ABSTRACT
This chapter is a narrative of how my cake art expresses my knowing and being as a mixed-heritage Tongan social work scholar in the diaspora. Using an auto-ethnographic approach (Méndez, 2013), I share my Cakes with Love story and examine the epistemic of creating and sharing cake art in my communities of place, culture and profession. Auto-ethnographic stories ‘are artistic and analytic demonstrations of how we come to know, name, and interpret personal and cultural experience’ (Adams, Ellis and Jones, 2015: 1). Within the Cakes with Love story, creative, sensory and relational knowing is examined in light of Tongan tā-vā epistemology (Ka’ili, 2017; Māhina, 2010; 2017) and border epistemology (Mignolo, 2011; 2018). I consider cake art as a metaphor and method for more fully human social work, which disrupts boundaries and binaries within mainstream social work and expresses decoloniality in the diaspora. The narrative invites consideration of relational Moana (Pacific-Indigenous) epistemologies which give primacy to mutuality and creativity for reshaping, recolouring and reconstructing social work as we know it.
