Building meeting grounds

Abstract

This article examines the issue of supervision across cultures, specifically Pacific postgraduates in Aotearoa/New Zealand, from the imperative of cultivating intersections, encounters and meetings, where not everything can be known in advance by either party. How to make things, which cannot be thought outside of one’s culture, visible and open to conceptualization? Such a situation involves learning on the part of both student and supervisor to deal with epistemic potentialities that relate practice and theory, native and new cultures in different ways. Such learning provides fruitful encounters and reversals in a friction or traction between cultures, languages and modes of thinking. Indigenous Pacific cultures valorise meeting grounds and meetinghouses highly. Adopted as metaphors – conceptualized – such spaces, along with certain material practices, might well aid the establishment of an in-between realm or potential space for the search for a thought that seeks its place.