Dr Tom White
Pacific Secularities | Governance, Development and Well-being in Oceania
Who's Tom?
Raised in Hertfordshire in the UK, I have studied and taught in universities in England (Durham), Scotland (Edinburgh), the USA (Ohio), Fiji (FNU), Germany (Leipzig) and Aotearoa New Zealand (Otago). I received my doctorate from Otago University in 2020, and I have over a decade of field research experience in the Pacific Islands.
I use qualitative and mixed methods research to improve our understanding of the governance, development and public health challenges that arise at the perceived collision point between traditional ways of being-in-the-world and a globalising (and most often capitalist) modernity.
My research objectives are pursued along three principal pathways...
(i) contextually-grounded analysis informing policy understanding
(ii) building research capacity in the Pacific Islands
(iii) testing and critiquing the dominant (secular) paradigms in law, governance and development.
Direct observation of court proceedings reveal power dynamics often hidden from the court records. Image: Google (2018).
Talanoa is a important means of sharing experiences, ideas and potential solutions in Pacific research. Image: TW (2017).
Emphasising local contexts also means sharing findings locally too. Fiji National Oceans and Rivers Conference (FNU, 2015).
Contextually-grounded analysis informing policy understanding...
Time and again, governance advisers and social development practitioners have to revise their initial assumptions when in the field. Anthropologists may be the most familiar with arriving into remote fieldsites with a suitcase of research tools not fit for purpose. Yet all social contexts are distinct in subtle and important ways, and all demand the careful and constant reappraisal of research methods and assumptions as lines of enquiry proceed.
Pulling from a range of ethnographic methods (from focus groups and interviewing, to large-scales surveys and direct and participaton observation) along with text-based approaches including literature reviews, mixed media analyses and archival visits to public and private collections, my research practice adapts to local contexts and highlights the importance of on-the-ground norms, values and structures when conceiving and implementing policy. This approach has been shaped by my time in the Pacific Islands, especially Fiji, where foreign aid and (Western-modelled) good governance advocacy often fail to deliver their promised outcomes because of a lack of contextual nuance.
In summary, my research emphasises the specifics of a case study's historical, environmental, legal, linguistic, cultural and political contexts, which often goes missing in comparative studies and large-scale datasets. As policy-making increasingly turns to 'big data' and quantitative insights, the specific complexities and contradictions of lived experiences 'outside the West' (though also increasingly within the West's own multicultural borders) are in ever greater peril of being misplaced and misunderstood.
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Building research capacity in the Pacific Islands
During my four years at the Fiji National Univerity's (FNU) Ethics and Governance Department (2011-2015), including stints as Head of Department and as Acting Head of School of Social Sciences, I worked with colleagues and senior faculty to build-up Fiji's national social research capacity, eventually resulting in a bachelors' programme in Social Policy.
In my subsequent years at Otago, return research in Fiji has also entailed training local research officers in ethnographic mixed methods data collection (see The Levuka Project). The importance of building local research capacity is integral to decolonising research, as well as ensuring local insights and expertise can correct outsider misunderstandings and attach the wisdom of lived experience to the so-called 'hard data.'
Year 1 Research Officers for The Levuka Study, 2023.
Discussing informant responses in Year 2 of The Levuka Study, 2024.
FNU's School of Social Sciences Research and Strategy Retreat, 2015.
Challenging the 'secular' paradigm
Underpinning much of the human sciences, one theoretical paradigm has focused the attention of my research above all others: secularity.
Secularity comes in various forms. The two most prominent are (i) the notion that a religiously 'neutral' secular state or public sphere is the solution to inter-religious conflict, and (ii) the secularisation thesis, the sociological assumption that modernity and modernisation pull in the opposite direction to religious belief and behaviour. Both have been central to the history of modern Western social and political thought, and both continue to carry tremendous ideological weight in the contemporary world of governance and development. Both, moreover, are increasingly subject to critique from the standpoint of postcolonialism and postmodernity, and both have deeply complex and ambivalent application in the Pacific Islands.
For the last decade, in my various projects on how traditional communities respond to significant and rapid social change, whether dealing with sea-level rise, military coups and constitution-drafting, tertiary education reform, or economic decline in a time of pandemics and category-5 cyclones, I've reported on how such secularities in the Pacific reproduce confusions and contradictions, how secularities miss (and yet sometimes, somehow, hit true), how they restrict and release different forms of power, and lastly, how they shape - and are shaped by - the surrounding social, environmental, economic, legal and cultural landscape.
It was with this overarching theoretical question in mind that I completed my PhD thesis, took up a six-month fellowship with Leipzig University's Multiple Secularities research group in 2022, and worked as the lead field researcher for The Levuka Study. In addition to presenting at conferences worldwide on this topic, I have been an invited speaker at law and governance workshops at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung at Bielefeld University in Germany (2014) the Australian National University in Canberra (2018), the National University of Singapore (2023), and Princeton University in the United States (2023).
Multiple Secularities Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe (Leipzig) led by Prof. Monica Wohlrab-Sahr and Prof. Cristoph Klein
TRIALS Law and Society Workshop, (NUS, 2023) with the brilliant Dr Sapna Raheem