University students will have the opportunity to hear Teresia Teaiwa, a well-known scholar in the research of the culture of the Pacific Islands, speak tonight in a lecture about gender and minority issues in Fiji.
The lecture, which is a part of the two-year Gender, Race and Militarization program, is co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society and the Women’s and Gender Studies program.
Teaiwa, the director of Pacific Studies at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, was born in Hawaii and raised in Fiji. Throughout her career, she has written many articles on the Pacific Islands, including her famous 1994 article “Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans,” which explored “the conflation of the U.S. nuclear exploitation and destruction of the Bikini Atoll and its people,” according to the CSWS Web site.
Judith Raiskin, an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, said that students should attend the lecture because of the unique nature of Teaiwa’s area of study and her point of view.
“So much of the study of the Pacific Islands has been anthropological and from a Western point of view,” Raiskin said. “Teresia is a Pacific Islands scholar who is not coming from a Western point of view.”
Teaiwa’s research is also unique because of her focus on the cultural aspects of the Pacific Islands and not just the anthropological ones, Raiskin said.
The lecture entitled “On Women and Indians: the Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion in Militarized Fiji,” will be held in the Knight Library Browsing Room at 7 p.m. and is free to the public.
– Meghan Eigo