Center for Pacific Island Studies

people

Katerina Martina Teaiwa

Assistant Professor, Center for Pacific Islands Studies; PhD Australian National University (2002)

Katerina Martina Teaiwa was born and raised in Fiji and is of Banaban, Kiribati, and African-American descent. She has a master's in Pacific Islands studies from the University of Hawai‘i and a PhD in anthropology from the Australian National University. Her dissertation, “Visualizing Te Kainga, Dancing Te Kainga: History and Culture between Rabi, Banaba, and Beyond,” took a multisited approach to Banaban and Kiribati history and culture and included seven short visual studies on DVD. She currently teaches Women in Oceania (PACS 640); Culture and Consumption in Oceania (PACS 492); Islands of Globalization: Pacific and Caribbean Perspectives (PACS 690); The Body and Pacific Studies (PACS 690); and Researching Oceania: Creative and Conventional Methods of Interdisciplinary Inquiry (PACS 603). Her current research focuses on the regional impact of phosphate mining on Banaba, rethinking approaches to Pacific area studies, and expanding Pacific dance studies. She is also a member of the Islands of Globalization project team based at the East-West Center, linking the Pacific and Caribbean.

Selected publications

2005	Our Sea of Phosphate: the Diaspora of Ocean Island. In Indigenous Diasporas and Dislocations: Unsettling Western Fixations, edited by Graham Harvey and Charles D Thompson, Jr. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK: Ashgate Press.
2004	Multi-Sited Methodologies: “Homework” in Australia, Fiji, and Kiribati. In Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation, edited by Lynne Hume and Jane Mulcock, 216–233. New York: Columbia University Press.
2003	Review of Tony and Joan Whincup’s Akekeia! Traditional Dance in Kiribati. The Contemporary Pacific 16:195–198.
2002	Asian-Pacific-American@orb.com: Review Essay on Rob Wilson’s Reimagining the American Pacific. Cultural Studies Review 8 (2): 190–193.
2001	Personalising Pacific Studies: Strategies for Imagining Oceania (with Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka’s Surfing Our Sea of Islands: the Politics of Imagination). SPAN (South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language) 50/51:14–42.
2000	Banaban Island: Paying the Price for Other People’s Development. IWGIA (Journal of the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs) 1:38–45.