Vā Moana Reading Group 03 2020

The next Vā Moana Reading Group continues our last discussion on online vā in the time of Covid-19.

In our last discussion we brought together writing by Mckenzie Wark, Emele Uguvule and Lana Lopesi to think about a digital vā within the sometimes hidden infrastructures of power and profit that enable internet use. This month we are going to continue that line of thought by reading the next chapter of McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead while also expanding the talanoa by looking at two texts written during and post New Zealand’s lockdown.

This reading group asks 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?

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

• McKenzie Wark. (2019). Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso: London. (Chapter 1 — The sublime language of my century)
• Pelenakeke Brown. (2020). Creative New Zealand, Pacific Art Legacy Project (unpublished)
• Dion Enari, Jacoba Matapo. (2020). The Digital Vā: Pasifika Education Innovation During the COVID-19 Pandemic. MAI Journal http://www.journal.mai.ac.nz/sites/default/files/MAI_Jrnl_2020_V9_4_Enari_02.pdf

The reading group will be held on Thursday 13 August 10am—12.30pm in WE303, level 3 WE Building, St Paul Street. We also welcome people to join us via Zoom. The link can be found here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83339340221

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.