Special section: Considering suitable research methods for islands

Abstract

The last 30 years have seen the consolidation of island studies as a field of research with particular imperatives and methodologies of interest to geographers and others, and not least the readers of this journal. This consolidation has been achieved through a range of strategies and practices from the involvement of government agencies and island development legislation and plans to the establishment of academic associations, dedicated scholarly journals, large-scale publishing projects in diverse locations and languages, conferences, interdisciplinary forums, postgraduate programmes of study, and collaborative research (including special journal sections, as here). A key objective of this (ongoing) project has been to reframe research methodologies that deal with and work for islands and archipelagos. For research findings to be meaningful to islands and islanders themselves, there is a heartfelt need to enact profound shifts in the premises and practices by which islands and islanders have been framed as convenient, even coy, objects of study (Baldacchino, 2008). Most fundamentally, there has been a perceived need for the relationship between among researchers, islands, and islanders to be reconceived and repurposed in terms of Indigeneity, decoloniality, scale, ethics, relationality, and standpoint.

The conception of islands as readymade laboratories and amenable case study material has been axiomatic across the disciplines, as with Charles Darwin and the Galápagos Islands and Margaret Mead on Samoa (Baldacchino, 2004). In 1965, Surtsey island off Iceland was declared a nature reserve for scientists while it was still in the process of being formed by volcanic action: a perfect, pristine research laboratory. In a related way, islands have also operated in the imagination as the primordial or pure homeplace, even for non-islanders. Moreover, history has shown how easily the imaginary island-homeplace fuelled and then consolidated European colonisation via the control of the sea lanes (for example, Benton, 2009). Islands are also imagined as perfect mirrors for the human psyche—hence the warning “No Man is an Island” (Beer, 1990; Deleuze, 2004; McMahon, 2016; Smith & Smith, 2003; Tuan, 1977). The topos of the island has been mapped as the topos of the self, of (self) possession, and the possession of knowledge. It is the topography that most profoundly connects being and space and their inter-relationship. In all these ways, it is the clearly self-enisled topography of the island that brings researchers across many fields to the disciplinary ontologies of geography. Islands hold us captive, but they are also captivating.

This “island turn” has focused attention on the manifold shortcomings of much research on and about (but not for or with) islands, including ongoing practices of objectification, colonisation, and segregation (Baldacchino, 2008; Stratford et al., 2011). Much has been achieved, often through connections across the interdisciplinary reach of the field and by the deployment of mixed methodologies that render the complexities and contradictions of islands more visible. Islands have also become emblematic of the Anthropocene, a model for researchers to think through environmental and cultural relationality. This model follows Deleuze’s (1997) ideal of archipelagic relationality in which islands are defined by their singularity, independence, interdependence, and mobility: a raft of qualities that, in his formulation, also enable political resistance. Chandler and Pugh (2021, p. 209) argue that islands have become “instruments of productive knowledge” and are “fundamental to an alternative, correlational, epistemology.” Islands also provide an alternative model of scale, opposed to a single globe, which, as Spivak (2003) has argued, is a logo of capitalism and “a totalizing image of reified ideology” (McMahon, 2013, pp. 55–56). While easily persevering as outliers and “elsewheres” in the public imaginary (Bonnett, 2020), islands are now being foregrounded as pivotal and vital spaces to enact and evaluate a different kind of practice and not just for the purpose of understanding how to transition to a decarbonised and sustainable future.