Join us for presentations by pre-eminent researchers on criminology in the Pacific.
The CIESJ Indo-Pacific Research Group is excited to announce the upcoming meeting, where we will have the privilege of hosting Gisa Dr Moses Ma’alo Faleolo from Victoria University of Wellington and Professor John Scott from QUT. Their research and publications on criminology in the Pacific are of great significance.
Dr. Faleolo and Professor Scott will share highlights from their recently published books at this meeting, providing valuable insights. Their books are titled:
- O fea le Pacific (Where is the Pacific?) in Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific references: A Pacific criminology perspective (Gisa Moses Ma’alo Faleolo)
- Island Criminology (John Scott)
This meeting will be held at QUT’s Kelvin Grove Campus, E Block, Level 5 – Room E558. A light lunch will be provided.
If you are unable to attend in person, register to attend via Zoom. We anticipate this session will be recorded and made available to registered guests in due course.
Event details
Date: Wednesday 6 November 2024
Time: Midday until 2.00pm
Venue: E558 – Kelvin Grove Campus or online
RSVP: Register to attend online or in-person by Wednesday 30 October. RSVP online.
Presentation abstracts
Gisa Dr Moses Ma’alo Faleolo: O fea le Pacific (Where is the Pacific?) in Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific references: A Pacific criminology perspective
There have been a lot of conferences I have been to where organising institutions claim that the participation and its activities represent the region, for example, “Asia-Pacific”, and “Indo-Pacific”. The experience is that it is not “Pacific” at all and feels and looks like an Asian-Western and Indo-Western encounter. This paper argues that if the term, “Pacific”, is utilised, that the event genuinely honours, recruits, and programmes actual voices that represent this region (Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia) otherwise stop using it. I remember I gave two international conference papers: one, at the 2015 Asia-Pacific Association of Social Work Educators, Saigon, Vietnam, and the other, at the 2019 Asia-Pacific Regional Social Work Conference in Bengaluru, India. My papers were the only ones whose subject content, illustrations, analyses, recommendations, and knowledge were drawn from Pacific (Sāmoan) theorisation content out of the four-day long conference event that was dominated by Asian and Western papers. The Pacific presence was largely a non-existent force, an invisible voice, as conference programming omitted this worldview from keynotes, facilitation, recognition, and even event planning. This must stop not only in social work but also in criminology. There are multiple criminological epistemologies such as American, British, European, and moving away from the global North’s hold over criminological knowledge production with the advent of Asian, and Indian criminology. This paper charts the evolution of another criminological strand, Pacific criminology, an alternative way of criminal justice theorising and responding, through the Pacific lens and highlights the importance of ensuring this worldview when it is used in the phrase, “Asia-Pacific” and “Indo-Pacific”, that the term “Pacific” is indeed honoured.
Professor John Scott: Island Criminology
Drawing from my recent book of the same title, the paper outlines a program for a criminological approach to the study of islands. I examine the existing criminological literature on islands and the relative neglect of island research and lack of concern with place- and space-based attributes more generally. I argue the geographic features of islands, especially their bounded and often remote nature, produces distinctive social networks, normative structures and forms of social control. While the physical and demographic diversity of such places must be appreciated, there is a need to understand crime in islands as places of production (agriculture, industry), consumption (tourism, retirement sites) and exclusion (detention centres, prisons). In contrast to studies of tourism and crime on islands, I argue that vital questions for criminology are not whether islands have more or less crime than other places, but how crime is defined in an island setting, which crimes are policed and visible, who defines crime and who is subject to regulation? Vitally, all these questions are informed by what I refer to as the ‘politics of place and belonging’, examples of which are drawn from my recent research on islands