Ping-Ann Addo is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her research uses Tongan textiles and gift exchange to analyse Tongan women’s agency and their communities’ ethnic identities in Auckland, New Zealand, and Oakland, California. She teaches courses on the anthropology of art and material culture, multiculturalism, and ethnic expression and has managed a community arts project with Tongan textile artists in Oakland. She has published in the areas of transnationalism, Tongan exchange, ethnicity, and the political economy of contemporary diaspora. Ping-Ann is ethnic Chinese and Ghanaian, and hails from Trinidad and Tobago.
Kalissa Alexeyeff is currently a research fellow in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry at the University of Melbourne, seconded from her position as lecturer in the Gender Studies Program. She has written a book Dancing from the Heart: Movement, Gender and Cook Islands Globalization (Univeristy of Hawai'i Press, 2009) which explores the significance of dance in the Cook Islands throughout colonial history and in its contemporary manifestations.
Maria Borovnik is a lecturer in the School of People, Environment and Planning at Massey University, New Zealand. She has a PhD from Canterbury University. Her main research area is the social strategies of people living mobile livelihoods and she has studied seafarers from Kiribati and Tuvalu who work on international merchant and fishing ships. Her recent publications on this appear in the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal and Asia Pacific Viewpoint.
John Connell is Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. He has long been interested in development issues in island states and the role of culture in development. He has written several books on the Pacific, especially focused on Bougainville and Papua New Guinea, and recently edited two books The international migration of health workers (Routledge, New York, 2008) and, with Barbara Rugendyke, Tourism at the grassroots. Villagers and visitors in the Asia-Pacific (Routledge, London, 2008).
Mike Evans is an Associate Professor at UBC Okanagan. After completing his doctorate at McMaster University in 1996, he taught at the University of Northern BC, and then at the University of Alberta prior to moving to UBC in 2003. His primary research relationships are with people in the Métis community in Northern BC, the Métis Nation of BC, and the Kingdom of Tonga. He has published extensively on Tongan adaptations to globalization, the impact of imported foods on Tongan diets and health, and other issues facing contemporary Indigenous communities in Canada and the Pacific.
Steve Tupai Francis is an Australian-born Tongan with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Melbourne. Steve is an Honorary Fellow with the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne and an Honorary Associate with the Refugee Health Research Centre, School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University. Steve is Manager—Movement Relations and Advocacy for the Australian Red Cross.
Paul Harms did doctoral research at the University of Alberta on the economic and social importance of Tongan migration.
Ingjerd Hoëm is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. She has held the position of Head of Research at the Institute for Pacific Cultural History and Archaeology at the Kon-Tiki Museum, of which she is now a member of the Board of Directors. She is the scientific leader of the research project ‘Identity Matters: Movement and Place’, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Among her latest publications are: Theatre and political process. Staging identities in Tokelau and New Zealand and ‘Stealing the Water of Life: The Historicity of Contemporary Social Relationships’, in History and Anthropology.
Helen Lee is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University and Visiting Fellow of the ANU Pacific Centre. Since the 1980s her research has focused on the people of Tonga, both in their home islands in the South Pacific and in the diaspora. Her publications include Becoming Tongan: An ethnography of childhood (Helen Morton, University of Hawai’i Press) and Tongans overseas: Between two shores (University of Hawai’i Press). Her current work is on second generation Tongan transnationalism and her most recent book is the edited collection Ties to the homeland: Second generation transnationalism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).
Sa`iliemanu Lilomaiava-Doktor was born and raised in Salelologa, Savaii, Samoa. She did her primary and secondary education in Savaii and went on a Samoan government scholarship through ADAB to do her BA at the University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia. She taught at Samoa College (high school) for five years before she went back on a Fulbright scholarship to do her MA in Pacific Islands Studies followed by her Ph.D. in Geography, both at the University of Hawaii. Sa’ili is a lecturer in Hawaiian and Pacific Studies in the Humanities Division at the University of Hawaii-West Oahu. Her publication, ‘Beyond Migration: Samoan Population Movement (Malaga) and Geography of Social Space (Va)’ appears in the February 2009 issue of The Contemporary Pacific 22 (1): 1-32.
Cluny Macpherson is Professor of Sociology at Massey University at Auckland. La’avasa Macpherson is a research associate and orchardist. They have worked in both Samoa and in Samoan diasporic communities over some 35 years. They have written a book Samoan medical belief and practice (Auckland University Press) and numerous journal articles on topics including Samoan migration, the social correlates of suicide, law and dispute resolution, religion and development in Samoa; economic development and the transformation of Samoan kinship and transnationalism. Their interest in transnationalism is personal and professional and they divide their time between family in Samoan and New Zealand.
Camille Nakhid is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences at Auckland University of technology. Her research interests include migrant and refugee communities, research methodologies, and Maori and Pasifika student achievement.
Vili Nosa completed his Master of Arts (Hons) in Sociology in 1997. His master’s thesis focused on the pull/push influences on Niuean migration. He also has a PhD in Behavioural Science for a thesis entitled: ‘The Perceptions and use of alcohol among Niuean men living in Auckland’. He is the first Niuean to gain a PhD. Vili is currently employed as a lecturer in the Section of Pacific Health, School of Population Health, University of Auckland. He lectures on number of health related courses in the certificate, undergraduate, post-graduate, and medical courses within the School of Population health.
Nancy Pollock’s interest in transnationalism stems from concerns about Globalisation and its many dimensions, particularly as they affect food access for populations in the Pacific. Her research on local foods and their uses over time has raised concerns about development, particularly poverty and thus food security and the health issues they raise in today's commercial world. She has retired from the Departments of Anthropology and Development Studies at Victoria University in Wellington, but continues her research activities, drawing on Pacific issues for wider concerns such as transculturation. Her latest publication is: ‘Sustainability of the Kava Trade’, 2009, in The Contemporary Pacific 21 (2).
R. Colin Reid, PhD (University of Victoria) is Assistant Professor in Health Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. He is a social gerontologist and demographer, with particular interest in quantitative and mixed methods.
Mark Schubert holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Queensland. He grew up in the Pacific Islands in places as varied as Pitcairn Island and Papua New Guinea and spent his fieldwork time in Australia’s south-west of New South Wales, among the many Pacific Islander migrants in Griffith town. He is currently lecturer in the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland and in his spare time does social mapping work in Papua New Guinea.