Deadline for Proposals: October 6, 2023

As sea levels rise in our region, the Pacific is also garnering a rising level of political attention. The Pacific is a site and source of political innovations for the complex and intersecting challenges faced by people and governments around the world. The Pacific confronts rising economic inequalities, increased international geopolitical tensions, a mutating pandemic, cataclysmic climate change and ongoing entrenched racisms, sexism, and other discriminations. At the fore in engaging with these, and other matters the Pacific may offer alternative responses, knowledges, and experiences.

The NZPSA|TKTToA 2023/2024 conference theme is “The Rising Pacific”. While the conference will welcome a broad range of Political Studies scholars and their works, we particularly encourage papers, panels, and roundtables that speak broadly to the theme.

Participants may wish to explore:

• How centring the Pacific as a region of study, or the Pacific as a collective of unique knowledges and histories, help us to better understand contemporary politics?

• What is “the Pacific”, and do distinctions between Oceania, the Indo-Pacific, Polynesia, and Australiasia, limit or enhance our theories and politics?

• What unique challenges confront the Pacific that suspend, obscure, generate, or stymie our existing ways of thinking and theorising about politics?

• What roles do Aotearoa New Zealand, and other Pacific nations, play in international politics in the Pacific and beyond?

The conference organisation team will welcome a diverse range of participatory formats. We encourage submissions of whole panels, author-meets-critic book roundtables, network-specific themed panels (e.g. local government, gender and politics, political theory, etc.) and professional development themed discussions.

For further questions, enquiries, or proposals, please contact NZPSA2024@gmail.com.