Potawatomi philosopher and climate justice scholar Kyle Powys Whyte has eloquently decolonised the spectre of the Anthropocene as the shared fate of all humanity in dystopian portrayals of perilous futures. Indigenous peoples have already experienced the catastrophic effects of colonising capitalism; the climate crisis is the culmination of perduring global inequalities. Central to his decolonising vision is a spiralling sense of time, in reanimating insights and practices from the past as living people strive to become ‘good ancestors’ for future descendants. His vision embraces not just humans but all the kin of the living world and the cosmos. 

Oceanic scholars, leaders and activists have been engaged in similar decolonial struggles confronting not just the future spectre but the pressing present reality of the climate crisis. They are joined by Oceanic artists who, in potent, creative expressions, have become decolonial agents. This talk explores the work of two stellar artists, Yuki Kihara and Taloi Havini, as they offer decolonial interventions and confront the injustices of the climate crisis in Oceania with spiralling visions across time and place. 

Margaret Jolly, AM FASSA D. Litt is a Professor Emerita in the School of Culture, History and Language in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University and a founding mother of the ANU Gender Institute. She has taught at ANU, Macquarie University, the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and the University of California at Santa Cruz and supervised over 60 PhD students and many Postdoctoral Fellows. She was an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow (2010–2016) and has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, gender equality and gender violence, intersectional and decolonial feminisms and gender and climate change. She held a Poste Rouge (Visiting Professor) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in France in 2009. She was conferred as a Member of the Order of Australia for contributions to Gender and Pacific Studies and received the Peter Baume Award from ANU in 2020.

In-person: H.C Coombs Building, Room 1.309 (northern hexagon) 

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1