Key Dates

Call for abstracts opens: 1st November 2022

Call for abstracts closes: 1st March

Abstract Reviews completed and authors notified of outcomes: 1st May

Presenter Registration Deadline: 15th May

Programme published: 30th May

Conference Programme

Thursday 8th June, 2023

8:00: Conference Registration opens
9:00: Mihi Whakatau (a welcome ceremony for all guests)
9:30: Morning Tea
10:00: Kapa Haka Performance
10:30: Welcome:

• AVP President, Kathrin Otrel-Cass,
• University of Canterbury Deputy Vice Chancellor, Catherine Moran
• Acting Executive Dean, Faculty of Education, Misty Sato

11:00: Te Rū Rangahau Keynote: Professor Georgina Stewart: Looking After Each Other
12:00: Lunch
1:00: Parallel papers/presentation session #1
2:00: Parallel papers/Presentation Session #2
2:30:Afternoon tea
3:00: AVP AGM
4:30: Film Screenings/Performances/Exhibitions (Optional, with pizza dinner)
7:00: End of Day 1

Friday 9th June, 2023

8:00: Publishing Workshop Breakfast, Video Journal Of Education and Pedagogies. Sponsored by Brill. (Limited tickets to this event)
9:00: AVP Keynote: Associate Professor Albert Refiti: Decolonising Vā Moana: Experiments in sympathetic readings of Moana material culture
10:00: Morning Tea
10:30: Pasifika Cultural Performance
11:00: Parallel papers/presentation session #3
12:00: Lunch
1:00: AVP Keynote: Professor Crystal Abidin: Inter-cultural Influencers: Industry logics, Platform optics, and Arbiters from the Asia Pacific region
2:00: Parallel papers/presentation session #4
3:00: Afternoon Tea
3:30: Plenary Session: Professor Stewart, Professor Abidin, Associate Professor Refiti: Watch this space for the plenary topic!
6:00: Conference Dinner Event (*Optional, additional cost)

Saturday 10th June, 2023

*10:30am- 2:30pm: “Visual Pedagogies: Possibilities for teaching and learning”.

A day that is practice focused, with a range of workshop sessions on new and exciting visual approaches to teaching and learning. Are you interested in what you could do with virtual reality with your students / ākonga? Or maybe you are interested in use of film, photography, games, tweet talks, memes and emojis, or star apps? Join us to find out what is possible.

Lunch will be provided and there will be play-workshops galore.

Accommodation Options:

https://ucliveac.sharepoint.com/sites/IntranetWHOurCampusFacilities/SitePages/Campus-Houses.aspx

https://www.christchurch-accommodation.co.nz/

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Georgina Stewart

Georgina Tuari Stewart (Ngāpuhi-nui-tonu, Pare Hauraki) is Professor of Māori Philosophy of Education in Te Ara Poutama, Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand. Formerly one of few Māori-speaking senior school teachers of Science/Pūtaiao, with many years of experience in writing national curriculum, qualifications, and teaching and learning resources. Author of Māori Philosophy: Indigenous thinking from Aotearoa (Bloomsbury, 2021) and lead editor of Writing for Publication: Liminal reflections for academics (Springer, 2021). Deputy Editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT), and Co-Editor of New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies (NZJES). Georgina is the Principal Investigator of a Marsden-funded research project (2022-2025) investigating how Flexible Learning Spaces (FLS) can support Māori aspirations in education.

Looking After Each Other

A video journal enables the use of oral forms of te reo Māori in ways other than what has traditionally been available in text vehicles of research. A video article is an article that has one or more video clips attached to it. This format is of potentially significant value for scholars of Māori language practices, such as oratory, mōteatea, karanga, kapa haka, or indeed any one of a number of traditional knowledge practices undergoing revival. A video journal is the practical manifestation of an underpinning philosophy of visual pedagogy—of a way of learning and teaching that opens space for the image. Students and teachers find relief in visual pedagogy from the restrictions imposed by academic text. Visual pedagogy is radical; a non-traditional form of pedagogy, and therefore of interest to those who are underserved by state education systems. That category includes Māori and Pacific families, who are concentrated in the lowest wealth bands of New Zealand society. Visual pedagogy is extremely relevant in this post-digital era, when a powerful camera is in each person’s hand. This keynote considers how visual pedagogy reunites us with ourselves and each other. What role does visual pedagogy play in the concept of a Māori flexible learning space?

Associate Professor Albert L Refiti

Leali’ifano Dr Albert L Refiti is an associate professor of art and design at Auckland University of Technology and the holder of the matai ancestral title Leali’ifano from his grandfather’s home of Vaovai, Falealili in Samoa. He is the co-author of Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul and Lana Lopesi of Pacific Spaces: transformations and transmutations (2022) and The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture (2018) with Elizabeth Grant, Kelly Greenop and Daniel Glenn. Albert is the convenor of the Vā Moana Research Cluster and recipient of 2 Marsden Fund Research Grants Vā Moana: space and relationality in Pacific thought and identity. (2019-2022) with Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul and Artefacts of Relations: Building in the Pacific (2022-2025) with Rau Hoskins. He is also the 2019-2020 Andrew W Mellon Senior Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of the Arts and was awarded the 2021 Fellow of the Auckland War Memorial Museum Medal. 

Decolonising Vā Moana: experiments in sympathetic readings of Moana material culture

An outline of experiments made by the Vā Moana Research Cluster at Auckland University of Technology to understand and develop ways to operate decolonial strategies will be covered in the presentation. I begin by exploring how the concept of space and time emerged in Moana cultures in our work and how we became aware of the inadequacies of several theories that we had used earlier in dealing with the complexities of Indigenous ideas. In doing so, we discovered that the interstices we searched for within the text were not enough to provide passages towards decolonisation. In the presentation, I explain how we have arrived at a process towards decolonising Indigenous pedagogies related to the creative arts. It is a three-stage process in which we first need to adequately acknowledge the harm and violence initiated by settler colonial ideas and the century of trauma that resulted in the current procedures for activating a state of reconciliation and reparation. Moana artists have successfully presented responses towards this, and there are many excellent examples. Secondly, the process of recovering and repairing Indigenous knowledge or Indigenisation is well on its way in our work. These are empowering our Indigenous communities, especially young learners. Early foundational experiments by Albert Wendt and Epeli Ha’uofa in “towards a new Oceania”, “a sea of islands”, and “teu le vā” have helped devise strategies from which to explore what we do as Moana cosmopolitans and how to provide platforms that allow us to recreate new ways in the diaspora to reactivate and reinvent new knowledge. We are now at a stage in our experimentation to articulate a third component of the process, “how to decolonise”. I will provide examples of this final phase with some recent experiments with young musicians, performers and video makers to explore how we are coming to terms with how to listen and make apparent the feelings as logo (Samoan), rongo (Māori), ‘ongo (Tongan) to respond to learning institutions and their roles in educating Moana and Pacific people, how to decolonise together with these institutions. This is called sympathetic readings, in which we develop strategies for how to feel with the text. 

Professor Crystal Abidin

Professor Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist and ethnographer of internet cultures, focusing especially on influencer cultures, internet celebrity, online visibility, and social media pop cultures, mostly in the Asia Pacific region. She works as Professor and ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies at Curtin University; Director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab (IERLab); Deputy Director of the Korea Research Centre (KRC); Associate Investigator at the Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child; Programme Lead of Social Media Pop Cultures at the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT); and Affiliate Researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University. She is also Founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network (TCRN), and Editor-in-Chief of Media International Australia (MIA). Crystal has published extensively in academic and popular media outlets, with over 80 articles and chapters on various aspects of vernacular internet cultures. Her research has won international accolades, with notable awards including WA Young Tall Poppy Science Award (2022), The Australian Top 40 Early Career Researchers (2021), ABC TOP 5 Humanities Fellow (2020), ICA Pop Comm Early Career Scholar Prize (2020), Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia (2018), and Pacific Standard 30 Top Thinkers Under 30 (2016).

Inter-cultural Influencers: Industry logics, Platform optics, and Arbiters from the Asia Pacific region

Influencers have established themselves as ambassadors, advocates, and advertisers for brands, promoting various products and services, and even encouraging political beliefs and social justice causes. As icons on the internet who are experts in holding attention and amplifying content, Influencers have expanded from being mere commercial enterprises to being conduits of public service information by reaching wide, diverse, and sometimes marginalized (young) audiences with important socio-cultural messages. Recent interest on Influencers in the Asia Pacific region have taken as their central focus the predominantly soft-authoritarian climate of these nations, considering how governments have leveraged on Influencers to make palatable civic awareness on a range of issues, and even for electoral campaigning in light of didactic media regime. Despite this, the regional locals of Southeast Asia and East Asia have also long boasted the invigorating potential of inter-cultural exchange, at the nexus of racial and ethnic diversity, relative mobility and migration, and economic disparity and aspiration. It is also in these pockets that Influencers operationalise subversive frivolity by using the vernacular of social media pop culture to negotiate both everyday identity politics and ‘big P’ politics. In this talk, we focus on Influencers in the ‘in between’ spaces of cultures and cultural exchange – the mixed race individuals, the international family units, the migrants across places, the diaspora within spaces  and the promises and pitfalls of the documentary, performative, commodification, and commercial work that they do. Through ethnographic case studies rooted in anthropological methods, we consider how such Influencers shape industry logics, impact platform optics, and become arbiters of values and norms from the Asia Pacific region.

Special Events in Aotearoa New Zealand around the conference:

Matariki is our newest public holiday. Celebrating te tau hou Māori (the Māori new year), this celebration is organised around the lunar calendar, and the rise of Matariki (Pleiades) constellation. 

Kai Tahu prepare for the new year with the rise of Puaka (Rigel) which can be observed over the weekend of the AVP conference. With sufficient interest from conference participants, we will arrange a day trip to Mt Johnwhich is at the centre of the Dark Sky project in Tekapo. 

Please contact visualpedagogies@gmail.com if you are interested in this option. 

Publish with the Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy

You may wish to submit a full article to our journal – VJEP

Our Open Access Scopus journal – Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy prioritises all aspects of visual learning and teaching – in and beyond traditional learning contexts. We encourage articles that include video and/or image components or which replace text altogether! In accordance with the themes of this year’s conference we invite two special topics for those who wish to take their conference presentations into the world. We will be offering a publishing session at the conference or you can contact the guest editors in advance of the conference to find out more. We encourage creative expressions and alternative forms of representation and thought. 

For those who wish to seek support for video preparations please contact Dr Bridgette Redder bridgetteredder@gmail.com or Dr Rene Novak proronny@gmail.com. Both will be on hand at the conference, as will Editor-in-Chief Jayne White and representatives from Brill, our publisher.

Special Topics for VJEP arising from the AVP Conference: 

Decolonising Visualities

Guest Editors: Professor Carl Mika carl.mika@canterbury.ac.nz, and Associate Professor Jacoba Matapo jacoba.matapo@aut.ac.nz

We invite you to submit video articles on the broad topic of ‘Decolonising Visualities’, exploring different ways of seeing and the importance of decolonizing sight and perception in and beyond education. We encourage diverse approaches to the theme, especially those that collapse the dominance of text. 

Deadline for first drafts: 1 September 2023

Visibilising Pedagogies

Guest Editors:  Dr Andrea Delaune andrea.delaune@canterbury.ac.nz, Toni Torepe toni.torepe@canterbury.ac.nz, & Professor E. Jayne White jayne.white@canterbury.ac.nz

We invite you to submit video articles on the broad topic of ‘Visibilising Pedagogies’, exploring the multiple intersections and synergies between visualities, pedagogies, and visual media. We take a broad view of pedagogies as processes of teaching and learning across complex and diverse spaces and communities. In summoning the term ‘visibilising’ we draw attention to the politics as well as the practices and processes of visual representations in education. Attention could also be drawn to how learning is represented, by whom, for whom, and by association, how learners are rendered capable (or otherwise). Approaches that incorporate theoretical, philosophical and pedagogical dimensions of visualities are encouraged. 

Deadline for first drafts: 1 August 2023