Responding to the call: talanoa, va-vā, early career network and enabling academic pathways at a university in New Zealand

Recent provocations by Māori and Pacific/Pasifika academics have called for a collective response to the under-representation of Pacific/Pasifika academics in universities across Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing from Indigenous concepts and frameworks foregrounds Pacific language and ideas as being central to our worldviews and validates the lived realities of Pacific peoples in higher education. We, the authors, collectively respond to Naepi et al.’s call by sharing our stories, experiences, and efforts to wayfind academia and provide a possible solution that is transformative in supporting early career Pacific academics. This led to the development of the Mentoring Oceanic Academics Navigating Academia in education (MOANA ed.) network at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education and Social Work as a way to mobilise, collectivise, mentor, nurture, and empower our next generation of Pacific/Pasifika academics. In this article, we utilise ‘talanoa’ as a methodological framework that privileges the worldviews and stories associated with academic mobilities and pathways for Pacific/Pasifika researchers based in Aotearoa New Zealand. At the pragmatic level, we employ talanoa as a method of gathering and analysing the stories. As part of talanoa as a dialogical process and to honour the stories shared, the authors agreed to (re)present and capture the nuances in our stories through vignettes.