The archipelago provides a provocation for social practitioners and participants to challenge by recontextualising focuses of engagement to take into consideration geo-sociopolitical values. On this point, the justification for favouring the archipelago is to move away from dominant-oppressed binaries in favour of methodologies that generate art practices that respect multiple perspectives through difference. Of specific interest is how examining what is unique for practitioners in Aotearoa/New Zealand, authentic models of engagement that focus on enabling participants to "… reach a wider and more complete vision of reality that not only opens up to new questions and ways of knowing but further allows a new kind of communication with stakeholders and all actors involved in the research process" (Pentassuglia, 2018). In this presentation, art (expressed as a social practice) can be viewed as an active investigation into how methodologies developed through localised engagement with artists as opposed to those modelled on continental frameworks. My ambition is that what results is not just a creative response, but a genuine understanding and expression of a lived experience. Archipelago Thought is attempting to contextualise SEA practices and theories within an Aotearoa-Pasifika archipelago. In navigating away from dominant ideologies this research is asking how does the geopolitical situation of Aotearoa impact on the expression of Socially Engaged Art practices, and how might these practices evolve to generate a methodology that repositions the agency for multiple publics?