Arts Collected Works - Research Publications

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    Indigenous knowledge is not an extractable resource
    Thomas, A (Academia.edu, 2021-11)
    Indigenous knowledge is increasingly being looked to as containing solutions to contemporary challenges, particularly climate change. Along with growing anxieties about the future of the planet is a parallel “tendency to exalt Indigenous or non-Western others as symbols of inspirational environmental ethics, modelling interspecies, interconnectedness and reciprocity contrary to a Western will-to-destruction” (Neale & Vincent, 2017, 426). Recent calls to harness Indigenous bushfire management techniques in Australia and growing interest in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in land and resource management globally are examples of this trend and represent important steps forward in improved recognition of Indigenous peoples. However, reaching for Indigenous knowledge when western knowledge and systems fail is to treat it as a gap-filler or additive (Starblanket & Stark, 2018, 170). While recognition is good and conversations around partnering with First peoples to resolve macro-problems are a step in the right direction, Indigenous knowledge cannot be treated as an extractable resource to be managed and used apart from the place, people and culture that generated it.
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    Samoa’s New Labour Trade
    Fatupaito, A ; Utuva, L ; Tauave, S ; Alofipo, A ; Meleisea, M ; Schoeffel, O ; Arthur, T ; Alexeyeff, K (Centre for Samoan Studies, National University of Samoa, 2021)
    This article explores the context of aspirations to become seasonal workers in New Zealand or Australia and the experiences of those who worked in New Zealand under the Recognized Seasonal Employer scheme. It is based on detailed interviews with 24 people who were seasonal workers or who aspired to become seasonal workers in 2020, and on other relevant sources. The focus of the article is the recruitment processes and the economic, social and historical contexts of seasonal work in Samoa.
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    Whose Paradise? Encounter, Exchange, and Exploitation
    Alexeyeff, K ; McDonnell, S (UNIV HAWAII PRESS, 2018)
    This essay is a critical reexamination of the trope of paradise. This trope has a long global history encompassing colonial imaginings and missionary and travel narratives, and notions of “paradise” continue to influence contemporary narratives of place and landscape in the Pacific for Indigenous groups and others. While much has been written about the potency of the paradise trope in the West, it is often implicitly assumed that Indigenous engagement with the trope amounts to a simple rejection or dismissal of “paradise.” In contrast, we suggest that the dynamics of possession, dispossession, and repossession of paradise require further investigation. Paradise is both an imaginary that frames foreign engagement with the Pacific and a complex political landscape that is mobilized by Indigenous people both to contest neocolonial forms of appropriation and exploitation and to affirm local articulations of ownership and belonging in the Pacific.
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    Cinderella of the south seas? Virtuous victims, empowerment and other fables of development feminism
    Alexeyeff, K (Elsevier, 2020-05-01)
    The developmental logic underpinning ‘Cinderella projects,’ in which women of the Global South are targeted for interventions intended to tap and expand their unrecognized economic and entrepreneurial potential. This version of ‘development feminism,’ constructs its female objects as both impoverished victim-subjects and as nascent market-oriented actors. Moreover, development feminist discourse, grounded as it is in seemingly universal ideas of women’s oppression, equality and economic participation, generates paradoxical effects in different social contexts. Drawing on ethnographic examples from Polynesia, the paper illustrates how a homogeneous concept of ‘woman’ makes little sense because local gender categories are complexly intersected by age, socio-economic status as well as by hereditary rank. As a result, development feminisms’ gender interventions transform local individual subjectivities in novel and often unexpected ways, producing new forms of inequality while obscuring others.
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    En las fronteras del género: política y transformaciones de la no-heteronormatividad en Polinesia = Gender on the edge: The politics and transformations of non-heteronormativity in Polynesia
    Besnier, N ; ALEXEYEFF, K (Universidad de Murcia, 2016-11-01)
    En las sociedades polinesias, las personas con un género o sexualidad no-heteronormativos ocupan, a un mismo tiempo, posiciones marginales y lugares centrales en la estructura social: forman una categoría social extremadamente visible, pero cuyas fronteras son a la vez borrosas. Esta duplicidad nos insta a pasar desde una aproximación que pretende aislarlos en tanto categoría identitaria a otra aproximación que se centra en las prácticas sociales, culturales y políticas. Esta aproximación comienza con la historia de los contactos entre Isleños y Occidentales, una historia que parece haber cumplido un papel central en la emergencia social de la no-heteronormatividad en la región. Rechazando los modelos simplistas que enfrentan “tradición” y “modernidad” para abrazar en su lugar la complejidad de estas categorías, pretendemos localizar la no- heteronormatividad polinesia en la convergencia de fuerzas locales y globales y en los intersticios entre moralidades diferentes que, sin embargo, funcionan simultáneamente.
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    2020 Was a Glitch
    Goodwin, M (Umbrella Studios, 2021)
    As Melbourne cycled through five lockdowns, I collated digital ephemera in isolation: skylines / screengrabs / sound bites. I documented myself too: Zoom meetings / contrived selfies / maudlin portraits in the mirror like this one. I circled back to this image recently and started chopping and slicing, each cut an edit in a seemingly endless loop.
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    Enter the surface-interface: an exploration of urban surfaces as sites of spatial production and regulation
    Andron, S ( 2021-01-25)
    Research interview for online research media library Faculti
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    Preventive Conservation: People, Objects, Place and Time in the Philippines
    Tse, N ; Labrador, AMT ; Scott, M ; Balarbar, R (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2018)
    Preventive conservation, with its origins grounded in the material fabric of cultural material, is in a period of transformation, with numerous practitioners, in and outside of the field of conservation, considering its broader and holistic objectives. The conventional tools for the assertion of preventive conservation principles, namely the assessment and management of risks to cultural material from the ‘ten agents of deterioration’, have a central focus on the primacy of physical materials and degradation, with less clear relationships with people, place, and time in their modelling. With a case study focus on collections in the Philippines, this paper argues for a practice of preventive conservation that incorporates a balanced assessment and broader thinking around the contexts of objects, people, place, and time. The case studies of ecclesiastical Church collections, and museum environments in the Philippines, demonstrate how the interdependency of objects, people, place and time forms a holistic and conceptual preventive conservation framework. Through a cyclic renegotiation of these four parameters, this paper speculates on the gaps and opportunities for an inclusive view of preventive conservation that is current and more sustainable.
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    Volunteers in Australian archives
    de Villiers, A ; Laurent, N ; Stueven, C (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2017)
    Why do volunteers choose to contribute thousands of unpaid hours per week to Australian archives? This paper presents the results of a nationwide web survey that provides insight into the demographics, motivations and experiences of volunteers in Australian archives. The findings provide a representative overview of formal volunteers in Australian archives, determining ‘who’ they are, the value of the contributions they provide and the level of training and support offered to them. This study is a continuation of existing discussions about volunteers in Australian archives and represents an opportunity for the development of stronger relationships with Australian archival volunteers and, through them, the communities our archives serve.
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    Setting the Record Straight for the Rights of the Child National Summit
    Laurent, N (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2017)