Call for Papers: ‘Libraries, Archives and Museums in Oceania’

A Special Issue of the Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-new-zealand-pacific-studies#call-for-papers

Guest Edited by Joshua Bell, Cristela Garcia-Spitz and Halena Kapuni-Reynolds

Though shaped by their colonial legacies and postcolonial presents, libraries, archives and museums can also be spaces of hope, healing and collective reimagining. These institutions and their staff steward various media formats (audiovisual objects and texts), giving presence to the many pasts of Oceania, and must reckon with Indigenous interventions that reconfigure these collections as familial legacies, belongings and ancestors. Collaborative work with Indigenous communities have also helped open these institutions and their collections to new possibilities, resulting in richer understandings about activating belongings to nurture and uplift source and descendant communities and returning belongings and ancestors through legal and ethical means. Simultaneously, Indigenous communities continue creating their own cultural centres, blurring distinctions between libraries, archives and museums to serve the needs of their respective communities.

While these projects and trends are in dialogue with global practices, they are also distinctly local and heterogeneous within Oceania. How are these projects in and around libraries, archives and museums transforming these institutions and their collections? How are Indigenous epistemologies helping to challenge the colonial legacies of these institutions? What new collaborative practices are emerging, which help to recentre the relations that may have otherwise been dormant? What lessons for institutions outside of Oceania can be taken from these engagements?

The Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies invites contributions that offer new insights into library, archive and museum practice in and about Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific, and associated collections from the region that may be housed outside of Oceania. Papers might address the following issues:

●Indigenizing and decolonizing strategies for curatorial practice, exhibition design, collection development and management

●community-based programming and research

●repatriation and ethical returns

●rematriation initiatives

●conservation/preservation

●digitizing collections and ethical and inclusive metadata practices

●digital scholarship and pedagogy

●emerging technologies and their impact on research

●evolving roles, education/mentoring the next generation of museum/archive professionals

We are particularly interested in case studies highlighting lesser-known libraries, archives and museums in or of the Pacific.

The Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies is a double-blind refereed journal. Articles, accompanied by a short biography, abstract and keywords, must be between 5000 and 8000 words, including notes and references, and must be formatted according to the journal style guide (https://www.intellectbooks.com/asset/2243/house-style-guide-6th-edition.pdf).

Original interviews (for example, with an artist, curator, librarian or archivist), research reports, review essays and exhibition reviews, between 1500 and 4000 words, are also welcome.

Deadline for submissions is 14 April 2025. All article submissions will be subject to peer review. If accepted for publication, articles will be published in vol. 13, no. 2, December 2025. Please submit complete articles for consideration to Heather Waldroup at waldrouphl@appstate.edu.