UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the work of diasporic Pacific Islanders to reconnect with lands/seas of Oceania and suggests storytelling, place-making and multimodal creativity as intrinsic to cultural reclamation education. The research is derived from a community engaged project of a Pacific Islander educational non-profit in developing a travel program for cultural exchanges between Northern California and Hawai’i. Research was conducted using ethnographic observations, interviews and participant generated art projects to generate a diasporic pedagogy and explore concepts of cultural identity, belonging and reclamation. This work enters at the nexus of “rooted” place-based educational practices and adaptivity of “routed” migrancy pedagogies in service of decolonial potentiality. It argues that cultural reclamation pedagogy in diaspora can be guided by both pedagogies in order to refashion connections across time and geographies to exceed colonial containment logics of modernity and Indigeneity. It also contends that a practice of ARTiculation guides these efforts through multisensory meaning-making and multi-modal generation.