Selection of talks, workshops,
conferences and podcasts
Jonathan Pugh will be talking at the International Conference - Reimagining (Island) Borders - held at Beijing Normal Hong Kong Baptist University, 16 January 2026
The rationale for the conference is as follows …
For the longest time, island borders have been viewed as fixed, peripheral lines demarcating the movement from land to sea. When it comes to divided islands, yet another political border is added to such a divisive schematic. In recent years, theoretical research has increasingly focused on deconstructing islands’ allegedly traditional stable forms theorised by earlier researchers and instead applied archipelagic and anthropocenic thinking to them, thereby rendering them as adaptive and affective spaces. On a practical level, the focus has also shifted to a deeper study of decolonising island studies and putting more emphasis on community work and addressing more fluid and relational social constructs, re-negotiating ecological, political, cultural, and economic processes. This conference will investigate the dynamic entanglements that shape island lives today and also invite comparative engagements, clearly moving island and border studies from the periphery to the centre. Rising seas, mobility regimes, postcolonial governance, and indigenous epistemologies all contribute to a new understanding of island lives, turning them into zones of encounter, with new identities produced, sovereignties challenged, and futures contested. Presenters will tell their own experiences and entanglements with island lives and integrate several disciplinary directions such as critical border studies, and environmental humanities. Themes include indigenous sovereignty, ecology, mobility, postcolonial politics, borderland discourse, and decolonial thought.
Jonathan Pugh will be giving the keynote at the Lucknow Summit 2025 The Geopolitics of Climate Change: the genesis of ecological doom loops, Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India. 19-21 Dec, 2025. The title and abstract for this keynote are:-
Three ways of thinking with islandness in contemporary critique
Thinking with islands and islandness is now central to Western critical attempts to disrupt modern frameworks of reasoning. Islands are routinely mobilised as liminal geographies that expose the violence of modern human/nature, subject/object and mainland/island divides, and as sites for “worlding the world otherwise”. Yet these critical trajectories are far from uniform. This paper offers a heuristic of three contemporary strands of thinking with islandness. The first, ‘tracking’, affirms islandness as a privileged site for registering more-than-human entanglements and emergent disturbances in the Anthropocene. The second, ‘suspending’, pushes further by seeking to undo the modern subject through immanent co-becoming, opacity and practices of unlearning mastery on and with islands. The third, ‘abyssal’, shifts the stakes from the subject to geography itself, understanding geography not merely as an academic discipline but as a dominant ontological operation that, since early modernity, has replaced transcendence as the authority suborning being to the world. Reading canonical and contemporary island figurations through this abyssal lens clarifies how islands are repeatedly asked to secure a world whose ontological violence remains intact. The paper argues that island studies must reckon with geography as a “groundless ground” if it is to take seriously the exclusions on which the world rests.
Jonathan Pugh gave a plenary at
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 provided 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.
November 6th, 2024, Jonathan Pugh gave a keynote on the ‘Anthropocene Islands’ project at the ‘International Island Forum’, Pingtan, China.
October 4th 2024, Jonathan Pugh talked at the 4th International ‘Critical Island Studies’ conference, Manila.