Sandra Kailahi has interviewed 20 Pacific women that have worked tirelessly within the New Zealand community to better the lives of their peoples. Included are politicians, artists, writers, church representatives, sportswomen, community leaders and many more. The interviews cover early lives to the present, and showcase the strengths and depths of knowledge the women contribute to New Zealand society every day. Each biography is accompanied by Eimi Tamua's beautifully shot portrait, as well as imagery from the contributors' private collections of photographs.

Women in the Academy are raising issues of pay parity, equal representation on committees, increased leadership positions, stories of resilience, and mentorship espousing changes at all levels including teaching, research, and administration. These strategies demand interrogation, and larger questions are being asked about the place of women empowerment worldviews in the dominant intellectual traditions of the Academy. Further, the trend to make changes requires an exploration of new transformational approaches that draw on critical theory to resist discrimination, sexism, and racism and support resistance and sustainable empowerment strategies. Critical Reflections and Politics on Advancing Women in the Academy is a critical scholarly publication that seeks to make the Academy responsive and inclusive for women advancement and sustainable empowerment strategies by broadening the understanding of why women in the Academy are overlooked in leadership positions, why there is a pay parity deficit, and what is being done to change the situation. Featuring a wide range of topics such as mentorship, curriculum design, and equality, this book is ideal for policymakers, academicians, deans, provosts, chancellors, administrators, researchers, and students.

ASALH 2023 Book Prize Winner A lively living history of anti-colonialist movements across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black is a compelling history of understudied anti-colonial movements in this region, exploring how indigenous Oceanic activists intentionally forged international connections with the African world in their fights for liberation. Drawing from research conducted across Fiji, Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Britain, and the United States, Quito Swan shows how liberation struggles in Oceania actively engaged Black internationalism in their diverse battles against colonial rule. Pasifika Black features as its protagonists Oceania's many playwrights, organizers, religious leaders, scholars, Black Power advocates, musicians, environmental justice activists, feminists, and revolutionaries who carried the banners of Black liberation across the globe. It puts artists like Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal and her 1976 call for a Black Pacific into an extended conversation with Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific’s Amelia Rokotuivuna, Samoa’s Albert Wendt, African American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, West Papua’s Ben Tanggahma, New Caledonia’s Déwé Gorodey, and Polynesian Panther Will ‘Ilolahia. In so doing, Swan displays the links Oceanic activists consciously and painstakingly formed in order to connect Black metropoles across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. In a world grappling with the global significance of Black Lives Matter and state-sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies, Pasifika Black is a both triumphant history and tragic reminder of the ongoing quests for decolonization in Oceania, the African world, and the Global South.

A collection of writing by 10 indigenous Pacific women. Essay topics include images of Maori women on New Zealand postcards, the interests and cultural identity of Maori women, education in Western Samoa, young Samoan women and sexuality, gender and work in Fiji, deconstructing the 'exotic' female beauty, representation in films, and poetry.

This book focuses on the variety of strategies developed by women athletes in the Pacific Islands to claim contested sporting spaces – in particular, rugby union, soccer, beach volleyball, recreational sports and exercise – as a prism to explore grassroots women’s engagement with heavily entrenched postcolonial (hetero)patriarchy. Based on primary research conducted in Fiji, Samoa, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, the book investigates contested sporting spaces as sites of infrapolitics intersected primarily by gender and also by other markers of inequality, including ethnicity, sexuality, class and geopolitics. Contrary to historical and contemporary representations of Pacific Island women as victims of gender injustice, it explores how these athletes and those who support them actively carve out space for their transformative agency. Pacific IslandWomen and Contested Sporting Spaces: Staking Their Claim focuses on a region underexamined by sport or gender studies researchers and will be of key interest to scholars and students in Gender Studies, Sport Studies, Sociology and Pacific Studies as well as sport practitioners and policymakers.

Since the time of decolonisation in Fiji, women’s organisations have navigated a complex political terrain. While they have stayed true to the aim of advancing women’s status, their work has been buffeted by national political upheavals and changing global and regional directions in development policy-making. This book documents how women activists have understood and responded to these challenges. It is the first book to write women into Fiji’s postcolonial history, providing a detailed historical account of that country’s gender politics across four tumultuous decades. It is also the first to examine the ‘situated’ nature of gender advocacy in the Pacific Islands more broadly. It does this by analysing trends in activity, from women’s radical and provocative activism of the 1960s to a more self-evaluative and reflexive mood of engagement in later decades, showing how interplaying global and local factors can shape women’s understandings of gender justice and their pursuit of that goal.