Abstract:
This thesis asks ‘How can women’s relational exchanges in the digital environment be architecture?’ Through analysing the gendered production of online siapo, it explores three research areas: gendered contribution to contemporary space making in Sāmoan Diaspora ; the relationship between contemporary space making and notions of “Sāmoaness”; and Sāmoan Diaspora as online space makers. At the intersections of these topics, it was found that women’s contributions to space making have routinely been erased across the disciplines of Oceanic architecture, Oceanic architectural history, Oceanic architectural theory, Oceanic anthropology, Oceanic feminism and digital culture. This historical bias found in the exclusion of women’s textiles from architectural discourse, Indigenous feminist thinking from Western frameworks of research, and women’s presence as a class of producers online. Through using feminist analysis, online siapo was found to be a relational, embodied form of ancestral siapo, which contemporary producers deploy in online self-making, and thus online space-making. Since it was found that there are no current theoretical frameworks to address these knowledge gaps, the thesis argues that new terms, definitions and vocabularies are needed to better describe these emergent spatialities.