Re-Imagining the Dialogic Spaces of Talanoa through Samoan Onto-Epistemology

This article proposes a Samoan Indigenous philosophical position to reconceptualise the dialogic spaces of "talanoa"; particularly how "talanoa" is applied methodologically to research practice. "Talanoa" within New Zealand Pacific research scholarship is problematised, raising particular tensions of the universal and humanistic ideologies that are entrenched within institutional ethics and research protocols. The dialogic relational space, which is embedded throughout "talanoa" methodology, is called into question, evoking alternative ways of knowing and being within the "talanoa" research assemblage (including the material-world). Samoan epistemology reveals 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 "talanoa" to a materialist process ontology, where knowledge generation emerges through human and non-human encounters.