Re-imagining the dialogic spaces of talanoa through Samoan onto-epistemology

Abstract

This article proposes a Samoan Indigenous philosophical position to reconceptualise the dialogic spaces of talanoa; particularly how talanoais applied methodologically to research practice. Talanoawithin New Zealand Pacific research scholarship is problematised, raising particular tensions of the universal and humanistic ideologies that are entrenched within institutional ethics and researchprotocols. The dialogic relational space, which is embedded throughout talanoamethodology, is called into question, evoking alternative ways of knowing and being within the talanoaresearch assemblage1(including the material-world). Samoan epistemologyreveals that nature is constituted within personhood (Vaai & Nabobo-Baba, 2017) and that nature is co-agentic with human in an ecology of knowing. We call for a shift in thinking material-ethics that opens talanoato a materialist process ontology, where knowledge generation emerges through human and non-human encounters