New Regional Labour Circuits in the South Pacific: Gender, Culture and Transnationalism
This project investigates the transforming contemporary Pacific.
Overview
Pacific mobility is being shaped by new patterns of international trade, investment and aid adopted by key regional players—China, America, Australia and New Zealand. Using a multi-sited analysis of regional labour circuits focusing on Polynesian Islands, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, this study connects broad geopolitical shifts to the movement of individuals and families, and to their gendered and culturally embedded economic, affective and expressive practices.
Research on Pacific mobility have focused almost exclusively on ‘out-migration’ of Islanders to larger countries of the Pacific Rim (United States, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand). As a feminist ethnography, the study explores movement of people, capital, investment and goods between Cook Islands, Sāmoa and Fiji that reveal vibrant transformations of both capitalist and local economic practices. The gendered, sexed, raced, and class dimensions of locally embedded and globally attuned networks challenge economic-driven models of global migration.
Aims
- Investigate, map and analyse new circuits of human mobility relating to the Pacific region
- Conceptually integrate these circuits by examining their connection to contemporary local and global socio-political and economic transformations
- Analyse the significance of gender and affect to Pacific transnationalism, including by assessing how gender relations and economies of affect are reconfigured and/or reconfirmed across practices and processes of mobility and immobility
Outcomes
- Alexeyeff, K. “Cinderella of the south seas? Virtuous victims, empowerment and other fables of development feminism,” in Women’s Studies International Forum 80, May - June 2020, pp. 1-9
- Alexeyeff, K. and Kihara, Y. “Polyface in Paradise: Exploring the Politics of Race, Gender, and Place,” (2.5Mb pdf) in Contemporary Pacific 30(2), 01 Jan 2018, pp. 329-353
- Alexeyeff, K, and McDonnell, S. “Whose Paradise? Encounter, Exchange, and Exploitation," in Contemporary Pacific 30(2), 01 Jan 2018, pp. 269-295
- Alexeyeff, K. and Taylor, J. (eds.,). Touring Pacific Cultures. Australian National University Press, 2016