Course syllabus
Welcome to Pacific Studies.
This is the introductory course to Pacific Studies. It is designed to introduce you both to the Pacific as a subject, and to Pacific Studies as a way of researching, analyzing and studying the Pacific.
The Centre for Pacific Studies is the University of Auckland’s focal point for researching and teaching the Pacific. The Centre coordinates and organizes the University’s scholarly engagement with the Pacific, as well as its engagement with Pasifika peoples in New Zealand.
The Centre is one of the global leaders in Pacific Studies.
Find out more about the:
What is Pacific Studies?
Pacific Studies is an interdisciplinary enterprise that employs different ways of studying and analysing ‘the Pacific’. What this means is that unlike traditional discipline-based knowledge formations (like history, or psychology, or economics, or biology) Pacific Studies pursues its enquiries through multidisciplinary intellectual approaches. In every Pacific Studies course you will learn using more than one disciplinary method.
Pacific Studies’ ‘interdisciplinarity’ (as it is called) is innovative and unusual in the university. You will notice it in the course as your teachers all have different scholarly training and backgrounds. Unlike most places in the university, people of different disciplines occupy the same physical and intellectual space in Pacific Studies: anthropologists, political scientists, economists, historians, sociologists, literary critics, health researchers, environmental scientists, educators, art historians, linguists and cultural experts (amongst others) not only share in the conversations about the Pacific, they even share the teaching of courses and buildings.
What unites the interdisciplinary enterprise of Pacific Studies is not a common background and way of seeing (as with most departments and centres on campus) but the shared subject of the Pacific and its peoples, and the shared scholarly and intellectual conversations about the Pacific. The Pacific, as you may know and will learn, is the largest thing on earth. There is more to learn in the Pacific than we will ever know.
It is the job of Pacific Studies 100 to introduce you both to the fundamental elements of the Pacific as a subject, and the fundamental elements of Pacific Studies as a special and distinct kind of study (and form of knowledge).
The Pacific has such huge dimensions, it is too large to encompass in any single way, and certainly in any single course. Pacific Studies is similar too: although Pacific Studies scholars share conversations, they do not share identical ideas or approaches, and consequently have different senses of what Pacific Studies is, or should be. This introductory course will also give you an introduction to the different range of Pacific Studies—the different conversations that Pacific Studies is enabling.
Course delivery format:
2 hours of lectures and a 1 hour tutorial.
(Timetable and room details can be viewed here)
Required Resources:
The following text is a required resource:
Mallon, S., Māhina-Tuai, K. and Salesa, D. (2012). Tangata o le moana. 1st ed. Wellington: Te Papa Press.
It can be purchased from the University Bookstore for $71.99 or borrowed from the Short Loan and General Library.
https://www.ubsbooks.co.nz/details.cgi?ITEMNO=9781877385728
https://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/search/tangata%20o%20le%20moana
Workload:
The University of Auckland's expectation on 15-point courses, is that students spend 10 hours per week on the course. Students manage their academic workload and other commitments accordingly. Students attend two hours of lectures each week and participate in a one-hour tutorial from week 2 of semester. This leaves seven hours per week outside the classroom to prepare for tutorials, assignments and the exam.
Course summary:
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