Dr Kalissa Alexeyeff 
According to Dr. Alexeyeff, “While Pacific islanders like many transnational migrants, frame labour migration in terms of economic necessity, the above comments suggest these crossing circuits of people and transfers of labour involve additional motives and desires. Anthropological scholarship has long argued that in order to account for the multi-directional traffic of people, goods, and services, economic processes require reconceptualisation in relation to cultural values and political, ideological, gendered and more recently, affective registers…In the case studies presented, shame emerges as a significant emotion that has intensified through neoliberal adjustments in patterns of work and the relations they entail. Affect, labour and migration are entwined to drive the search for ‘that moral-intimate-economic thing called the good life…”
Dr. Alexeyeff is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She has conducted research in the Cook Islands since 1996 and taught in the Centre for Samoan Studies in 2016. She is the author of Dancing from the Heart: Gender, Movement and Cook Islands Globalization and Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay and Other Pacific Islanders with Niko Besnier and Touring Pacific Cultures with John Taylor.
