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Islands and their environs-aerial, terrestrial, aquatic-may be understood as intensifiers, their particular and distinctive geographies enabling concentrated study of many kinds of challenges and opportunities. This edited collection brings together several emerging and established academics with expertise in island studies, and interest in geopolitics, governance, adaptive capacity, justice, equity, self-determination, environmental care and protection, and land management. Individually and together, their perspectives provide theoretically useful, empirically grounded evidence of the contributions human geographers can make to knowledge and understanding of island places and the place of islands. Nine chapters engage with the themes, issues, and ideas that characterise the borderlands between island studies and human geography and allied fields, and are contributed by authors for whom matters of place, space, environment, and scale are key, and for whom islands hold an abiding fascination. The penultimate chapter is rather more experimental-a conversation among these authors and the editor-and the last chapter offers timely reflections upon island geographies' past and future, penned by the first named professor of island geography, Stephen Royle.
List of contents
1. Introduction
(Elaine Stratford)
2. The deep Pacific: island governance and seabed mineral development
(Katherine Genevieve Sammler)
3. Islands and lighthouses: a phenomenological geography of Cape Bruny, Tasmania
(Thérèse Murray)
4. Too much sail for a small craft? Donor requirements, scale, and capacity discourses in Kiribati
(Annika Dean, Donna Green, and Patrick D. Nunn)
5. An island feminism: convivial economics and the women’s cooperatives of Lesvos
(Marina Karides)
6. Nature and islands: rethinking the cultural heritage of New Zealand’s protected islands
(David Bade)
7. "The good garbage": waste-to-energy applications and issues in the insular Caribbean
(Russell Fielding)
8. The returning terms of a small island culture: mimicry, inventiveness, suspension
(Jon Pugh)
9. Conversations on human geography and island studies
(Elaine Stratford and the authors)
10. Retrospect and prospect
(Stephen Royle)
About the author
Elaine Stratford works at the University of Tasmania, Australia, where she is a research professor at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, adjunct professorial fellow with the Peter Underwood Centre for Educational Attainment, and an affiliate of the Discipline of Geography and Spatial Sciences in the School of Technology, Environment and Design.
Summary
Islands and their environs – aerial, terrestrial, aquatic – may be understood as intensifiers, their particular and distinctive geographies enabling concentrated study of many kinds of challenges and opportunities. This edited collection brings together several emerging and established academics with expertise in island studies, as well as interest in geopolitics, governance, adaptive capacity, justice, equity, self-determination, environmental care and protection, and land management. Individually and together, their perspectives provide theoretically useful, empirically grounded evidence of the contributions human geographers can make to knowledge and understanding of island places and the place of islands. Nine chapters engage with the themes, issues, and ideas that characterise the borderlands between island studies and human geography and allied fields, and are contributed by authors for whom matters of place, space, environment, and scale are key, and for whom islands hold an abiding fascination. The penultimate chapter is rather more experimental – a conversation among these authors and the editor – while the last chapter offers timely reflections upon island geographies’ past and future, penned by the first named professor of island geography, Stephen Royle.
Additional text
"In Island Geographies, an impressive and diverse collection of essays, and a terrific, but singular conversation, considers the contemporary implications and challenges the dominance of continental discourse...Island Geographies calls into question the very processes by which we imagine things to bound into an impermeable category when they are entangled in mobile, changeable, and relational settings...This collection draws its readers away from the dominant paradigm of continental thinking; it draws us away from thinking of islands as simplistically insular—as small spaces of isolation. Instead, through discussion of the complexities of deep sea mining, climate change and management of environmental, cultural and heritage values and approaches to economic sustainability, waste management and literary and political representations of islandness, island geographies are revealed less categorical, more entangled, and less bounded than they might seem from the limitations of continental perspectives. Island Geographies invites rethinking much that is taken-for-granted—and in the process often claimed or taken by those empowered by continental discourses." Book Review by Richard Howitt, Macquarie University, Australia in Geographical Research (2018,56(2), 241–245)
