Engaging Pacific Island Feminism and Indigenous Feminism

Thursday, March 30, 2023

4-5 p.m.

Register for the Zoom event by March 28 to learn from Stephanie Nohelani Teves and Maile Arvin about Pacific Island Feminism, expanding on their co-written chapter “Decolonizing API” in Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics.

Stephanie Nohelani Teves, PhD, is an associate professor and chair of the department of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she teaches courses on Indigenous feminisms and queer theory. Her articles have appeared in American Quarterly, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, The Drama Review and the International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and was a recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral and Dissertation Fellowships and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in 2017. Teves is author of “Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance” (2018) and co-editor of “Native Studies Keywords” (2015). Most recently Teves is the PI of the LGBTQ Kupuna Oral History Project and is a lead researcher on a National Science Foundation ADVANCE Catalyst grant. She lives with her ʻohana in ʻEwa, Hawaiʻi.

Maile Arvin is an associate professor of history and gender studies at the University of Utah. She is a Native Hawaiian feminist scholar who works on issues of race, gender, science and colonialism in Hawai‘i and the broader Pacific. At the University of Utah, she is part of the leadership of the Pacific Islands Studies Initiative, which was awarded a Mellon Foundation grant to support ongoing efforts to develop Pacific Islands Studies curriculum, programming and student recruitment and support. Arvin’s first book, “Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania,” was published with Duke University Press in 2019. Her work has also been published in the journals Meridians, American Quarterly, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, The Scholar & Feminist, and Feminist Formations, as well as on the nonprofit independent news site Truthout. From 2015-17, Arvin was an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside, in Ethnic Studies. She earned her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation won the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel prize. She is also a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Charles Eastman Fellow in Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, and Ford Foundation Pre-doctoral Fellow.

The UIC AANAPISI Initiative, Native American Support Program, Global Asian Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, Women’s Leadership and Resource Center, and the Gender and Sexuality Center are partnering to present this program Thursday, March 30, at 4 p.m. for Women’s History Month. This event is also part of the Deconstructing AAPI Series which is dedicated to curating events that expose the identity-specific issues that are hidden when grouping the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. 

Register for the event.

The UIC AANAPISI Initiative is fully funded by the U.S. Department of Education. UIC is federally recognized as a Minority Serving Institution through its status as a funded Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution.