Islands of the World XII Conference 2012

"Globalisation: Islands Adapting to Change"
29 May – 1 June, 2012
The Virgin Islands (BVI)

Welcome to the online home for the Islands of the World XII Conference 2012. This conference is being hosted by the H. Lavity Stoutt Community College, which is located in the Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands Steering Committee is the official body, which will oversee the planning and organsing aspects of the conference. This conference is conducted every two years under the auspices of the International Small Islands Studies Association (ISISA).

ISISA is a voluntary, non-profit and independent organisation. Its objectives are to study islands on their own terms, and to encourage free scholarly discussion on small island related matters such as islandness, smallness, insularity, dependency, resource management and environment, and the nature of island life.

The 2012 conference will cover the areas of:

Agriculture and Fisheries
Economic Development
Disaster Management
Financial Services
Alternative Energy and Sustainable Development
History and Culture
Philanthropy Health and Social Development Entrepreneurship Tourism Caribbean Governance and Business Climate Change and Conservation Education and Literature Information Technology

This conference will be attempting to discuss and solve many of our small island issues. We now invite you to peruse this website and register for the various conference offerings. We also invite you to become a member of ISISA.

For further information, please contact us at islandsxiiinfo@hlscc.edu.vg.

Los libros que lleva y trae el viento: Island Enclaves

McGill Queens University Press, Canada. 301pp.

From the book: 

"This book investigates the carving out of islands, and even parts thereof, as jurisdictional enclaves –by and for themselves, or by and for other powers– in the context of idiosyncratic governance. Excising, zoning, detaching, niching, outbordering, dislocating, insulating, unbundling, quarantining, or offshoring are some of the performative active verbs that can be used to describe a clutch of different initiatives that share many basic characteristics. Deliberate or serendipitous, the method would involve the endowment of a specific place with particular and closely circumscribed privileges and powers, often ratified by law. The physical and geographic boundedness and distinctiveness of islands make these spaces especially attractive, and often default candidates of choice for such a thrust of political design that presupposes its own boundedness and distinctiveness.

If one wishes to transform a place in order to endow it with the possibility of doing something different, perhaps shady, perhaps unconventional, perhaps dangerous, whether utopic or dystopic, or simply exceptional, and in any case requiring both containment and distance, then that place should be on an island, or a whole island."

Islands have a unique hold on our imagination as intriguing places where -as Thomas More and Jonathan Swift showed in their fiction- fantastic utopic or dystopic worlds are possible. Perhaps such ideas developed because we are implicitly aware of the unique political and social arrangements that can be designed when a region is so distinctly separate. Island Enclaves highlights the idiosyncratic forms of governance that occur in places that are both a part of, and apart from, national boundaries.

Examining subnational island jurisdictions such as Guantánamo Bay, Macau, Aruba, the Isle of Man, and Prince Edward Island, Godfrey Baldacchino shows how these distinct locales arrange special relationships with larger metropolitan powers. He also deals with the politics, economics, and diplomacy of islands that have been engineered as detention camps, offshore finance centres, military bases, heritage parks, or otherwise autonomous regions. More than a study of how detached regions are governed, Island Enclaves displays the ways in which these jurisdictions are pioneering some of the modern world's most creative -and shadowy- forms of sovereignty and government.

Review quotes:

"This book develops an original thesis: it argues cogently for the existence of subnational island jurisdictions as a specific set of policies that exploit the current phase of globalisation and their geographies to practice a clever use of jurisdiction."
- Paul K. Sutton, London Metropolitan University, U.K.

"This book provides a striking array of examples to illustrate 'offshoring strategies' deployed more easily by non-sovereign island territories because of their amorphous political status resulting from their relatively small and insular character, as well as their so-called autonomy between dependence and sovereignty."

- Jerome L McElroy, St Mary's College

Godfrey Baldacchino is a professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island.

Dossier Islas: Literatura insular. Hernán Díaz, editor (La Habana Elegante)

Finding Their Place: Islands in Social Theory

© Jenny & Peter's photostream . Flickr. All rights reserved.

CALL FOR PAPERS

An International Conference organized by the Islands Commission of the International Geographical Union (IGU), in collaboration with the Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Sweden.

Venue – The Island of Ven, Sweden, 27 – 30 August 2010.

Islands are well established as significant and relevant milieux in the biological sciences. The emergence of the basic principles of a theory of evolution, and the associated attributes of endemism and extinction, have made islands veritable 'hot spots' for research in such fields as conservation ecology and bio-geography. Studying and interpreting the Galápagos finches, the butterflies of the Aru Islands, and the honey creepers of Hawaii, or following the biotic trends in Rakata (Indonesia) or Surtsey (Iceland), are today basic features of any core biology text. Some island states - Maldives, Tuvalu, Marshalls - have been thrust unwittingly as the 'canaries in the coal mine' for such contemporary phenomena as sea level rise; while other island territories - Socotra, Macquarie, Aeloian Islands, the Tasmanian Wilderness - have had their unique, and mainly natural, attributes recognized via their designation as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

But, strangely enough, there does not appear to be any similar appreciation of the 'island effect' in the humanities and social sciences. This absence of recognition is not so much an outcome of a failure of social scientists to engage with islandness, as a hesitation to identify so many interesting developments - in both the theorisation and conceptualisation of knowledge - with the island context that spawned them.... And yet, the island context, and its associated allures of a temptingly available microcosm within a framework of managed isolation, has been involved in the formative development of social science, and social scientists.

Take, for example, Erwin Goffman, pioneer of the dramaturgical perspective within the symbolic interactionist school of sociology. He chose to escape Chicago and study rural life in the Shetland Islands for his doctoral thesis. He arrived in Unst in December 1949 and stayed until May 1951, masquerading as a student of agricultural techniques, but actually studying social interaction among the islanders. (The islanders initially suspected that he was a spy.)

Or French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau who spent "the happiest days of his life", on St Peter's Island in Lake Biel, Switzerland, in 1756, and admitting the influence of the "idyllic environment".

Or Margaret Mead, who ‘came of age’ and revolutionized American anthropology with her pioneering research of teenage girls in Samoa in 1925, continuing on with more fieldwork in New Guinea in 1929.

Or Marshall Sahlins, who drew on studies of Hawaii, Fiji and New Zealand to critique Western (continental?) history and anthropology, in his Islands of History (1985).

Or Eric Arthur Blair (better known as George Orwell), whose last writing retreat was out on the wild isle of Jura, off Scotland's west coast, in 1946, where he wrote much of ‘1984’.

What was, from 1923 to 1939, one of the most feared gulags in the Soviet Union? Nobel Prize winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn had much to say about the great isolation of the Solovetsky islands in the Gulag Archipelago: "This was the basic idea behind Solovki. It was a place with no connection to the rest of the world for half a year. A scream from here would never be heard."

A more recent Nobel Prize winner, J. M. G. Le Clézio, studies colonialism in Raga. Approche du Continent Invisible (2006). The history of colonialism is, after all, largely a history of islands, sites of the origins of environmentalism (Grove 1995).

Research in Bremnes, a remote Norwegian island parish, in 1954, led Joseph Barnes to advance social network theory; while Jeremy Boissevain, a Dutch anthropologist, mapped out the size, influence and transactional power of networks in the early 1960s in Hal-Farrug, the pseudonym for a small village in Malta, and documented in his book Friends of Friends (1974)

Research into the human history of the Pacific Islands by such scholars as John Terrell and Patrick V. Kirch has been highly influential in revising our understanding of human history in general.

The wealth of island settings in imagined places from fantasy to philosophy, from spiritual journeys to forays into imperialism, is abundantly exemplified in such texts as Homer’s Odyssey, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the subsequent Robinsonnade genre, and many others included in Alberto Manguel’s and Gianni Guadalupi’s remarkable Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1999).

Some imaginary islands constitute the very foundation of theories on societal development, for instance Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s Der Isolierte Staat (1842) and of course, that prototype ideal political state, Thomas More’s Utopia (1614). More recently, Gilles Deleuze pries into issues of origins, gender, myth and creativity in Desert Islands (2004).

And, what of things to come? Research on and about Rapa Nui - as in Easter Island, Earth Island by Paul Bahn and John Flenley (2003) - suggests that we may need new understandings of development that do not assume endless resources and the possibility of permanent growth. The Planet Earth is after all an island in space, and this realization, in itself, has been revolutionary in humankind's self-conceptualisation, as argue cogently Dennis Cosgrove and John R. Gillis.

The purpose of this conference on Islands in Social Theory is to bring together a coherent set of papers highlighting the role that island studies have played in advancing key concepts and principles in social theory and suggesting ways in which island research may further contribute to development of social theory.

We welcome submissions of titles, along with approx. 150-word abstracts, for papers to be presented at this conference. It is planned to publish a book with the edited proceedings, following a peer review process.

We ask you to send us your abstract by October 31, 2009.

Thank You

Godfrey Baldacchino
University of Prince Edward Island
Canada
gbaldacchino@upei.ca

Eric Clark
Lund University
Sweden
eric.clark@keg.lu.se