Wednesday, November 5, 2025
New time: 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
Online

The OFDAS Center for Teaching Excellence is inviting interested faculty and staff to read and gather to discuss Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi in the fall 25 semester with the editors and contributors of the book.

Detours is a collection of essays, stories, art, maps, and scholarship by various Kanaka Maoli contributors that subverts the traditional travel guide format to offer a critical perspective on Hawai‘i beyond the romanticized “tropical paradise” image and tourist destination. Join the roundtable and engage in an intellectual exchange about teaching on our campus, how Hawaiʻi’s cultural heritage should inform and guide our pedagogy.

CTE Place-Based Education Library has the print book available for the UH Mānoa community for loan up to four weeks. 

The book is also available online through the Hamilton Library. Please click here to access.

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Presented by

Hōkūlani K. ʻAikau
Professor, School of Indigenous Governance, University of Victoria

Hōkūlani K. ʻAikau (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) is Professor and Director of the School of Indigenous Governance at the University of Victoria. She is the author of A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawaiʻi (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). With Vernadette V. Gonzalez, she coedited Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi (2019) and they edit the Detours Series with Duke University Press. She has also collaborated on two other book projects: Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation (University of Toronto Press, 2023) and Introduction to Indigenous Feminisms (Routledge, 2025). Dr. Aikau is also the editor for the Pacific Islands Monograph Series (University of Hawaiʻi Press).

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez
Professor, Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Affiliate Graduate Faculty of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Gonzalez’s interdisciplinary humanities-based research broadly examines cultures of imperialism, with a focus on the United States and its colonial territories and interventions in Asia and the Pacific. A central thematic in her work is how race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality intersect and operate, sometimes together and sometimes in opposition, in the cultural terrains of empire.

Dean Saranilio
Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Mehana Vaughan
Professor, Natural Resources and Environmental Management Sea Grant College Program, Hui ʻĀina Momona, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

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This event is sponsored by the OFDAS Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE).