News/Research

Conference Grant Reports: Sophia Perez at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting

15 Jun, 2024

Conference Grant Reports: Sophia Perez at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting

We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Sophia Perez presented “Island Time" at the Annual Conference of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). From Sophia:

2024's Annual Conference of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) was held in Honolulu, offering a rare opportunity for me to share ideas and be in community with fellow researchers interested in Pacific Islands studies. Some of the most meaningful presentations and panels that I attended included the keynote address from the Pacific Islander leader and "honorary geographer" Nainoa Thompson, a three-session series called "The Past Before Us: Navigating Island-centered Histories and Futures," and several media-centered sessions that featured films created by researchers, like "Filmmaking in a time of chaos, conflict, and crisis". I presented in one of the "Past Before Us" sessions alongside four fellow members of Berkeley's Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective on a paper called "Relocating Occupation; A critical environmental justice analysis of military migration from Okinawa to Guåhan." I also presented on the anticolonial theory behind my 37-minute Chamorro children's show pilot_, Island Time_, in a session called "Critical, Creative, Technological, and Collaborative: Imagining Another Geography."

My Island Time presentation leveraged Stuart Hall's reading of Gramsci to identify and analyze US hegemony in several media portrayals of the Mariana Islands. My media examples included a recent clip from 60 Minutes about developing more infrastructure on Guåhan to further the US's "military readiness" in the Pacific as well as a celebratory YouTube video of bombing exercises in the Marianas made by a member of the US Airforce. In contrast to these clips that portrayed the Marianas as an empty space naturally owned and used for US military purposes, I showed clips from Island Time, a show that valorizes the indigenous Chamorro culture and spotlights the broad range of talent and charisma possessed by those who call the Marianas home. This was my way of presenting my developing theory and methods as far as anticolonial indigenous filmmaking within the specific context of the Marianas.