Key points

• • This chapter disrupts the academy by highlighting the value of talanoa as a culturally centred and community-led research and knowledge creation process.

• • Privileging Pasifika perspectives provides a platform for effective and engaging health and community responses developed with local Pacific-Indigenous peoples alongside their support services and social structures.

• • Lived experience knowledge that informs applied research activities helps understand the situations and circumstances Pacific people may be situated and located within.

• • By co-creating, co-curating and co-opting this knowledge, it can help mobilise a leadership approach alongside social inclusion outcomes that are grounded in a collective, collegial and collaborative approach.

• • Social justice tenets around access, equity, participation and human rights can be enacted through a culturally nuanced and relevant approach.

Introduction

This chapter is co-authored by five Pasifika peoples, also known as Pacific-Indigenous and First Nations Pacific. We reflect on our own lived experiences and journey as professionals striving to work in partnership across the local region and beyond. We endeavour to decolonise and disrupt how we co-create knowledge that can inform applied research activities and lead to social justice outcomes for diverse communities. We have employed a collective, collaborative and collegial approach through a talanoa process, where we share and hold a dialogically driven space to talk about our experience of working together to support our Pasifika communities through the CORE (Collaboration Openness Respect Empowerment) Pacific Collective.

Talanoa is a key concept found across Pacific-Indigenous cultures, which allows for a collective and shared conversation with no prescribed agenda or structure (Vaioleti, 2013). Rather, it aims to create a safe space for participants to hold space, to sit within space, and to share their own insights on topics explored (Farrelly and Nabobo-Baba, 2014). As a relational approach, a talanoa provides people with an opportunity to nurture the sacred (vā or tabu) connection they have with self and others (Tecun et al, 2018). Authenticity is a major component in creating a talanoa that is sincere. Participants are actively invited to be vulnerable on the premise that others will. As a result, a deep sense of connection is established, providing the platform to establish and share themes organically. We write this chapter as a shared conversation with ourselves and readers, as an approach of working together by sharing knowledge.