Gender inequality in the Pacific is a serious challenge and a sensitive issue - and requires a culturally appropriate and joined-up development approach to support and drive the necessary social changes. The prevalence of violence against women in the Pacific region is among the highest in the world, whilst women's parliamentary participation is amongst the lowest in the world. Countries across the Pacific region have put in place policy strategies, legal frameworks and a raft of initiatives, but against their own and internationally accepted indicators there has been poor progress towards gender equality, despite the development cooperation efforts of many donors over several decades. Why is the current paradigm underpinning gender policy apparently ineffective in grasping the social actions that produce gender inequality in the Pacific? What are the cultural contexts shaping the contemporary situation? An emerging body of Pacific-made participatory documentary films has recently thrown new light on these problems by enabling communities to tell their own stories, in their own ways and through their own cultural terms. But we cannot assume that Pacific peoples' view visual representations as we might expect, nor that film technologies alone are able to access and to draw out ideas in the vernacular. Rather, research suggests that the design of participatory processes can enable people to analyse and to leverage social change in their own terms. How do these home-grown Pacific film projects fit with the history of community film-making and human rights activism? What are the key factors to development methods able to align with indigenous knowledge and Pacific protocols for communal relations? At the same time, legal and anthropological research suggests that current gender policies have recognisable origins in Euro-American folk models that reduce 'gender' to the taken-for-granted differences between men and women. But gender in the Pacific is not merely a matter of the biological differentiation of women and men: in their own analyses of events and actions, Pacific peoples point to the importance of differentiating whether a woman is acting as a mother, daughter, sister, cousin, wife, in-law and look to these particular social, collective and kinship relations. Alongside examining the conceptual and cultural assumptions that underpin the current gender policy paradigms, we will examine the dominant theories of change for levering 'individual' and 'societal' behaviour changes misunderstand the tenets of Pacific socialites. Is there a culturally appropriate way to promote rights-based issues such as gender inequality within a communal society? Film studies and ethnographic research each have distinctive ways of understanding how people engage and portray the world in their own cultural terms, and this project aims to bring these insights into dialogue. With PNG and Samoan film-makers' recent development of culturally effective participatory methods and ethnographic evidence that Pacific gender differentiates relational roles not biological difference, this international research network opens a new space for dialogue in which academics and non-academics can collaborate in re-thinking the current paradigms in development policy and practice. The proposed inter-disciplinary international research network will work by promoting sustained collaboration between researchers in the UK, Papua New Guinea and Samoa, by the use of video-conference research seminars, by analyzing the emerging genre of Pacific-made community films, by reviewing the literature on indigenous approaches and participatory methods, by involving Pacific film-makers and communities with experience of participatory film-making, and by series of workshop and impact engagement events across both regions - all with the objective of contributing to creative development methods to support the challenge of promoting gender equality in the Pacific.

This interdisciplinary project explores the legacies of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific writing, investigating the relevance of his work to contemporary readers in Samoa, Scotland and Hawai'i, and producing new art and poetry inspired by the three short stories published in Stevenson's 1893 collection Island Nights' Entertainments. These include 'The Bottle Imp' and 'The Isle of Voices' - set in Hawai'i - and 'The Beach of Falesá', rooted in Stevenson's experience of Samoan culture. Given that educational institutions throughout the world are actively engaged in decolonising their curricula, Stevenson's work and legacy present a particularly valuable focus of inquiry. Stevenson became actively involved in supporting Samoan and Hawaiian indigenous sovereignty movements at a crucial period just before these islands were annexed by the US and Germany, and yet his Pacific fiction, while iconoclastic in featuring indigenous protagonists with considerable agency and dignity, and offering a critical proto-modernist perspective on western imperialism, still upholds many of the colonial stereotypes typical of fin-de-siecle western literature. This project is unique, in terms of: (a) developing a set of creative outputs and teaching resources emphasising the relevance of Stevenson's Pacific corpus to explorations of pressing contemporary issues such as globalisation, the transnational, climate change and sustainability, (b) exploring the rich and complex legacies that Stevenson's Pacific writing, and his historic presence in Hawai'i and Samoa, has left for contemporary Pacific communities, and (c) producing the first ever graphic adaptation of the three Island Nights' Entertainments stories, translated into Samoan and Hawaiian. Other outputs include new poetry by indigenous authors; a documentary film; an exhibition; a website; and various scholarly publications. The project contains three major disciplinary strands, focused around visual arts-based practice and research; literary/adaptation studies; and arts education/pedagogy. These inform various project activities and methods, including: 1) On-location and archival research into the environments, cultures and histories depicted in Stevenson's Pacific fiction, and the contexts in which his work was originally published and illustrated, so that the adaptation process takes due account of the fact that Stevenson's Pacific writing was inflected by a desire to develop a literary realism attuned to meticulous observations of Pacific cultures and places also documented in his Pacific travel writing, photography and painting 2) In recognition of Stevenson's own respect for Pacific traditions of cross-cultural reciprocity (informing his practice of sharing Scottish/European folk tales in exchange for narratives from indigenous Pacific interlocutors, and blending European and Pacific storytelling traditions in his writing), indigenous Pacific communities will be involved in every stage of our creative and research processes, using Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) methodologies, including: (i) semi-structured interviews exploring what Stevenson means to contemporary Pacific communities, as well as project artists/poets (ii) participatory arts workshops (run by project artists/poets in Samoa, Hawai'i and Scotland) enabling participants to produce an illustrated piece of creative writing engaging with Stevenson's literary legacy and/or the Pacific places/cultures depicted in his fiction (iii) involving Samoan interns in the making of a documentary film which will draw upon indigenous methodologies 3) Consultations with educators in Samoa, Hawai'i and Scotland that will inform the production of teaching resource packs, attuned to local pedagogical needs and appropriate age groups, to accompany our graphic novel. Partnerships with local educational organisations will enable us to pursue options for our resources to be adopted at national curricular level.