Episodes

  • Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, "Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene" (Routledge, 2024)

    Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, "Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene" (Routledge, 2024)
    Feb 28 2025
    Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2024) presents an innovative and imaginative reading of contemporary Australian literature in the context of unprecedented ecological crisis. The Australian continent has seen significant, rapid changes to its cultures and land-use from the impact of British colonial rule, yet there is a rich history of Indigenous land-ethics and cosmological thought. By using the age-old idea of 'cosmos'--the order of the world--to foreground ideas of a good order and chaos, reciprocity and more-than-human agency, this book interrogates the Anthropocene in Australia, focusing on notions of colonisation, farming, mining, bioethics, technology, environmental justice and sovereignty. It offers 'cosmological readings' of a diverse range of authors--Indigenous and non-Indigenous--as a challenge to the Anthropocene's decline-narrative. As a result, it reactivates 'cosmos' as an ethical vision and a transculturally important counter-concept to the Anthropocene. Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell argues that the arts can help us envision radical cosmologies of being in and with the planet, and to address the very real social and environmental problems of our era. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and postcolonial, transcultural and Indigenous studies, with a primary focus on Australian, New Zealand, Oceanic and Pacific area studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    53 mins
  • Educational Inequality in Fijian Higher Education

    Educational Inequality in Fijian Higher Education
    Feb 25 2025
    In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Prashneel Ravisan Goundar about his new book, English Language-Mediated Settings and Educational Inequality: Language Policy Agendas in the South Pacific published by Routledge in 2025. In this book, Goundar explores how educational inequalities are responsible for the way students perform in English language-mediated school settings. He seeks to establish an explicit connection between language testing and educational inequalities at the higher education level. With its focus on higher education, this research is a fresh reminder of the need to continuously revisit and unsettle inequalities that are embedded in education systems. In the South Pacific context, this study reveals the current issues, including medium of instruction challenges, lack of teaching and learning resources, teacher shortages, and language barriers. Goundar’s research seeks new answers to the problem of academic English language skills faced by undergraduate students. Since English is a second language for the majority of students in Fiji and as the quality of education varies between urban and rural schools, this cumulatively impacts students’ acquisition of English skills, and, consequently, their university performance. The important questions posed and addressed in this book are as follows: What are the language implications of colonisation on education in the South Pacific? What resources and learning opportunities are provided in schools to promote equal access to education content for students from non-English-speaking backgrounds? How do students from different schooling backgrounds in Fiji cope with an English language-mediated university learning environment? Do educational inequalities manifest in the performance of students from all schooling backgrounds, or are they confined to specific sociocultural zones? Drawing on a unique dataset from a context in the Global South, this book provides new insights for a more holistic approach to examining academic language proficiency and the use of language testing. English Language-mediated Settings and Educational Inequalities: Language Education Policy Agendas in the South Pacific is suitable for postgraduate students in language policy and planning, multilingual language policies for schools, medium of instruction studies, and language testing, and South Pacific studies. For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    46 mins
  • David R. Saunders, "Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965" (Cornell UP, 2024)

    David R. Saunders, "Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965" (Cornell UP, 2024)
    Feb 25 2025
    In Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965 (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr. David R. Saunders demonstrates that the withdrawal of the British imperial state from Sabah did not result in the decolonization of the territory. From the late 1940s to the 1960s, international anti-colonialism interacted with regional competition over Sabah to result in a paradoxical increase of British power and influence on the ground. Meanwhile, ethnic, social, and political heterogeneity in Sabah contributed to fragmentation and disunity, undermining the development of a local anti-colonial movement. Instead, a class of influential local elites seized power as competing attempts by the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaya to incorporate the territory into their respective archipelagic spheres grew in strength. Due to these local and international rivalries, Dr. Saunders argues, Sabah's eventual merger with the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 prompted an extension of colonial-style rule, resource extraction, the suppression of local autonomy, and the imposition of an externally-configured national identity. Chasing Archipelagic Dreams underscores the significance of regional rivalries in the South China Sea and highlights the fate of subaltern communities bisected by (post)colonial borders. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 7 mins
  • Angela Wanhalla et al., "Te Hau Kainga: The Maori Home Front during the Second World War" (Auckland UP, 2024)

    Angela Wanhalla et al., "Te Hau Kainga: The Maori Home Front during the Second World War" (Auckland UP, 2024)
    Feb 2 2025
    Taking readers to the farms and factories, the marae and churches where Māori lived, worked and raised their families, Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Home Front during the Second World War (Auckland University Press, 2024) by Dr. Angela Wanhalla, Dr. Sarah Christie, Dr. Lachy Paterson, Dr. Ross Webb and Dr. Erica Newman tells the story of the profound transformation in Māori life during the Second World War. While the Māori Battalion fought overseas, the Māori War Effort Organisation and its tribal committees engaged Māori men and women throughout Aotearoa in the home guard, the women’s auxiliary forces, and national agricultural and industrial production. Māori mobilisation was an exercise of rangatiratanga and it changed how Māori engaged with the state. And, as Māori men and women took up new roles, the war was to become a watershed event for Māori society that set the stage for post-war urbanisation. From ammunition factories to kūmara fields, from Te Puea Hērangi to Te Paipera Tapu, Te Hau Kāinga provides the first substantial account of how hapori Māori were shaped by the wartime experience at home. It is a story of sacrifice and remarkable resilience among whānau, hapū and iwi Māori. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Adrian de Leon, "Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America" (UNC Press, 2023)

    Adrian de Leon, "Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America" (UNC Press, 2023)
    Jan 11 2025
    In a book that pulls together both sides of the Pacific, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (UNC Press, 2023) asks the question: what if we look at Filipino history not from the cities or the imperial metropoles, but from the mountains and the countryside? Or put another way, from the "bundok," the Tagalog word for "mountain" which American soliders in the late 19th century would come to use as a catachall for the places they found themselves fighting imperial wars. In Bundok, NYU history and FIlipino Studies professor Adrian De Leon tracks both the movement of European and American colonizers into the archipeligo, as well as how people and images moved beyond the islands and into the wider Pacific world, and how these pictures and these emigres shaped ideas about civilization, savagery, and the nature of Filipine identity itself. In a book that traces pathways from the mountains of Luzon to the mountains of South Dakota, De Leon demonstrates how the American West has always been a transnational space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood" (Duke UP, 2018)

    Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood" (Duke UP, 2018)
    Jan 6 2025
    In Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (Duke University Press, 2018), Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to conventional understandings of Hawai‘i’s admission as a U.S. state. Hawai‘i statehood is popularly remembered as a civil rights victory against racist claims that Hawai‘i was undeserving of statehood because it was a largely non-white territory. Yet Native Hawaiian opposition to statehood has been all but forgotten. Saranillio tracks these disparate stories by marshaling a variety of unexpected genres and archives: exhibits at world's fairs, political cartoons, propaganda films, a multimillion-dollar hoax on Hawai‘i’s tourism industry, water struggles, and stories of hauntings, among others. Saranillio shows that statehood was neither the expansion of U.S. democracy nor a strong nation swallowing a weak and feeble island nation, but the result of a U.S. nation whose economy was unsustainable without enacting a more aggressive policy of imperialism. With clarity and persuasive force about historically and ethically complex issues, Unsustainable Empire provides a more complicated understanding of Hawai‘i’s admission as the fiftieth state and why Native Hawaiian place-based alternatives to U.S. empire are urgently needed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 19 mins
  • China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications

    China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications
    Dec 27 2024
    Why has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of different actors such as China, Russia, the US, the EU and NATO in the region? How are small island developing states such as the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, and Vanuatu affected by challenges in the new security environment? In this episode, Professor Marina Svensson talks to Professor Anne-Marie Brady about her research on China’s strategic thinking and economic and political influence in the Indo-Pacific, with a particular focus on the small island states. The need for collaboration among like-minded partners in the region and other actors such as the EU is also addressed. This episode was produced and edited by Lisa Sihvonen and Tabita Rosendal. Anne-Marie Brady is a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. Professor Brady is a specialist on Chinese politics, polar politics, China-Pacific politics, and New Zealand foreign policy. She is founding and executive editor of The Polar Journal. She has published ten books and over fifty academic papers and also written op eds for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Financial Times, among others. Further readings: Anne-Marie Brady’s work on the indo-pacific: https://www.aspi.org.au/report/when-china-knocks-door-new-caledonia https://thediplomat.com/2024/06/facing-up-to-chinas-hybrid-warfare-in-the-pacific/ https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/new-caledonia-crisis-a-turning-point-in-pacific-security/ https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/china-in-the-pacific-from-friendship-to-strategically-placed-ports-and-airfields/ The EU strategy: https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/eu-indo-pacific-strategy_en On NATO strategy: https://www.cfr.org/blog/natos-indo-pacific-aspirations This podcast was produced as part of EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03). The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: · Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia) · Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland) · Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania) · Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) · Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland) · Norwegian Network for Asian Studies Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    32 mins
  • Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

    Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
    Dec 22 2024
    In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-entrenching imperial power dynamics between the two countries. The U.S.-RMI Compact at once enshrined exclusive U.S. military access to the islands and established the right of “visa-free” migration to the United States for Marshallese citizens, leading to a Marshallese diaspora whose largest population resettled in the seemingly unlikely destination of Springdale, Arkansas. An “all-white town” by design for much of the twentieth century, Springdale, having nearly quadrupled in population since 1980, has been remade by Marshallese as well as Latinx immigration. Through ethnographic, policy-based, and archival research in Guåhan, Saipan, Hawai’i, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C., New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States (University of Georgia Press, 2024) by Dr. Emily Mitchell-Eaton tells the story of these place-based transformations, revealing how U.S. empire both causes and constrains mobility for its subjects, shaping migrants’ experiences of racialization, citizenship, and belonging in new destinations of empire. In examining two spatial processes—imperialism and migration—together, Dr. Mitchell-Eaton reveals connections and flows between presumably distant, “remote” sites like Arkansas and the Marshall Islands, showing them to be central to the United States’ most urgent political issues: immigration, racial justice, militarization, and decolonization. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 15 mins