CLeaR Fellows 2018 – Jacoba Matapo

The art of wayfinding: Navigating Pasifika student success

Jacoba Matapo is of Samoan Dutch heritage, born and raised in Aoteroa/New Zealand. Jacoba’s passion for Pasifika education has stemmed from personal experiences as a Pasifika navigating cultural, political, and social tensions in her education journey. Jacoba’s current doctoral research locates her work within diasporic multiplicities, attempting to re-imagine Pasifika leadership as a cultural and collective political act. Her research engages in a post-foundational, posthuman critique of Pasifika leadership in higher education and attempts to question how cultural knowledge opens up relations of change in the context of human and material within Pasifika leadership. Her focus in leadership, questions the relational field that traverses collective cultural commitment and professional responsibility.

“The art of wayfinding: Navigating Pasifika student success”

Jacoba’s 2018 CLeaR Fellows project will engage specific Pacific cultural knowledge of way-finding as a method of cartography, to map, talanoa and re-imagine Pasifika success throughout the University of Auckland. It is in the spirit of the collective, this project aims to generate opportunities within the University to bring together Pasifika peoples, to teu le va (attend to the inter-relational space), to generate a sharing and ownership of knowledge, resources and skills (Anae, 2010). An outcome of this project will be to develop an online platform as a method of way-finding Pasifika success, whereby all Pasifika may connect within the wider university context. This will include the sharing of teaching and learning resources, materials, and Pasifika research.