This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence Newcastle University ePrints-eprint.ncl.ac.uk Pugh J. The relational turn in island geographies: bringing together island, sea and ship relations and the case of the Landship.
ABSTRACT:The island has become arguably one of the most emblematic figures of the Anthropocene. It is regularly invoked as exemplary of the changing stakes of our planet. This generates a crucially important role for island studies scholars; to explore, question, but now perhaps also trouble, some fundamental debates about islands in the Anthropocene. This paper picks up a particularly recurrent theme for island scholarship in recent decades-relationality and islands-and reorientates this within the stakes of the Anthropocene; discussing some implications for island studies, island ontology and resilience ethics.
Resilience is one of the dominant tropes in contemporary policy, practice and academic debate. This paper situates resilience within historical and contemporary approaches to international intervention, governance and analysis. It contains three related arguments suggesting that resilience reflects and seeks to offer a positive alternative to the loss of modern frameworks. First, it is argued that resilience emerged in international intervention as a response to the limits of liberal internationalism in the 1990s. Second, that resilience has emerged as a post-liberal episteme that reflects and seeks to engage the 'reality' of complex life as an alternative to modernist frameworks of analysis. Today, rather than being seen as a limit, complexity is positively foregrounded under resilience frameworks as an active force that has moved beyond the limitations of modern frameworks. Third, this emergence of resilience as a post-liberal episteme that actively responds to complex life can be usefully explained through reflecting on recent work that engages Foucault's notions of biopower and biopolitics.
The politics and ethics of participatory development have been a topic of vibrant debate since the 1990s. While proponents assert that participation emancipates and empowers marginalized people, critics assert that it enacts new forms of control and regulation. This paper reads these debates through the analytical lens offered by assemblage thinking. Assemblage allows us to foreground affective relations between people and things, and the diagrams of power, or ideal sets of force relations, that attempt to direct these affective relations. On this basis, we characterize different participatory approaches in terms of their relation to the constitutive power of affective relations: modernist participation enacts a will to truth that attempts to objectify and control constitutive power through categories such as social capital and vulnerability; performative participation recognizes that participatory activities, while still entangled in power relations, may develop in ways that might challenge existing power relations, and the designs of the project organizer. This characterization helps us identify a politics of life enacted through participatory activities: on one hand, a negative biopolitics that problematizes constitutive power; on the other, an affirmative biopolitics that creates new possibilities for individual and collective life. Assemblage thinking can thus reconfigure participation around an affirmative biopolitics that positions the researcher as one resource among others marginalized people might use in their struggles against insecurity and suffering.
Island studies tends to focus on peripheral, isolated, and marginal aspects of island communities, while urban studies has showed scant awareness of islandness: Although many people research cities on islands, there is little tradition of researching island cities or urban archipelagos per se. Island cities (densely populated small islands and population centres of larger islands and archipelagos) nevertheless play import cultural, economic, political, and environmental roles on local, regional, and global scales. Many major cities and ports have developed on small islands, and even villages can fulfil important urban functions on lightly populated islands. Island concepts are also deployed to metaphorically describe developments in urban space. The journal Urban Island Studies explores island and urban processes around the world, taking an island approach to urban research and an urban approach to island research.
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