Vā Moana Reading Group 04 2020

The next Vā Moana Reading Group continues our last discussion on work of Mckenzie Wark and online vā.

So far we have read McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead alongside writing by Emele Uguvule, Dion Enari and Jacoba Matapo, Lana Lopesi, and Pelenakeke Brown to think about a digital vā within the sometimes hidden infrastructures of power and profit that enable internet use. The questions the reading group has been grappling with include how Indigenous Pacific relational practices can be maintained or shifted to the online environment and what happens when these practices have to be mediated through devices and operate within the rigid systems of the internet? And whose experiences are we often overlooking in the conversations on digital vā?

In this month group we are going to continue reading McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead, while digging a little deeper into Marx, asking how can Marxist theory and by extension western philosophy be used by Moana peoples? And what value can it offer our own communities? This was lead by the interests that arose in the last session.

We will be discussing these ideas in relation to three texts:

• McKenzie Wark. (2019). Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso: London. (Chapter 2 — Capitalism—Or Worse?)
• Simon Barber. (2019). ‘Māori Mārx: Some Provisional Materials’. In Counterfutures 8. https://counterfutures.nz/8/Barber%20article.pdf
• Plastic Pills, Deleuze – Control Societies & Cybernetic Posthumanism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu4Cq_-bLlY&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1c4YmWfHOSa9GOf-t194YpSOguvuTJwL1Isg4wUg1OANicQHJXFKQIpt8

The reading group will be held on Thursday 15 October 10am—12.30pm in WE303, level 3 WE Building, St Paul Street. We also welcome people to join us via Zoom. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83317192198

This is open to Māori and Pacific postgraduate students as well as extended aiga and those in their final year of their undergraduate degrees. Please RSVP to lana.lopesi@aut.ac.nz.