La'avasa Macpherson Author

Cluny Macpherson is a professor of sociology in the school of social and cultural studies at Massey University, Albany. He has longstanding teaching and research interests in Oceania including social and economic development in Pacific states; relations between large and small states in the Pacific region; the social and economic consequences of migration in the Pacific region; health and ethnic identity of Pacific people in Aotearoa. He has particular interests in Samoa and the Cook Islands and Fiji. La'avasa Macpherson is a trained nurse, researcher and translator with interests in social transformation in the Pacific and special expertise in medicine across cultures developed from her childhood experiences of assisting with her grandmother with her traditional Samoan practice and, more recently, from her direct observations as a nurse of the overlap between two systems of practice in migrant communities in South Auckland. Now a researcher at Massey University, she has written on migration and settlement and the Samoan Diaspora and is the co-author, with Cluny Macpherson, of Samoan Medical Belief and Practice (Auckland University Press, 1990; 2006).