University Of The South Pacific Research Articles

Conference Review: International Conference on Sustainable Alternatives to Poverty Reduction and Ecological Justice (SAPREJ-18), The University of the South Pacific, 26-29 June 2018

From June 26-29, 2018, the 18th international conference on Sustainable Alternatives to Poverty Reduction and Ecological Justice (SAPREJ-18) took place at The University of the South Pacific (USP). The aim of the conference was to strengthen academic and interfaith dialogue on major social and environmental challenges that the Pacific Islands and other parts of the world are facing in the 21st century.

Editorial

The South Pacific Journal of Natural Science (SPJNS) is published online by CSIRO PUBLISHING on behalf of the Faculty of Science and Technology, The University of the South Pacific, Fiji. The normal focus of the journal is to disseminate scientific research work carried out in the Pacific.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) The South Pacific has a narrative, but it is one more closely associated with the views of Western writers like James A. Michener than those of committed inhabitants of the region like the Tongan and Fijian writer and scholar Epeli Hau-ofa, whose work is introduced in this issue along with that of many other thought-provoking, committed writers and scholars from the region. This issue is about the latter group making its own theoretical claim to this region of the world—and wresting it from the appropriations of continental perspectives. But this is no easy task for it is a Western imaginary so strong that the very nomenclature of the region needs to be altered if there is any hope for it to shake its associations with a narrative that is at once embraced and disdained by inhabitants of the region. The progenitors of this continental narrative may have had affection for the region and its people, but nonetheless their vision of it is one that needs to be left behind. The success of works like Michener's Tales of the South Pacific (1947) is partly to blame here. Written in 1946, when he was stationed by the United States Navy on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides Islands, Michener's collection of stories about the Pacific campaign in World War Two not only won a Pulitzer Prize, but spawned a veritable South Pacific imaginary for generations of readers and viewers. Not only is Rogers and Hammerstein's award-winning musical play, South Pacific, which opened on Broadway in 1949, and ran for 1,925 performances, based on Michener's work, but so too is director Joshua Logan's 1958 film adaptation of the Broadway musical as well as the 2001 television adaptation. So if no more South Pacific-type imaginary then what? Hau-ofa, who was a professor at the University of the South Pacific, embraced the term "Oceania" to denote the notion that the region is not a group of small territories separated by a vast emptiness of water, but rather, in the words of guest editor, Maebh Long from The University of Waikato, "a grand archipelageo whose inhabitants live by and with and on the sea" (10). Hau-ofa says that this region has been too long a topic of "belittlement, vulnerability, and isolation" (2008, 29). Re-coining the region as "Oceania" allows "anyone who has lived in our region and is committed" to view it as "our sea of islands," rather than "islands in a far sea," as Western narratives, including Michener's, tend to view it. This is both an epistemological shift and an ontological one. [End Page 5] But it is not one that necessarily excludes those who were not born in the region to participate in its establishment. In a generous and beautiful gesture, Hau-ofa allows those not born in the region to call themselves "Oceanian," if only they are willing to "transcend all forms of insularity, to become one that is openly searching, inventive and welcoming" (55), which is, to adopt a sense of self that is most definitely at odds with Western notions of the self predicated on insularity and exclusion. All of the contributors to this issue are Oceanians. They introduce us to a range of theoretical possibilities for contemporary Oceania, moving between Western and Pacific ontologies and epistemologies. From the political to the literary, the contributors ask how can we theorize Oceanian modernity, ensuring that we reflect and engage without imposing Western models or privileging Western experiences? They explore, in great depth, what is at stake in the myriad names, such as "South Pacific," "the South Seas," and the "Pacific Islands," often imposed by colonial power structures, which mark the region. Collectively, their responses show how the work of Oceania's theorists presents a set of challenges and opportunities for those who do not affiliate their work with this under-theorized region of the world. After reading this issue, you will never think of the "South Pacific" the same. ________ Looking forward, we have two issues under preparation. The first, entitled Blue Humanities (Vol. 27, No...

Editorial

The South Pacific Journal of Natural Science (SPJNS) is published online by CSIRO PUBLISHING on behalf of the Faculty of Science and Technology, The University of the South Pacific, Fiji. The normal focus of the journal is to disseminate scientific research work carried out in the Pacific.

Science teachers accelerated programme model: a joint partnership in the Pacific region

ABSTRACTThe paper heralds a new pedagogical model known as the Science Teachers Accelerated Programme as a platform to upgrade the qualifications of secondary school science teachers throughout the Pacific region. Based on a tripartite partnership between a higher education provider, a regional government and a cohort of science teachers, the model offers an accelerated Bachelor’s degree programme to the cohort. Using this tripartite partnership model, a pilot of the Science Teachers Accelerated Programme is underway between the University of the South Pacific, the Government of Samoa and a cohort of science teachers in Samoa. The underpinning activities garnering social and academic integration are highlighted with analytics. The strengths, challenges and opportunities of the new, cohort-taught science model are presented with relevant diagnoses, interventions and adaptive works carried out in the first half of the delivery plan. While the Government of Samoa is considering the implementation of a second cycle, the University of the South Pacific is considering extending the model to other regional countries.

Bearing Witness 2016: A Fiji climate change journalism case study

In February 2016, the Fiji Islands were devastated by Severe Tropical Cyclone Winston, the strongest recorded tropical storm in the Southern Hemisphere. The category 5 storm with wind gusts reaching 300 kilometres an hour, left 44 people dead, 45,000 people displaced, 350,000 indirectly affected, and $650 million worth of damage (Climate Council, 2016). In March 2017, the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) launched a new 10-year Strategic Plan 2017-2026, which regards climate change as a ‘deeply troubling issue for the environmental, economic, and social viability of Pacific island countries and territories’. In November, Fiji will co-host the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP23) climate change conference in Bonn, Germany. Against this background, the Pacific Media Centre despatched two neophyte journalists to Fiji for a two-week field trip in April 2016 on a ‘bearing witness’ journalism experiential assignment to work in collaboration with the Pacific Centre for Environment and Sustainable Development (PaCE-SD) and the Regional Journalism Programme at the University of the South Pacific. This paper is a case study assessing this climate change journalism project and arguing for the initiative to be funded for a multiple-year period in future and to cover additional Pacific countries, especially those so-called ‘frontline’ climate change states.

Editorial

The South Pacific Journal of Natural Science (SPJNS) is published online by CSIRO PUBLISHING on behalf of the Faculty of Science and Technology, The University of the South Pacific, Fiji. The normal focus of the journal is to disseminate scientific research work carried out in the Pacific.

Social stigmatisation, cultural coercion, and peer-pressure faced by Pacific student reporters: A Wansolwara student press case study in problem-based learning

This set of three case studies, with elements of problem-based learning, examines how the University of the South Pacific (USP) journalism students deal with social pressure applied by their peers, and the impact on learning. This is becoming an urgent and increasing concern due to the new, global realities of trolling and cyber bullying. This article is part of ongoing research into applied learning and teaching through the USP journalism student training newspaper, Wansolwara. The first case study deals with social stigmatisation, the second with intimidation, and the third with assault and cyber bullying. This article argues that social pressures are both a threat and an opportunity. As unpleasant as the hostile reactions are, they are a reality of practising journalism. Student reporters’ exposure to such confronting situations provides an early taste of real world journalism. The learning outcomes show that the experience toughens students’ resolve. For those bearing the brunt of the vitriol, coping mechanisms such as guidance by lecturers, support from the fellow journalism students, family encouragement, and due recognition of their journalistic work, are critical. This article contends that unlike physical harm, psychological harm to student journalists is overlooked. This trend is risky, especially in the digital media age, and needs to be addressed.

Carving out institutional space for multilingualism in the world’s most multilingual region: the role of Linguistics at the University of the South Pacific

ABSTRACTThe University of the South Pacific is a regional university catering for 12 countries. Its location situates it within unparalleled linguistic diversity, and its regional structure creates a highly multilingual body of staff and students interacting either face-to-face on the major campuses or remotely via e-learning and satellite communications. On the surface, it is an exciting place to be engaging with matters of language and linguistic diversity. However, in common with many universities that strive for academic excellence whilst operating on sound financial principles and catering equitably for a diverse student population, there are a number of institutional factors that unintentionally stifle the opportunities to study, learn and use multiple languages. This paper discusses language planning at the university with reference to Hornberger’s [(2002). Multilingual language policies and the continua of biliteracy: An ecological approach. Language Policy, 1, 27–51] metaphor of ideological and implementational space. It considers the mechanisms that serve to close down institutional space for languages other than English, and identifies opportunities to carve out new and different spaces. This paper argues for the need to work within, between and around the spaces left by shifts towards rationalisation and efficiency in ways that move with, rather than against, the tide. It is suggested that seeking space for languages other than English within tertiary institutions, and thus challenging the monolingualising tendencies of the shifts in the global landscape, requires a four-step framework of engagement, working sideways to engage with the macro and the micro simultaneously.

Pacific Islanders’ understanding of climate change: Where do they source information and to what extent do they trust it?

The experience of environmental stress and attitudes towards climate change was explored for 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the foremost tertiary institution serving the independent nations of the Pacific. Students sourced information regarding climate change from media including television, radio, and newspapers; the community (typically via their village, church, and extended family); the University and their friends; and in addition to regional agencies such as the Pacific Community. Most students concluded that they could not believe all of the informations provided by these sources. The findings demonstrate that most students—the future elite of the region—rank global environmental change as the highest future risk. Although nearly all respondents believed that climate change was happening, more than half of respondents believed that the risk was exaggerated and only one-third believed that science would find an answer, suggesting a lack of trust in scientific sources of information. Results also showed that these attitudes varied across demographic factors such as age, region, and gender. The understanding of contemporary attitudes towards global environmental change among a cohort that is likely to include future national leaders in the Pacific Islands region presents unique opportunities for long-range planning of intervention and support strategies. Of particular note for effective intervention and support is the breadth and trustworthiness of various information sources including Pacific Island leaders.

Spirituality and attitudes towards Nature in the Pacific Islands: insights for enabling climate-change adaptation

A sample of 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the premier tertiary institution in the Pacific Islands, answered a range of questions intended to understand future island decision-makers’ attitudes towards Nature and concern about climate change. Questions asking about church attendance show that the vast majority of participants have spiritual values that explain their feelings of connectedness to Nature which in turn may account for high levels of pessimism about the current state of the global/Pacific environment. Concern about climate change as a future livelihood stressor in the Pacific region is ubiquitous at both societal and personal levels. While participants exhibited a degree of understanding matching objective rankings about the vulnerability of their home islands/countries, a spatial optimism bias was evident in which ‘other places’ were invariably regarded as ‘worse’. Through their views on climate change concern, respondents also favoured a psychological distancing of environmental risk in which ‘other places’ were perceived as more exposed than familiar ones. Influence from spirituality is implicated in both findings. Most interventions intended to reduce exposure to environmental risk and to enable effective and sustainable adaptation to climate change in the Pacific Islands region have failed to acknowledge influences on decisionmaking of spirituality and connectedness to Nature. Messages that stress environmental conservation and stewardship, particularly if communicated within familiar and respected religious contexts, are likely to be more successful than secular ones.

Turning the Tide: the need for sustainable sea transport in the Pacific

This paper reports on progress in developing a regional research and education strategy for Pacific Island countries and communities wishing to transition to a low carbon sea transport future. Sea transport is an absolute necessity for most such communities. All current services are fossil fuel based and are becoming increasingly unaffordable and unsustainable. The countries in the Pacific region are the most dependent on imported fossil fuels in the world, importing more than 95% of needs. Such dependency is having a crippling effect on national budgets and major impacts on key productive sectors. The region's transport issues are unique; small and vulnerable economies scattered at the ends of some of the longest transportation routes in the world and arguably the most challenging to maintain per capita and per sea mile. Alternatives to current fossil fuel powered sea transport have been almost totally ignored in recent regional and national debates and the issue has been largely invisible within the policy and donor strategy space at all levels despite concerted efforts over more than two decades to transition Pacific countries' electricity sector fossil fuel use. The University of the South Pacific has been collaborating with a network of stakeholders and knowledge partners since 2012 to advance this agenda, building off previous doctoral research and the resultant Sustainable Sea Transport Talanoa 2012. Prasad et al. (2013) set out the basis for a catalytic research program following from the consensually agreed outputs of SSTT 2012 and this paper records the progress made since.

Berths and Anchorages: Pacific Cultural Studies from Oceania

The canoe has been a dominant metaphor constituting the discursive growth of Pacific studies in its transformation from a multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary project. In the first half of this essay I grapple with extending the canoe metaphors discussed by Vicente Diaz and J Kēkaulani Kauanui in their 2001 article “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” and in the latter part I discuss programming at the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture and Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific. Not wholly rejecting the “seductive metaphor” of Pacific studies as an interdisciplinary canoe between fields of study, my intention rather is to seek how to expand the metaphor productively toward anchorages and berths to produce homegrown theorizing of our intellectual practices, including creative practices. Practice-based research paradigms are increasingly being utilized in Pacific studies, and this kind of re-engagement with the discourse is productive. For a more holistic and pragmatic as well as intellectual and political Pacific studies, the canoe must make landfall, to complete a hermeneutic circle that began with the theoretical placing of the canoe as the animus of the interdisciplinary project in 2001.

Editorial

The South Pacific Journal of Natural Science (SPJNS) is published online by CSIRO PUBLISHING on behalf of the Faculty of Science and Technology, The University of the South Pacific, Fiji. The normal focus of the journal is to disseminate scientific research work carried out in the Pacific.

Pacific migration futures: ancient solutions to contemporary and prospective challenges?

Scholarship published by staff and students at the University of the South Pacific has had a profound impact on understandings by researchers of both historical and contemporary transformations in Oceania. This paper contains some reflections by a geographer who has been researching population movement in the region since the mid-1960s. It begins by drawing attention to seminal writing by the late Epeli Hau’ofa in the 1980s and 1990s, and traces the impact of some of Hau’ofa’s messages about regional integration and identity in Oceania in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Reference is made to another very significant collection of essays by scholars, students, politicians and government officials linked with the USP in 2015 which explores what is being called ‘the new Pacific diplomacy’. Like the discourse generated by Waddell, Naidu and Hau’ofa’s (1993) A New Oceania: Rediscovering our Sea of Islands, ideas reported in Fry and Tarte’s (2015) The New Pacific Diplomacy have the potential to shift thinking about identities, regional co-operation and migration in Oceania.

Honest Iago? A media and academic freedom case study

This case study involves issues of academic freedom and media freedom at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in a dispute between the senior administration of the university and two journalism lecturers over the impact of media releases and media comments made between May and July 2014, about the military-backed government and the right to freedom of expression. In May 2014, just four months before Fiji’s post-coup general election, a student at USP, suddenly and unexpectedly, had his scholarship cancelled. As a result, USP student journalists wrote a radio news story, which was broadcast on the USP radio station Radio Pasifik. A few days later, the scholarship was reinstated. Shortly afterwards, the USP journalism lecturers issued a joint media release criticising the military government on two issues: (1) their support of torture; and (2) the refusal of accreditation for two senior Fiji journalists to attend an international conference being held in Nadi. This action brought the two lecturers into an acrimonious dialogue with the USP administration. The article reviews the media coverage and examines the issue from the perspective of the head of the journalism programme.

Media freedom in Fiji: Journalism challenges facing Wansolwara, an independent, campus-based newspaper

This article is a case study of Wansolwara, the University of the South Pacific (USP) journalism programme student training newspaper. The article compares the outcomes of Wansolwara’s coverage of the 2000 and 2006 Fiji coups in relation to student learning and an alternative media voice in a climate of restrictions. Interviews with student journalists and lecturers involved in the coup coverage indicate that Wansolwara’s status as a campus-based newspaper has been a strategic benefit in filling some gaps in mainstream media reporting, besides providing students with empowering learning experiences. The case study illustrates the importance of an independent, campus-based newspaper somewhat less restrained by commercial pressures and less exposed to direct state coercion.

A personal appreciation of Professor Tony Lowe and some reflections as a student at the University of the South Pacific

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the contribution of Tony Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Accounting and Financial Management at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji from 1990-1993. Tony Lowe died on 5 March 2014. The paper also offers more attention to his more indirect enabling contribution. Tony was instrumental in formalising the post graduate program at the University of South Pacific. He also contributed to accounting research and teaching from an inter-disciplinary perspective.

The Bond of Time: An Epic Love Poem by John Puhiatau Pule (review)

Reviewed by: The Bond of Time: An Epic Love Poem by John Puhiatau Pule Steven Gin The Bond of Time: An Epic Love Poem, by John Puhiatau Pule. Canterbury, nz: Canterbury University Press, 2014. isbn 978-1-927145-56-2, xii + 88 pages. Paper, nz $25.00. Niuean poet and artist John Pule’s The Bond of Time, written when he was twenty-one, first appeared in a run limited to a hundred copies in 1985. A second edition came out in 1998 when Pule was the Pacific Writing Forum’s Writer-in-Residence at the University of the South Pacific. As Jeffrey Paparoa Holman notes in his introduction to the present edition, it has garnered little visibility in New Zealand, but the poem has remained present as text in Pule’s paintings, as referenced in art catalogs, and in the memories of those who have read it or seen it performed. In publishing this third edition, the Canterbury University Press makes available once more, in a handsome paperback, a vibrant work that anticipates much of the poet/artist’s extraordinary vision of the Pacific. The poem’s eighty-eight pages are tightly structured in form, each containing five unrhymed five-line stanzas of verse, each line roughly the same length; the orderliness of the stanzas belies a significant turmoil built into the poem’s imagery and flow, as an ocean surface hides worlds of subaqueous complexity or a sleeping person appears motionless while expansive dreams actively occupy her mind. Readers who approach The Bond of Time as an epic love poem expecting a coherent love story might become frustrated; narrative conventions of plot, setting, and character are diffuse, discontinuous, and erratic. Instead, Pule’s poem conjures up constellations as it interweaves varied images, scenes, words, and motifs, suggesting continuity and chronology. Pule conveys the fecundity of the natural world in the poem’s repetition of references to dolphins, whales, turtles, crabs, butterflies, ants, doves, sparrows, katipo and tui (a spider and a bird species, both indigenous to Aotearoa/New Zealand), oceans, mountains, fruits, vegetables, as well as sleep, dreams, knives, bruises, and misfortune. While the appearance of any of these and many other motifs might seem commonplace in isolation, the rhythm of their significant repetition across the epic time and space of the poem produces a gradual familiarity with the figures that populate it. Not unlike some of his paintings, Pule’s patterned arrangement of motifs makes them pulse with energy. Since he is an artist capable in many different genres and media, it should come as no surprise that Pule contemplates the affordances and conventions of poetic language, as when the speaker provocatively mixes sensorial language: “A whole repertory of symbols dances / to the tune of love-lyrics, a sculpture of / snow and yam rises from your flesh” (62). If it is not a conventional narrative, neither is The Bond of Time a conventional love poem. While the speaker declares his love for the female addressee with euphoric sexual imagery, such words flow freely into miserable images of hatred, violence, suffering, and misfortune. The speaker narrates one prurient scene in which “as my hands toward / your breast roam, you inhale air of / ecstasy, and we love and love / again and sleep, so [End Page 296] gentle a sleep” (12), which is followed immediately by a stanza expressing dire conflict: “Your eyes close over in dagger and / glass; you breathe onto me anger and / black hate with holes of traps and / nets. What pain did we not suffer? / What bruises have not yet been done?” (13) Pule’s vision of love is volatile, regularly jolting between such extreme passions and opening the reader’s eyes to both love’s beauty and its horror, which, Pule suggests, may be mutually constitutive. The poetic landscape that Pule creates is a dreamy phantasmagoria that constantly pushes the reader’s imagination with lurid imagery. The poem’s opening lines are evocative and grotesque: “Dolphins, nectarines and turtles, / and all at once, they jump out from your / mouth” (1). Reminiscent of the excruciating first scene of Luis Buñuel’s surrealist movie Un Chien Andalou, Pule’s imagery assaults the reader directly using the...

Editorial: Meltdowns and militarisation

During the Pacific Science Inter-Congress in Fiji in July 2013, an integrated symposium on ‘Oceans and Nations: “Failed” states and the environment’ in the Pacific, was hosted at the University of the South Pacific. The brainchild of USP’s Dr Mohit Prasad and professors Victor Bascara, Keith Comacho and Elizabeth DeLoughrey of the University of California at Los Angeles, this drew its inspiration from another conference at Laucala Bay some two years earlier. The 2010 Oceans, Islands and Skies Symposium (OIS), with papers published in a special edition of the USP literary journal Dreadlocks (Prasad, 2010-11) in 2012, had established the disruption to the traditionally organic and fluid nature of relations between artists, writers and performers in the Pacific by the contemporary crisis of the environment. A follow-up Oceans and Nations Symposium explored relations between impacts on the environment, and crisis in political and related development, among the emerging nation-states of the Pacific.Cover cartoon from Rod Emmerson, New Zealand Herald.