Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Academic migrants who shift to another space and another worldview, feature in the educational landscape of every continent. However, a global lens may not be useful in understanding their experiences, nor in seeking to support them in their endeavors. This paper discusses ways of understanding the intersections of space, movement, and worldview derived from Pacific thinking. The discussion is grounded in the activities of Leadership Pacific (LP), a cause-based Movement. LP has grown from a single group to become a fluid, welcoming and ever-morphing network of interlocking clusters across the Oceania region. Responding to the need for a village-like web of caring and reciprocal relationships, LP fills the gap experienced by many Pacific-origin academic migrants when faced with academic practices and relationships. Through its people-centered storying pedagogy, LP provides an alternative space in which indigenous ways of knowing and being can be at home and through which the racism inherent in a mono-cultural understanding of academia is challenged. It welcomes both Pacific-origin academic migrants and those academics who seek alignment with a village-like people-centered approach to relationships and leadership. The LP experience, which now includes an international conference, provides a model of contextualized action that may be helpful in supporting academic migrants from other regions. Long-term, the influence of Movements such as LP has the potential to shift deep-seated universal assumptions of what movement and space might mean for the academy, and of ethical forms of response to the needs and potentials of the academical migrant.