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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.

The proportion of Pacific academics in permanent confirmation path positions at New Zealand universities (1.4 percent) continues to lag far behind the Pacific share of New Zealand’s population (7 percent). In this paper, we use a thematic talanoa to explore the experiences of Pacific early career academics (PECA) at the University of Auckland to highlight the key themes, challenges and features of our daily lives in the colonial, Western, and Pākehā institution that is the university. This paper sheds light on the systemic and structural barriers that impact PECA journeys through higher education and suggests actions that universities in New Zealand can take to further support, nurture, and develop PECA pathways into and upward through the academy.

Ongoing calls to indigenise the academy renew debate regarding the value and significance of Pacific and Indigenous philosophies and methodologies. This paper contributes to this conversation by reflecting on our experience as Tongan women and early career academics promoting the utility of Pacific methodologies such as talanoa within business research in Aotearoa. We examine the constraints on and drivers to adopting talanoa in our respective fields to argue that institutional demands and limited Pacific capacity within the business space restrict our ability to work towards legitimising talanoa and drive future-focused directions in research. These factors hinder our ability to actively contribute to the agenda of indigenising the business academy.