Matapo, JEnari, Dion2021-09-152021-09-152021-01-012021-01-01Waikato Journal of Education. Special Issue: Talanoa Vā: Honouring Pacific Research and Online Engagement, 26, 79-88. https://doi.org/10.15663/wje.v26i1.7701173-61352382-0373https://hdl.handle.net/10292/14509This article proposes a Samoan Indigenous philosophical position to reconceptualise the dialogic spaces of talanoa; particularly how talanoa is applied methodologically to research practice. Talanoa within New Zealand Pacific research scholarship is problematised, raising particular tensions of the universal and humanistic ideologies that are entrenched within institutional ethics and research protocols. The dialogic relational space, which is embedded throughout talanoa methodology, is called into question, evoking alternative ways of knowing and being within the talanoa research assemblage1 (including the material-world). Samoan epistemology reveals that nature is constituted within personhood (Vaai & Nabobo-Baba, 2017) and that nature is co-agentic with human in an ecology of knowing. We call for a shift in thinking material-ethics that opens talanoa to a materialist process ontology, where knowledge generation emerges through human and non-human encounters.This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Materiality; Talanoa; Indigenous philosophy; Pacific methodology; Onto-epistemologyJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.15663/wje.v26i1.770