Selection of talks, workshops, conferences and podcasts
Jonathan Pugh will be talking at ‘Islands and Island Studies’ Venue: JICAS, Jersey — Dates: June 3rd–7th 2025. Organised by the Jersey International Centre of Advanced Studies (JICAS) in collaboration with Shima and the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative (SICRI).
The interdisciplinary field of Island Studies began in the early 1990s with the establishment of ISISA (the International Small Islands Studies Association). The field was subsequently enhanced through the formation of SICRI (the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative) in 2005, and with the establishment of a number of academic periodicals, including Island Studies Journal (in 2006), Shima (2007), The Journal of Marine and Island Cultures (2012) and the Okinawan Journal of Island Studies (2020). Organisations such as Island Innovation (founded in 2018) have also pursued collaborative research, development and dialogue between and for islanders.
The Islands and Island Studies 2025 conference will provide an opportunity for researchers, administrators, policy makers and islanders to explore key questions concerning island societies and jurisdictions in the early 21st Century and to review research in the field to date.
The conference will comprise 3 plenary sessions and two parallel panel strands:
Plenary #1 — Lessons from and challenges for Jersey — featuring contributions from Jersey government officers and representatives of local organisations.
Plenary #2 — Two decades of Island Studies as represented in its journals — featuring presentations from journal editors Philip Hayward (Shima), Sun-Kee Hong (The Journal of Marine and Island Cultures), Ping Su (Island Studies Journal) Ayano Ginoza (former editor of the Okinawan Journal of Island Studies) + response by Jonathan Pugh (Professor of island Studies, Newcastle University, UK) (tbc).
Plenary #3 — New Voices in Island Studies (programmed by SICRI) — featuring presentations from six emerging island Studies scholars.
Proposals for panels and/or individual papers for the parallel strands are welcome on the following topics:
Issues in Island Studies
Research collaborations with island communities
Island cultures in periods of transition
Island societies, climate change and the Anthropocene
The conference will commence with an early evening reception on June 3rd, there will be three full days of panels and papers on June 4th–6th and a study trip (tba) on June 7th.
Proposals for papers should be 250–300 words long and should be submitted to islandsandis@gmail.com by November 1st 2024 and notifications of acceptance will be issued by December 10th 2024. Any inquiries as to the suitability of proposed topics and/or proposals for panels can be sent to Philip Hayward (on behalf of the conference organising committee) at prhshima@gmail.com by October 1st 2024.
Conference Registration Fee (includes conference receptions, lunches and refreshments): UK 175 pounds. (Postgraduate/unwaged rate UK 99 pounds.)
Information about accommodation deals for delegates will be posted on conference website in November.
November 6th, Jonathan Pugh gave a keynote on the ‘Anthropocene Islands’ project at the ‘International Island Forum’, Pingtan, China.
October 4th 2024, Jonathan Pugh will be talking at the 4th International ‘Critical Island Studies’ conference, Manila. https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cis2024/
Two sessions at the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual International Conference, London, Tuesday 27 to Friday 30 August 2024.
1] Negating Islands: Exploring Critique Beyond the Relational Turn (in-person only). Session Organiser: Jonathan Pugh, Newcastle University, UK. (Jonathan.pugh@ncl.ac.uk)
In recent decades much island scholarship has been dominated by the relational turn. This has sought to engage islands as sites for generating relational ways of thinking about being and knowing, aiming to challenge the violent hubris of top-down modern and colonial reasoning, the human/nature divide, and a telos of linear progress. This session asks, as discussion heightens around colonialisms, problematising the appropriative hand in its many manifestations, what does this do today to challenge the relational turn? Are relational ontologies and epistemologies increasingly being understood as too productivist, framing the island and islander as all-too-available, whether for instrumentalization or for a well-meaning ethics of care for the Other? It would seem that a range of discontents are emerging: from developments around opacity, fugitivity and marronage on islands, to understandings of island cultures as desedimenting ontological framings, to re-readings of how the figure of island in Western philosophy, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze, has long strained against the projection of human concepts over the world. This session seeks to explore the possibilities of a contemporary development and the session includes both conceptual and empirical papers which engage islands through such tropes as negation, opacity, refusal, the non-generative, non-relation, and withdrawal.
Please email your title, abstract of no more than 150 words, and keywords, along with details of all authors, by 18th February 2024, to Jonathan Pugh (Jonathan.Pugh@ncl.ac.uk)
For further details about the conference: https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference
Key conference dates and deadlines: https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/key-dates-and-deadlines
2] Paper Session: ‘Critique Beyond Relation’ (in-person only)
Session Organisers: David Chandler (D.Chandler@westminster.ac.uk) and Jonathan Pugh (Jonathan.Pugh@ncl.ac.uk)
Relation is at the centre of much work in Human Geography. Neoliberal frameworks, for example, depend on ontologies of relation to explain and to legitimate differences in outcomes, to rationalise the reproduction of inequalities and exclusions. For relational constructivists and actor network theorists, anarchy or capitalism, or anything else, “is what actors make of it”. The rapid change in Human Geography from modernist ontologies of top-down transformation, to bottom-up ones of relation, entanglement, assemblage, speculation and attuning to emergence, shifts the register from critique to affirmation.
In recent years, relational approaches have come under a variety of critiques, which range from charges of affirming and suborning us to reproducing the world as it exists; to the misappropriation of non-Western epistemology, ontology, and cosmology; to reinstating the authority of the (post- or more-than-) human; to starting from metaphysics rather than foundational cuts and worlding violences. For this session we welcome papers that seek to engage ‘Critique Beyond Relation’. Contributors might potentially draw upon, or indeed critically interrogate, the growing popularity of various recent developments, such as, the aesthetics or the poetics of suspension, the void, fugitivity, non-relation, the Anthropocene and the extinction of the human, the undercommons, and psychoanalytically inspired approaches, which enrol Lacan or Fanon to refuse relation in order to centre opacity and the negative.
Please email a title, abstract of no more than 150 words, and keywords, along with details of all authors, by 20th February 2024, to David Chandler (D.Chandler@westminster.ac.uk) and Jonathan Pugh (Jonathan.Pugh@ncl.ac.uk)
January 2024, David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh recorded a talk and discussion about ‘The World as Abyss’ with Foreign Objekt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX1EQy6lEJk
January 2024, David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh recorded a podcast about ‘The World as Abyss’ with Lateral, the Cultural Studies Association’s journal. https://csalateral.org/podcasts/positions/the-world-as-abyss/
January/February 2024, Jonathan Pugh took part in a week of dialogues, directed by AbdouMaliq Simone, on ‘Popular Territories/Surface Blackness/Improbable Commons’.
Three Panels on ‘Critique After Relation’ - International Studies Association, San Francisco, April 3-6, 2024. Convenors: Jonathan Pugh (Newcastle University) and David Chandler (University of Westminster).
Abstract: For many of us, it appears that relationality is already at the centre of international studies. Neoliberal and neo-institutional frameworks of governance and policymaking, for example, depend precisely on ontologies of relation to explain and to legitimate differences in outcomes and rationalise the reproduction of inequalities and exclusions – as the relational and material sociologists (constructivists and actor network theorists) argue, anarchy or capitalism, or anything else, “is what actors make of it”. The swift move of many critical theorists from modernist ontologies of top-down transformation to bottom-up ones of relation, entanglement and emergence, of post- and more-than-human assemblages and sensitivities, are moves that shift the register from critique to affirmation. These relational approaches have come under a variety of critiques, which range from charges of appropriation to those of reinstating the (post- or more-than-) human at the centre, to starting from metaphysics rather than foundational cuts and worlding violences. For these panels – Critique Beyond Relation – we welcome inputs and contributions that seek to challenge the hegemony of relation, potentially drawing upon ideas of non-relation, of refusal, of withdrawal, of the infinite, of quantum superpositionality, of negation, spaces, voids, and the abyss, just to name a few potential examples.
Panel: Social Archaeologies and Islands. At the Society for American Archaeology Conference, New Orleans USA, 2024. Convenors: James L. Flexner, Scott Fitzpatrick, Sandra Monton-Subias, and Helene Martinsson-Wallin. Discussant: Jonathan Pugh.
Abstract
Island archaeology has advanced significantly during the past two decades, from exponential increases in empirical data to new theoretical breakthroughs, particularly in ecological and evolutionary approaches. While these bodies of knowledge are essential for understanding islands, we propose that a predominance of “scientific” theoretical frameworks for interpreting islands could be complemented by more social understandings of life on islands in the past, with broad implications for islander presents and futures. Island studies in general have moved from using islands as laboratories to research of islands and islanders on their own terms. From the early 2000’s the field of Island studies have been growing vastly, mainly due to multidisciplinary studies of current global issues and phenomena from the perspective of islands and islanders. The studies of past island life and islanders’ maritime relationships can for example contribute in major ways to understanding current sustainability issues and conservation strategies. This session brings together perspectives from islands around the world to engage with the diversity of social archaeologies that emerge from the perspective of smaller as well as larger landmasses surrounded by rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. The session also highlights engagement with the water itself as a medium of human experiences in the past as they link to the present.
Selection of previous …
On 16th February, 2021 David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh discussed Anthropocene Islands with the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft Bonn lecture series on 'Ecology and the Metamorphosis of Modern Society' (University of Bonn, 2020-2021) See here
On 15th March, 2021 David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh discussed Anthropocene Islands at a virtual coffee morning, University of Westminster. See here
On 6th September 2021 David Chandler presented ‘Islands and the End of Modernity’ for Philosophy in Our Times, see here
On 22nd September, 2021 Jonathan Pugh was interviewed by Laureline Simon for the online magazine Tero. The interview will be published later in the year.
On 23rd September, 2021 Jonathan Pugh was interviewed by Phil Hayward for the ‘Island Conservations’ Podcast Series of the SICRI (Small Island Cultures Research Initiative) network. The podcast can be found here on the SICRI network website.
On 28th Sept 2021 Jonathan Pugh was interviewed by Erica Angliker (ICS-London) and Lilian Laky (University of Sao Paulo). The interview launched the publication of the volume "Questions of Insularity" in the journal Mare Nostrum. It was also be transmitted though the youtube channel here.
On 1st December, 2021. Jonathan Pugh discussed ‘Anthropocene Islands, Entangled Worlds’. Amor Mundi: Multispecies Seminar Series. Chiang Mai University. A YouTube of the talk and discussion can be found here
On 7th May, 2022 the podcast station ‘A Correction’ did an interview with Jonathan Pugh on islands and the Anthropocene. The podcast can be found here
River Islands: redefining the Anthropocene. Ashoka University, October, 2023. Keynote address: Jonathan Pugh. Negating Islands: Non-Relational Geographies. For discussion see here
October and November, 2023. Series of lectures to MA students at the Jersey International Centre of Advanced Studies (Jonathan Pugh).
December, 2023. Series of lectures to MA students at Trinity, Dublin (Jonathan Pugh).
Taster of the book ‘Anthropocene Islands’ (34 mins)
Longer talk on ‘Anthropocene Islands’ (1 hr 18 mins)