island conversations
podcast series

Urban river, Nancun Town, Guangzhou

Credit: Adam Grydehøj

​

Could you give us some examples of what you mean by some of these islands that haven't been considered in island studies?

​

The most obvious example for me, because it's where I am now, is China. The Chinese mainland had very little involvement in the international, Anglophone field of island studies. I'm not aware of anyone having attended an Islands of the World Conference, for example, from a Chinese mainland institution until relatively recently. Island Studies Journal had never published an article from a scholar in the Chinese mainland. And part of it is, we spoke  about it as ‘the mainland’. So it doesn't sound very ‘islandy’. I started getting involved in China after being contacted by Huan Zhang, who would become a very good friend and who is located at Zhejiang University and works with the Zhoushan Archipelago. I realised over the next few years, from 2015 onwards, that in fact there are a very large number of islands around the Chinese coast and that there are large numbers of people in the Chinese academic and policy environments who are explicitly studying islands, even if they don't call it island studies. They are studying Island development or Island tourism. I rather suspect there are more people explicitly studying islands in China than in the rest of the world combined. But somehow, this had escaped the notice of the international field, partly for language reasons and partly for other reasons. 

 

There has been this tendency on the part of people from outside China to approach Chinese islands using foreign developmental perspectives about what island nature and ecosystems ought to be and what we should do with economic development to make these islands more ‘island-like’. But this sense of islandness doesn't actually fit with the ideas of local researchers, some of whom come from islands and archipelagos themselves. If island studies is trying to ‘study islands on their own terms’ (which is a motto from which I have distanced myself a few times), then it's important to actually ask, “Well, what are the islanders’ own terms?”. Rather than to take our terms, and then imagine that this is what islanders believe. This has been a problem with which island studies hasn't always grappled significantly.

​

[…] what comes out of that, this international space, is more of a Western, academic scholarly engagement with islands and not that this doesn't have value, it just reflects a particular epistemological framework. That brings me to this other question about the indigenous Islands and the indigenous islands scholarship.  […] it's not as if there is not enough Island studies to inform the islanders on what they want to do in terms of economic development, but how much of that is indigenously informed?

​

As I mentioned earlier, this question has occupied me since my time in Kalaallit Nunaat, largely due to the people I met there, as well as scholars from elsewhere. I have to name drop my very good friend and colleague Yaso Nadarajah, who introduced me to decolonial scholarship. If we go back to the idea of the disciplining aspect of academic creation—One of the nice things about island studies, is that it has this multidisciplinary status, which makes it more difficult for the establishment, if we want to call it that, to exclude particular ideas. But that doesn't mean the field has always been particularly good at going out of its way to try to look at what, say, Indigenous islanders are thinking about. I've been discussing a lot with colleagues recently how the international field of island studies often engages with Indigenous scholarship or with islander scholarship by taking islanders who have written scholarship, calling them ‘island studies scholars’, and then using their ideas to back up the European and North American and Australian theories that already exist. Now, in some cases, we have Indigenous scholars who have shown no inclination whatsoever to be involved in island studies – some have actively distanced themselves from island studies, but then become major names within island studies, sort of against their will. One might ask: If we're learning from them, what’s actually wrong with this situation? My feeling is that, if island studies is going to try to respect people's ideas involving islands, then it also involves respecting people's ideas not to have their societies viewed as islands in some cases. So that's part of the challenge that the international field has to deal with: what to do when we want to study places as islands when maybe that's not the most important factor from a local perspective.

​

Another really very pertinent comment! That brings me to what you had mentioned earlier on in our introduction about your work, that you're really interested in deeply collaborative work. How does that take place in island studies, especially for us who are international scholars who go on location to do work with islands scholars?

​

It's one of these ironies—I'm sure I'm not alone here in having found that my deeply collaborative work has increased since the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, maybe I would go on lots of short trips involving relatively shallow meetings with people and then go back home. On these trips, one could re-establish connections, and then maybe might write a co-authored article, or something, but it wouldn’t necessarily go much deeper than that. 

 

I'm not particularly interested in what I have to say about academic things. This might be hard to believe, hearing me talk for so long. But I'm not sure that my own insights independently of other people are particularly important. That might be because I largely believe that we all have the capacity to gain so much by seeing what happens when we combine our ideas and perspectives with those of others. Short, in-person meetings are extremely valuable, but since the pandemic began, my practice has slowly evolved to focus on close work with a smaller number of very close colleagues. It's Yaso Nadarajah, who I mentioned earlier, and my good friend and colleague Su Ping, who's also at South China University of Technology, where I am now. This idea of really sitting down together, in a mental way, sharing experiences, and finding out—from very different cultural and academic and disciplinary perspectives—what does this tell us about this situation, about this case? Crucially, for me, it goes beyond saying, “Well, we need to involve a local expert in this project, we need to call someone who knows about the place so that we can have some credibility and gain local knowledge.” Because this isn't about learning facts about a particular environment. It's about seeing what different worldviews, what different perspectives, even just different personalities can tell us about what we're researching. So if we look at the visible aspects of my scholarly production today, they're nearly all co-authored articles. And my favourites of them are deeply, deeply co-authored and deeply collaborative. It's a lot of work, but it involves trying to put together different voices, trying to create something that truly belongs to all of us equally.

​

Perhaps, we need to reflect a lot more on the ethics of collaborative scholarly work within the island studies.

​

I'm obviously not the first person to be saying that. And it's worth stressing here that I don't regard myself as some kind of a trailblazer in decolonial scholarship. Of course, island studies is developing as the wider academic world is getting increasingly aware of the limits to representation. For example, the idea that the diversity of people involved in our field isn't actually enough, can sometimes lead to tokenization. I don't think that there any easy answers to any of this. There's no simple way for trying to figure out how to do research ethically. I guess for me, it's crucial that researchers begin by trying to figure out where they are. What's their position? How do the power geometries work out? And how can we find ways of bringing ourselves more justly in conversation with others?

​

I love that, […] positionality and reflexivity as key elements […] Let me take you now to your work as the editor of the Islands Studies Journal. You have been the editor for quite a long time. I'm sure you have observed certain changes or trends in scholarship reflected in the work that the journal has published. Can you speak to the contribution of the journal, to the development of islands studies, but also some of your observations about the changing nature of the scholarship and how it's been reflected in what you have been publishing?

​

I first became editor and was being taught the ropes by the previous and founding editor, Godfrey Baldacchino, in late 2016. My first real issue of Island Studies Journal came in 2017. So it's been five years now, but I still see myself as the new editor. I guess that's how these things work. Island Studies Journal, for me, as with the other journals devoted to island studies, plays a truly central role in keeping the field running as a field. Of course, there are great many people who attend island studies conferences but who never write in the journals, and even more people who write in the various journals without thinking of attending these various conferences or joining the associations. But there's often this this idea that for people contributing to the journal that, “Oh, well, I'm a bit out of place here, because I don't really do island studies, I just have an interest in this island.” Actually, very few people define themselves primarily, or even to a great extent, as doing island studies.

 

Certainly, most people on the Island Studies Journal editorial board don't use island studies as their primary field, and most of our authors don't either. So the various journals devoted to this field are necessary for bringing together research about islands and about islandness within an island studies framework, because in many cases, this framework wouldn't exist otherwise. In this sense, maybe, we could say that the field is smaller than it sometimes looks. But on the other hand, the field also has the ability to reach outside of itself and to evolve, involving all different kinds of scholarship. 

 

The contents of Island Studies Journal have certainly changed over time. One thing is the journal has gotten much, much larger, for reasons that have nothing to do with me, I can assure you. In my first year as editor, the number of submissions to the journal tripled or quadrupled. We had, I think, 120 submissions in 2017. I'm not entirely sure what happened that year to cause that number, as they’ve dropped a bit since then. But this also led to significant changes in the way that the editorial board works and the way that the journal functions. Something I'm proud of is helping to bring Island Studies Journal into a new place institutionally. In the beginning, when I first became editor, the previous editor Godfrey Baldacchino had been doing a tremendous amount of work and was responsible for many, many, many parts of the journal process, the editorial process, the production process. Other people gave substantial help, but this was very much a project for which we have to think Godfrey. But this becomes utterly impossible when you're dealing with 120 submissions a year.

 

Together with colleagues, there was a process of changing how the Island Studies Journal editorial boardworks, and creating the position of associate or co-editors, who have editorial power themselves, and who are handling paper submissions, within their own disciplines and have their own areas of interest and expertise. This greatly expanded who got involved in the journal on the editorial side, which of course then also has an influence on the sorts of people who are involved in other ways.

 

I think we have to bear in mind the context in which Island Studies Journal  arose, in which island studies had sort of developed in its earlier years. Just this morning, I've been making changes to the Island Studies Journalwebsite, in which I've been trying to collate previous publications into anthologies, which is an innovation that was launched by the journal Shima. And I was looking at what papers Island Studies Journal published on particular topics and particular themes in the past. Originally, I planned on doing what Shima has done and placing these articles in ascending chronological order. So, we’d look at the first important works and see where it's developed over time. But if we did it that way, I very quickly became aware, for a lot of these themes we’d just have a list of 10 or 15 men at European and North American institutions at the very beginning. Now, this is a problem with the system, right? This isn't the fault of individual men who are writing very good articles. But it's really glaring, especially when, if we switched the list around to reverse chronological order, there's definitely…  I can tell you, having looked at our articles, there's a lot of room for improvement. But the journal is now significantly less white and male then it was in the past. That doesn't actually solve the problems, but it's a necessary step towards solving some of the problems of coloniality.