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- Convenors:
-
Ilan Kelman
(UCL and UiA)
Aideen Foley (Birkbeck, University of London)
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- Stream:
- Borders and Places
- Sessions:
- Monday 14 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Island studies has always been interdisciplinary with multi-media research products and processes. This panel encourages island studies to be self-reflexive to seek creative expressions of its theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to, and gains from, anthropology-geography links.
Long Abstract:
From its origins, island studies has been interdisciplinary and has always encouraged multi-media research processes and products. Examples from journals, books, and conferences are full-length academic papers and presentations, photo essays and exhibitions, performing arts and poetry, and short essays which might be fiction, reflections, or editorialising. This panel seeks contributions of any form suitable for an academic conference which are self-reflexive about island studies in order to link anthropology and geography through an island or islandness lens. Contributions may be presentations, audience interaction or games, performing or non-performing arts, or question-and-answer/discussion formulations.
The core research presented could be theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical, but must examine island studies' contributions to, and gains from, connecting anthropology and geography. Explicit cross-overs between anthropology and geography are necessary. These could be through case studies of urban islands (island cities and city archipelagos), historical or archaeological evidence and approaches, contemporary and ongoing research projects, taking creative and critiquing views of the terms 'island' and 'islandness', or examinations of island and islandness pasts and futures. Conceptual, quantitative, qualitative, performative, and mixed methods are welcome. Island studies will be the baseline through which connections are made among pasts, presents, and futures as well as anthropologies and geographies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 14 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Harris Tweed, a trademark-protected textile, can only be produced in the Outer Hebrides. Considering the industry's place in imaginaries of 'island life' and 'island futures', I discuss how local understandings of resourcefulness can reframe possible connections between anthropology and geography.
Paper long abstract:
Trademark-protected since 1910 and covered by its own Act of Parliament since 1993, Harris Tweed can only be hand-woven at islanders' homes in the Outer Hebrides, an archipelago located off the western coast of Scotland. Despite this localized production, the luxury cloth is exported to over 50 countries, contributing in important ways to local livelihoods in a region threatened by depopulation and described as economically fragile. From its early beginnings as a cottage industry until today, arguments supporting the legal protection of Harris Tweed have emphasized its place in islanders' livelihoods, and its historical significance to the islands' socio-economic and cultural life.
Considering the role played by ideas of 'island life' in popular depictions of the Harris Tweed industry and the archipelago, as well as people's actual experiences of working and living in the Outer Hebrides, in this paper I discuss how local understandings of 'island life' in this region can suggest productive links between anthropology and geography. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Outer Hebrides, where I focused on the work, workers and workplaces where Harris Tweed is produced, I discuss how notions of resourcefulness and experiences of belonging in this region both highlight the centrality of 'island life' in local discourses, and invite a more nuanced and critical understanding of the expression itself. Considering particular local histories, contemporary experiences and imaginaries of 'island life', and recent political discussions on 'island futures', I explore how these examples suggest possible directions for socio-cultural research.
Paper short abstract:
This paper makes the original and bold claim that thinking with islands establishes the core methodological and conceptual framework for contemporary Anthropocene thinking more generally.
Paper long abstract:
This paper makes the original and bold claim that thinking with islands establishes the core methodological and conceptual framework for contemporary Anthropocene thinking more generally. Thus, we go beyond the more obvious point that Anthropocene scholarship regularly engages islands as the emblematic figures of transforming planetary conditions (rising sea levels, global warming, intensifying hurricanes and nuclear radiation). Instead, we examine how Anthropocene scholarship conceptually draws upon the relational affordances, feedback effects and intensification of relation which have long been associated with island life in particular. Examining the power of thinking with islands in the Anthropocene we heuristically categorise today's leading debates according to the key paradigms of 'Resilience', 'Patchworks', 'Storying' and 'Sensing', and conclude with a new critical agenda for islands studies in the Anthropocene.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines impacts of climate variability and extreme weather, and of community or family coping strategies, on children on Orkney in the early 20th century, through a mixed-methods analysis of school logbooks.
Paper long abstract:
Small islands can be perceived as challenging datascapes in which to explore long-term climate impacts. Local meteorological station data may be absent or uncertain, particularly in sparsely populated island peripheries. Yet, observations of weather are not limited to those obtained using instruments; historical narratives (school logbooks, newspaper reports, etc.) can provide valuable insights into past weather, and societal responses to it.
Such data can be treated quantitatively and qualitatively. Indexing can reveal long-term trends but forfeits descriptive depth and detail. Conversely, the narrative as qualitative data may be viewed as anecdotal or unreliable. It is essential, then, to incorporate a variety of methodologies to gain a nuanced perspective of such accounts.
Content analysis of school logbooks from Deerness spanning 1905-1919 was undertaken to index descriptions of climate variables and identify impacts. Impacts are direct, including difficulty travelling, and indirect, including absences from school due to changes in the harvest times or other agricultural events, which are a product of climate variability and broader socio-economic context. Causal loop diagrams are used to conceptualise children's dynamic social-environmental vulnerability, illustrated by references to the narrative account.
What emerges is a detailed picture of the vulnerability of children in past society to climate variation and extremes events, which can help inform measures for fostering child-centred social resilience in contemporary society.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores perceptions of 'islandness' among residents of London's Isle of Dogs amid ongoing private development, financialisation and social change. Lessons drawn engage with the concept of 'island' to examine critically the interplay between geographic, social and disciplinary boundaries.
Paper long abstract:
Affectionately referred to as 'The Island' by long-standing residents, the Isle of Dogs is bound by the River Thames and a series of interlocking quays. This geographically-distinct heart of London's Docklands had historically been home to a relatively homogeneous working-class community for nearly two centuries. Increased skilled migration alongside the proximal construction of the Canary Wharf financial hub, the policies of Thatcher's government, the broader financialisation of the British economy, and the area's integration with the rest of London, contributed to a period of precipitous social transformation. The ramifications of such processes remain evident on The Island some thirty years on. Successive social, political, and economic developments including the UK's divisive 2016 referendum vote to withdraw from the European Union and the 'alternative facts' phenomenon propagated by various processes continue to provide fodder for social anxieties and divergent epistemologies in the everyday lives of Island residents and workers. This paper explores how residents' perceptions of 'islandness' are produced, experienced, contested, and contingent on notions of difference given such ongoing processes of shifting geographic, socio-economic, and political terrains. It suggests that the concept of 'island' can be a useful theoretical tool not only for understanding local geo-social constructions of Island identity and community, but also for engaging with the many scales of wider epistemological and disciplinary systems of classification, categorisation, and boundaries used to arrive at that understanding. Using lessons drawn from the Isle of Dogs, the paper closes with a discussion of the impact that disciplinary bridges can have.