Women’s Football in Oceania: The complications and conflicts of western approaches to writing women back into history

We present on some reflections of producing our book Women’s Football in Oceania. While the history recorded is important and will serve as a foundation for future work in the Pacific, this paper will focus on the challenges, learnings and key considerations the researchers encountered working within a western discipline in the Region. The Pacific embraces rich and diverse approaches to recording knowledge, is entrenched in and impacted by colonisation and includes several nations with severe gender inequality and where violence against women is experienced at some of the highest levels in the world. We reflect on ways to record history as accurately as possible while safeguarding marginalised and vulnerable communities, considering cultural sensitivities, collaborating with community while engaging with Pacific methodologies such as Talanoa (Vaioleti, 2006).