During New Zealand’s unprecedented level-four lockdown, opportunities to practise Pacific pedagogies in New Zealand universities required creative and innovative solutions from Pacific academics. This paper brings together the experiences of teaching during this lockdown from a cross-section of Pacific Early Career Academics (PECA) across a wide range of disciplines and schools at New Zealand’s largest university. This paper argues that despite the challenges, PECA found ways to adapt Pacific pedagogical concepts through online delivery methods; however, their ability to effectively do this was severely influenced by existing socio-economic inequities that disproportionately impacted Pacific students. PECA continued to nurture the vā/wā with students in innovative ways, but they still encountered major challenges that will require more careful consideration of equity issues by New Zealand universities moving forward.

To respond to the enduring need for a reckoning with racism in New Zealand through legal scholarship and praxis, this article grapples with the question: how can we adopt a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework that is located within, and appropriate for, the New Zealand context? Our central thesis is that scholars and activists seeking to apply a CRT framework or conduct a CRT analysis in New Zealand should be mindful of the particular circumstances of the settler-colonising state imposed by the Crown. To assist with this mindfulness, we propose five guiding principles for CRT scholarship and praxis in New Zealand, which are all non-prescriptive and subject to critique and further development. To illustrate the usefulness of this framework, we undertake a critical reappraisal of the 1980 Tifaga v Department of Labour case. As we show, it is important to approach this case against the backdrop of the dawn raids and state-fuelled racism against Pacific peoples.

This article offers critical reflections regarding legal scholarship on Pacific peoples in Aotearoa from two Pacific early career academics in the legal academy. It explores why very little legal scholarship focusing on the issues facing Pacific peoples in Aotearoa exists by examining and illustrating the systemic barriers that prevent Pacific legal academics from producing such scholarship. It then examines the detrimental impacts this lack of legal scholarship on Pacific peoples in Aotearoa has on both Pacific law students and Pacific communities in Aotearoa. Lastly, it imagines a Pacific jurisprudence for Pacific peoples in Aotearoa located within Pacific communities, committed to fulfilling the obligations that Pacific peoples have to Māori as Tangata Whenua of Aotearoa.

Although the power of social media to bring people together across borders is acknowledged, very little has been written about the potential of social media sites for emerging Pacific scholars living transnationally across our region and beyond. We deploy thematic talanoa to demonstrate how emerging Pacific scholars engage Twitter as a platform where routes and relationships are established and teu/tauhi in the digital vā. Furthermore, we argue that emerging scholars of Pacific heritage are building an augmented reality founded on Pacific-specific ways of relationship building, forming external to, and in response to, marginalising dominant narratives inside and outside Pacific worlds.