Tuinawi Rakuita
Lecturer
School of Social Sciences
University of the South Pacific
Fiji
Biography
Tuinawi Rakuita graduated with a BA, from USP, in 1997 with majors in History, Politics and Sociology. After a short stint with the Fiji Government workforce, he rejoined USP to pursue post-graduate studies in Sociology. He formally joined the Sociology unit here at USP whilst working on my Master of Arts degree. My MA Thesis, which was completed in 2003, was a theoretical exposition in social and political critique. It interrogated the notion of Social Capital both as a mode of thought and as a framework of development using a critical prism that stemmed out of an innovative yet judicious coupling of the works of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. His PhD, which was done at the Australian National University is, broadly, a study in Continental Philosophy revolving around figures such as Kant and Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer and the way their works have influenced the philosophical premises of the Frankfurt School of Thought in relation to Social and Political Theory. Specifically it interrogates Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the Public Sphere from a vantage point animated by the negative dialectics espoused by his erstwhile mentor, Theodor Adorno.
Research Interest
He was particularly interested in looking at how Oceanic people can effectively re-present themselves in globalised spaces using sociological tools that are animated by my philosophical interests
