Vā Moana Reading Group 01 2019

For 2019 the Vā Moana Reading Group will host four talanoa looking at various aspects of being in diaspora. In each talanoa we will bring together three texts spanning academic texts, think pieces, films and other artworks. The first reading group for 2019 will focus on the theme of Oceans and Seas.

It has been many years since Epeli Hau’ofa’s seminal text Our Sea of Islands sought to recontextualise the ways in which we see ourselves and our connections to each other. Nearly 30 years on, seas and oceans continue to offer artists, writers and scholars in the Moana diaspora ways to (re)articulate and (re)enact connections. We will be discussing three texts: Epeli Hauʻofa’s Our Sea of Islands (1993); Karin Amimoto Ingersoll’s Oceanic Literacy in Waves of Knowing : A Seascape Epistemology (2016) and Warner Brother’s film Aquaman.

The reading group will be held on Thursday 28 March , 10am—1pm at ST PAUL St Gallery two, Level 1 WM building, AUT. This is open to Māori and Pacific postgraduate students as well as extended aiga and those in their final year of their undergraduate degrees. Spaces are limited so please RSVP to lana.lopesi@aut.ac.nz who can help with access to texts.

The 2nd reading group for the year will be held on May 16 – so pencil it in now.