Oceanic Ethnic Studies

The Oceanic Ethnic Studies Initiative (OESI), housed in the Ethnic Studies Department at California State Polytechnic University, is a place-based initiative that takes seriously our university’s location in the Pacific. Inspired by the work of scholars, artists, activists, cultural producers, and university programs such as the University of Hawai’i’s Oceanic Ethnic Studies initiative, we recognize how turning to the ocean as a place and epistemology illuminates often unseen entanglements between lands, waters, peoples, and struggles. OESI is rooted in a land- and water-based approach to strengthen our understanding of our local contexts as oceanic peoples in what is now California, and routed through the vast and diverse archipelago of oceanic knowledges. OESI operates from the belief that the ocean connects all of us in a constellation of diverse relationships that span half the globe.

OESI acknowledges shared histories of racism, US empire, settler colonialism, militarism, and Indigenous dispossession as they manifest across the ocean that inform the everyday university experiences of our Pacific and Indigenous students. The interdisciplinary field of Ethnic Studies has always been an anti-racist and anti-imperialist project that understands the university as a colonial institution, even as it carries the potential currents of anticolonial resistance and transformation (see our Department’s overview of the field for more information). Continuing this radical tradition, we understand OESI as a desire-centered space for students, faculty, staff, and the greater community to generate oceanic knowledges, develop ocean-based pedagogies, and facilitate student-centered mentorship that honors the interdependent modes of co-existence the ocean teaches us as we strive for vibrant, relational futures.

ES Faculty members Dr. Lydia Heberling and Dr. Ryan Buyco, with
students, at the UCLA Native Canoe Lab event (September, 2026)