The University of St Andrews Centre for Pacific Studies invites delegates to gather for the 8th Conference of the European Society for Oceanists, to be held on 5th-8th July, 2010.

Theme

At the end of the 7th ESfO conference, Verona 2008, a round-table of Pacific Islands academics forcefully urged their colleagues to take seriously the consequences of the theme ‘putting people first’: they wanted academics to acknowledge the obligations activated by their relations in Oceania, and to recognize the responsibilities to Oceanic peoples, to the Academy and to Civil Society that come with the exchange of expert knowledge. Simply put, knowledge transfers work both ways, and they wanted academics to act.

Knowledge exchange in Oceania has always involved two-way traffic. In asking about the emergent properties of reciprocity, responsibility and obligation constituted in academic research relations with Oceanic peoples, what leads and lessons can we draw from the solutions that Oceanic peoples are fashioning for themselves out of this contemporary dilemma? Equally, what roles and capacities are Oceanic peoples fashioning for academics who are interested in the region?

ESfO conferences are renowned for gathering together academics based in different regions of the world: Exchanging Knowledge in Oceania aims to put this gathering of inter-personal and conceptual relations to work in examining what kinds of knowledge transfers between bodies of knowledge are currently going on in Oceania, and what kinds of emergent relations are being formed.

Download the ESfO 2010 Conference Programme