Pacific Dynamics
Understanding the dramatic changes in the world today requires deeper and critical exploration of diverse paradigms of knowledge in their conceptual and applied forms. This involves reimagining the often fiercely guarded dominant disciplinary boundaries, research discourses and methodologies. The synergy between local and global discourses and the multidimensional aspects of modern society require diverse intellectual prisms for more critical scholarly research and knowledge production. Questioning dominant ideas and transcending the traditional boundaries of formal disciplines, while maintaining one’s core area of expertise, can be enriching and reflective of the complexity of the contemporary world.
Pacific Dynamics attempts to respond to this need for critical, open and interdisciplinary approach to research. The journal aims to promote rigorous debates on theoretical discourses, applied knowledge and policy issues regarding the Pacific Islands, including New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Rim using multiple prisms. The journal accepts articles from diverse areas of study including gender studies, indigenous studies, conflict-peace-security studies, minority studies, politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, education, philosophy, literature, development studies, economics, marine studies, environmental studies and others not mentioned here. To ensure wide circulation, the journal is online and open access and for academic rigor, it has a comprehensive peer review process.
Pacific Dynamics is published biannually by the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies in collaboration with the Arts Digital Lab at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
The main website for Pacific Dynamics is at: pacificdynamics.nz
All work in Pacific Dynamics is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence
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Journal Articles [52]
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Ngā Whakaaro a Puhiwahine: A Political Philosophy and Theory from the Mōteatea of Puhiwahine
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2020)Mōteatea are the orally sung literature and one of its most famous composers was Ngāti Tuwharetoa and Ngāti Maniapoto’s Puhiwahine. This paper will explore the political philosophy and theory contained within Puhiwahine’s ... -
Promoting widening participation and its social value amongst Pacific people in Australia
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2020)Pacific people in Australia are less likely to access university due to structural disadvantages, including isolation from the dominant culture; the overlapping nexus between low socio-economic status and race; and ... -
Navigating Security in the Pacific
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2020)This article examines how New Zealand has framed recent security dynamics in the region and asks how this framing aligns with the priorities of Pacific partners. There are some indications of increasing alignment with ... -
Re-thinking Contextualisation in Solomon Islands school leadership professional learning and development
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2020)This article discusses the perceptions of Solomon Island mentors and regional administrators of a Solomon Islands aid-funded school leadership professional learning and development intervention. The focus is on context ... -
Education for a Vocation or Society ? The Dialectic of Modern and Customary Epistemologies in Solomon Islands
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2020)Rural Training Centres (RTCs) in the Solomon Islands are community-based initiatives that offer vocational education to men and women. Since the 1960s, RTCs have grown to become an organised movement of 47 centres present ... -
Maori and kava: New drug fashion or re-engagement with 'kawa'?
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2019)The Pacific “cultural keystone species” (Garibaldi & Turner, 2004, pp.1,5) kava is uniquely linked with notions of mana (spiritual power) and used to infuse efficacy into celebrations and life events. The drink, made ... -
The Samoan vowel shift: A phenomenon in phonetics and phonological awarenessics and
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2019)This paper is a response to a phenomenon in the area of Samoan phonology, or to be exact, the vowels' pronunciation. It involves a shift in the utterance of vowels in the past thirty years or so. And it comes to this. A ... -
Two cases of memory construction in Fiji: A theoretical development of collective memory under globalisation and digital agetive memory
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2019)The theory of collective memory argues that remembering is a socially constructed phenomenon. It is society that constructs and provides individuals with norms, beliefs, and ideas about life, and only within the social ... -
Impact of climate change on spirituality
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2019)The Pacific is known as the most sensitive region to the impact of climate change on spirituality due to high Christian rates per capita. Using an explanatory design, here we studied 36 cases (n=36) of Fijians aged 25 ... -
Air temperature trends, variability and extremes across the Solomon Islands: 1951-2011s
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2019)Past climatological studies .use only one or two local stations to describe the full climate of Solomon Islands. In this paper, we examined all available daily minimum and maximum surface air temperature data between 1951 ... -
“Forests for life” or forests for carbon markets?The case of Choiseul Province, Solomon Islands
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2019)Climate change is widely recognised as one of the biggest threats to livelihoods, security and wellbeing in the Pacific. Carbon markets represent one of a number of global responses, with projects expanding across the ... -
Lila
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)Evening. Dye from prayer flags mounted on bamboo poles runs into the western sky. They have fluttered here for over a century now and it is impossible to imagine the landscape without them: the mast of bamboo, the spinnaker ... -
The sea is rising: Visualising climate change in the Pacific islands
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)I begin with our earth island; a concept made possible by the satellite technologies developed in the Cold War; a battle that, while largely invisible to the majority of the people of the globe, was violently propagated ... -
From contrapuntal writing to antipodal carving: Paul Gauguin's Polynesian "Afternoon of a Faun"
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)This article examines the adaptation of Mallarmé’s symbolist poem, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” by Paul Gauguin. During his first trip to Tahiti, Gauguin carved a cylindrical wooden totem that recreates the faun’s lustful ... -
Girmit, postmemory, and Subramani
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)The centenary of indenture in Fiji was celebrated with public displays, speeches, parades, and publications. The momentum for critical and creative response grew in tandem with the wave of publications inspired by the end ... -
“i am the dreams of your tipuna”: constructing Oceanic memory in contemporary anglophone Māori literature
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)Drawing on the creative output of Witi Ihimaera, Apirana Taylor and Patricia Grace, this article examines how memories related to Oceania are woven into these authors’ prose and verse narratives. After a brief introduction ... -
Grace’s interstitial Oceanic memory in Alan Duff’s Once were warriors
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)An exercise in symptomatic reading, this paper studies Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990) from a postcolonial perspective. It claims that the novel invokes Oceanic memory more than its author is willing to admit. Against ... -
Collective creavity: contemporary art associations in Port Vila, Vanuatu
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)This paper examines the influence of contemporary art on collective memory in Port Vila, Vanuatu. In doing so, two key organisations are introduced – the Nawita Contemporary Arts Association and the Red Wave Vanuatu Arts ... -
The performance of memory in Rapanui theatre
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)This article discusses how memory has been crucial in the production of theatre in Rapa Nui. Histories of colonial powers in Rapanui have foster the use of memory as a real source of information, not only to gather information ... -
Stowaway memory
(Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2018)In te ao Māori, the kiore (Pacific rat or Rattus exulans) is a distinguished travel companion who recalls migratory history, Oceanic homelands and distinct ancestral values. Yet for European settlers, kiore are indistinguishable ...
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