A Cartography of Higher Education: Attempts at Inclusion and Insights from Pasifika Scholarship in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Higher education in settler colonies like Aotearoa New Zealand,1 Australia, the USA, and Canada has historically been dominated by European ways of knowing and being. As a result, these institutions tend to privilege individual (over collective) achievement, produce and trans- mit totalizing knowledge, and operate according to linear conceptualiza- tions of time and teleological notions of progress and futurity (Ahenakew et al. 2014). Social mobility (particularly as it results in capital accumula- tion) is increasingly viewed as the primary “end” of higher education, through the “means” of competition, meritocracy, and self-determination. While Indigenous and racialized students have been historically excluded and/or underrepresented in higher education within the settler colonies (Ahenakew and Naepi, 2015; Airini et al. 2010b; Ahenakew et al., 2014; Andreotti et al. 2015; Curtis et al. 2012; Gusa 2010; Mayeda et al. 2014; Kuokkanen 2008; Mila-Schaff and Robinson 2010; Patterson 2012; Roshanravan 2012, etc.), the increased presence of these students pres- ents not only the possibility of, but also the ethical demand for, disruption of these institutionalized Eurocentric educational norms. In this chapter, we respond to this demand by examining the potential for Pasifika2 epis- temologies to inform alternative approaches to ‘diversity’ in higher educa- tion than are commonly deployed by universities.