Another Kind of Applied Research? Interventions Across the Academic Hierarchy

Community Post by Kevin Lujan Lee

Epeli Hau’ofa––who was born in Papua New Guinea to Tongan missionary parents, and who lived itinerantly across the Pacific throughout his life––is the great thinker of Oceania. Developmental economists see the Pacific Islands as small, resource-poor and isolated; and its peoples as trapped within the cages of their islands. Invoking indigenous myths and histories across the pre-colonial Pacific Islands, Hau’ofa (1993) decisively rejects this portrait. He shows instead how indigenous Pacific Islanders have never thought of their islands as small, and find shared heritage and resource abundance in Oceania––the vast ocean which connects all islands and all indigenous Islanders. For him, designations of “small” and “island” are thus colonial constructs, which artificially divide the Pacific with foreign cartographies, and which assume that size and abundance are merely features of land.

Haunani-Kay Trask, of Kanaka Maoli origins, is a major intellectual force behind the contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty movement. While the specific demands of Kanaka Maoli sovereignty activists differ widely (with some advocating for legal recognition akin to Native Americans, and others advocating for nationalism and separatism), some common themes of the movement include the recovery of Kanaka Maoli agency in Hawaiian history; the disavowal of the Hawaiian tourist economy; and the denouncement of the  “prostitution” of Kanaka Maoli culture.

The I-Kiribati scholar Teresia Teaiwa was one of the main intellectual forces behind the ‘indigenous’ turn of Pacific Studies in the 1990s. She made an impact in nearly every domain in the field: she polemically argues how the marketization and sexualization of the bikini erases the nuclearization of Bikini––a small atoll in the Marshall Islands (Teaiwa 1994); she uncovers the phenomenon of “militourism”––how “military or paramilitary force ensures the smooth running of a tourist industry, and that same tourist industry masks the military force behind it” (Teaiwa 1999, 251); and, above all, she cautions against the “Pacific exceptionalism” of Pacific Studies, and demands that Pacific scholars engage in comparative and global research to save the field––and region––from obscurity (Teaiwa 2006).

For John Friedmann (2008), planning theory is about translation: it is produced when theories and ideas from other fields are extracted and tested against the messiness and unpredictability of the real world. Implicit in Friedmann’s thoughtful, well-intentioned account of planning theory lies the echoes of a resilient academic hierarchy: with theorists at the top, social scientists (and humanists) below; and planners––alongside other applied researchers––at the bottom. Good planning theory is foreign theory well-applied; and good planning theorists are watchful and patient––we wait for good ideas, and instrumentalize them in service of justice.

While this vision of planning scholarship remains noble and important, I propose that robust applied research goes beyond mere translation and application. Following the lead of the best planning scholars, we must dare to reconfigure borrowed ideas and the theories within which they are embedded. This means a commitment to another kind of applied research––one which offers interventions across the academic hierarchy, and which forges original connections from theory, to ideas, to mechanisms, and finally, to context and application. Good planning theory is also foreign theory reimagined; and good planning theorists are those for whom “wicked problems” aren’t just sites of theoretical application (Rittel and Webber 1973), but also sites of theoretical transformation.

I am interested in the role of state-society relations in equitable economic development at the local and transnational scales. In my dissertation project, I study the political-economic consequences of the circulation of human capital, politics and policies across the transnational circuit connecting the Pacific Islands to their ex-colonial powers––especially the United States. This transnational circuit has had profound but underexplored effects on the political economy of development: Australia and New Zealand universities export accounting expertise and shape public financial administration across Pacific microstates; foreign-educated scholar-activists return home with radical calls for decolonization and global indigenous solidarity; Okinawan activists call for the demilitarization of Guam; targeted land trusts emerge in Hawai`i and Guam as strategies of indigenous repossession and wealth-building.

And in my preliminary research, I’ve experienced what most planners already know to be true––that my borrowed theories aren’t enough and must be rethought. Take the literature on transnationalism, which highlights how increased global mobility and interconnectedness have increased the complexity and extent of material and ideological flows between local communities across national boundaries. However, in narrowly focusing on the celebratory dimensions of increased global mobility and interconnectedness, the literature fails to systematically consider the political dimensions of such transnational flows––whether these transnational processes serve to bolster and/or undermine one kind of political project or another. For instance, scholars have long studied circular mobility across the Pacific Islands but rarely speak of whether these mobilities cultivates Hau’ofa’s brand of inter-ethnic solidarity or serves to strengthen identity boundaries between ethnic Islander groups.

Thus, one of my current projects––in collaboration with Josh Campbell, a political theorist at UCLA–– begins with understanding the discursive terrain within which indigenous Pacific Islander activists conceive and mobilize for indigenous justice. Of the many thinkers we study, three are highlighted in the introduction. With an understanding of these political discourses, we then attempt to understand how they are operationalized through transnational organizations that produce and exchange art, theory, policy expertise, rhetorical frames, organizing strategies etc.­­­­––and the kinds of indigenous intellectual-political projects that these exchanges serve to bolster and/or undermine.

References

Bautista, Lola Quan. Steadfast movement around Micronesia: Satowan enlargements beyond migration. Lexington Books, 2010.

Friedmann, John. "The uses of planning theory: A bibliographic essay." Journal of Planning Education and Research 28, no. 2 (2008): 247-257.

Hau'ofa, Epeli. "Our sea of islands." The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 148-161.

Lee, Helen, and Steve Tupai Francis, eds. Migration and transnationalism: Pacific perspectives. Australia National University E-Press, 2009.

Macpherson, Cluny, and La’avasa Macpherson. "Kinship and transnationalism." In Migration and Transnationalism: Pacific Perspectives. Canberra: Australia National University E-Press (2009): 73-90.

Rittel, Horst W.J., and Melvin M. Webber. "Dilemmas in a general theory of planning." Policy sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155-169.

Teaiwa, Teresia K. "Bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans." The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 87-109.

Teaiwa, Teresia K. "On analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a global context." The Contemporary Pacific 18, no. 1 (2006): 71-87.

Teaiwa, Teresia K. "Reading Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Epeli Hau ‘ofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism, and the ‘Polynesian’ Body." In Inside out: Literature, cultural politics, and identity in the new Pacific, Eds. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson. Oxford, UK: Rowman and Littlefield (1999), 249-263.

About the Author:

Kevin Lee is a second-year PhD student broadly interested in the role of state-society relations in equitable economic development. He explores this through two parallel research agendas: (1) local workforce development planning for populations facing multiple, compounded barriers to employment in California, especially undocumented immigrant workers in low-wage industries; and (2) the role of transnational advocacy and policy networks in shaping economic development planning in the geographical region of Micronesia. Kevin actively collaborates with advocacy organizations in the United States and Oceania, and maintains secondary research interests in economic justice organizing, indigenous Pacific Islander political thought and nonprofit performance management.