Island Dynamics

11/04/2026

Island Dynamics is introducing a new kind of journal-conference collaboration. Authors who have had a paper accepted in the new journal 'Blue Humanities' will receive free full registration for and accommodation at to the upcoming Island Dynamics Blue Humanities Conference, which is taking place in Helsingborg, Sweden and Helsingør, Denmark on 11-14 January 2027. https://islanddynamics.org/conferences/bluehumanitiesconference-2027/

'Blue Humanities' (https://bluehumanitiesjournal.org) is a non-fee charging open access journal dedicated to water-centered interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and critical humanities scholarship. All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review and must follow the journal's ordinary submission requirements.

This offer is especially valuable for students, early career researchers, and others on a tight budget, but it more generally makes it easier for our growing academic community to get together and share knowledge.

Visit the conference website or contact the convenor Adam Grydehøj ([email protected]) to learn more.

20/01/2026

Conference call for papers - 'Island Dynamics Blue Humanities Conference 2027: Oceanic Urbanism', Helsingborg, Sweden & Helsingør, Denmark, 12-15 January 2026
https://islanddynamics.org/conferences/bluehumanitiesconference-2027/.

Theme
As a multidisciplinary scholarly movement within the environmental humanities, the Blue Humanities explores the role of water spaces in forming, maintaining, and transforming human cultures and societies as well as takes humanities and social science approaches to the non-human aquatic world. The Blue Humanities encompasses research from such fields and disciplines as history, anthropology, cultural studies, maritime studies, human geography, literature studies, ecology, gender studies, Indigenous studies, im/migration studies, art history, and tourism studies.

Presentations at this conference are welcome on any topic within the Blue Humanities (past, present, or future). However, presenters are especially encouraged to address the special conference theme of oceanic urbanism: the ways in which human cities, settlements, technologies, and infrastructures interact with water systems and spaces (oceans, seas, rivers, lakes, bays, estuaries, glaciers, fog, etc.).

Throughout history, coastal cities, towns, and villages have been spaces of intensive interaction between humanity and the aquatic realm. Urban experiences with waters have shaped ways in which people perceive themselves, their culture, the city, nature, and the world as a whole. Human-water entanglements have inspired a myriad of artistic and cultural creations on the part of humans as well as urban adaptations on the part of non-human actors such as plants and animals. It is in urban spaces that the hard infrastructure of ports; harbours; and waterside residential, leisure, and commercial zones meets the ever-changing liquid environment. It is here that marine and riverine forces challenge the illusion of human control over nature and the hubris of imagining that any anthropogenic structure can ever be permanent or complete. Yet it is also here that people undertake both productive and extractive engagements with aquatic spaces in ways that profoundly influence human life, hydrological systems, and the ecosystems that depend upon them. Oceanic urbanism extends beyond coastal cities as discrete, primarily terrestrial units, encompassing offshore rigs, aquaculture facilities, dams, ships, undersea cables and pipelines, and other spaces that can be studied from an urban perspective.

Presentations may reference to particular water bodies, sites, cities, infrastructures, or they may discuss the conference theme in general terms that are nevertheless situated within particular cultural frameworks and worldviews. The conference is open to all theoretical approaches. In line with Island Dynamics’ wider philosophy, we take a pluriversal perspective that insists upon epistemic diversity and distinct ways of knowing and acting within the world.

Min Zhou (Professor at Hangzhou Normal University’s Center for Caribbean Studies & co-Editor-in-Chief of 'Blue Humanities') and Søren Frank (Professor at University of Copenhagen’s Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics) will serve as keynote speakers.

Abstract submission
If you wish to give a presentation at the conference, please submit your proposal via the abstract submission form: https://islanddynamics.org/abstractsubmission/. Abstracts should be 150-200 words long and must not include citations or references. After submission, your proposal will be reviewed, and the organisers will respond with a decision as soon as possible. The earlier you submit your proposal, the earlier you will receive the decision. All presentations will be in English. The deadline for abstracts is 30 June 2026.

Conference location
The main conference location is Helsingborg, a small Swedish city on the Öresund, facing the Danish town of Helsingør across the strait. As both a border city and a port city, Helsingborg’s millennium-long history has been inseparable from the sea. Today, Helsingborg is striving to become a testbed for smart and sustainable urbanism -— a laudable goal that nevertheless raises questions about the wider proliferation of role models of eco-urbanism and their complicated role in global systems of financial, racial, gender, epistemic, and other inequalities. The conference will begin with two days of local site visits. On 12 January, delegates will explore the Helsingborg’s terrestrial and marine cityscapes, from the medieval centre to the state-of-the-art harbour and port. On 13 January, delegates will take a ferry across the Öresund to Helsingør in Denmark, visiting the M/S Maritime Museum of Denmark, walking the grounds of the imposing Kronborg Castle, and experiencing the wider historic city. Conference presentations will be held on 14-15 January at Elite Hotel Marina Plaza.

Publication opportunity
This conference is organised in association with the peer reviewed, non-fee charging open access journal 'Blue Humanities' (https://bluehumanitiesjournal.org). Presenters are strongly encouraged to submit papers to the journal. If you wish for your paper to be published in advance of the conference, the deadline for submissions is 31 August 2026. Although we strongly encourage article submissions, it is not necessary to submit a paper to the journal or to have a paper accepted for publication in order to participate in the conference. To learn more about journal publication, please contact Adam Grydehøj ([email protected]).

Conference registration
In order to make the conference affordable to as many people as possible, we have created two registration packages:

- Basic registration: Includes attendance at the conference presentations (14-15 January), two lunches (14-15 January), and one dinner (15 January). Cost: 500 Singapore dollars.

- Full registration: Includes attendance on the study trips in Helsingborg and Helsingør on 12-13 January, conference presentations (14-15 January), four lunches (12-15 January), and one dinner (15 January). Cost: 850 Singapore dollars.

Students can receive a 20% discount on their registration fees. Registration does not include accommodation. Delegates are recommended but not required to stay at the conference hotel in Helsingborg, Elite Hotel Marina Plaza. The early deadline for registration will be 30 June 2026, after which registration fees will rise by 250 Singapore dollars. To register, fill out the registration form here: https://islanddynamics.org/conferences/registration/. Within the following few days, you will be sent an invoice (payable by credit or debit card) using the information included in the registration form. Payment of the registration fee is due within one month after you have received the invoice.

Conference organisation
Co-Convenors: Adam Grydehøj (South China University of Technology, China) & Ping Su (South China University of Technology, China)
Organisers: Island Dynamics & Research Center for Indian Ocean Island Countries & School of Foreign Languages, South China University of Technology

12/12/2025

Island Dynamics conference call for papers: 'Art, tradition, environment: Folklore in place', Xining & Rebgong/Tongren, Qinghai Province, China, 13-18 September 2026.

This small academic conference explores the mutual importance of (1) place and (2) the creation of art and the maintenance of artistic traditions. Co-organised by the Qinghai Tibetan Culture Museum and South China University of Technology, the conference will include visits to Hui Muslim and Daoist cultural sites in the city of Xining as well as a multiday fieldtrip to the Tibetan Buddhist monastery town of Rebgong (Tongren in Mandarin).
https://folkknowledgeplace.org/post/3562-art-tradition-environment-folklore-in-place

Deadline for abstracts: 28 February 2026

How does the natural environment influence culture and art? How do artistic traditions contribute to the construction of cultural landscapes by inspiring alterations to and reenvisionings of the natural environment?

17/02/2025

Call for papers: 'Placemaking across time: Histories of spatialised knowledge', 6-9 October 2025, Næstved & Karrebæksminde, Denmark
https://folkknowledgeplace.org/post/2864-placemaking-across-time-histories-of-spatialised-knowledge

Sites and locations exist in nature, but they are transformed into place through human knowing and experience, both individual and collective. People and societies create places–and out of them, spaces–as means of engaging with the world. Yet place is not just personal, social, and cultural; it is also temporal. Sense of place develops over time in a complex interplay of material and immaterial engagements between people and their surroundings.

Perceptions of the past influence what is imagined in the present, both for good and for ill: Ascriptions of heritage and inheritance imbue locations with localised value to and for particular people, while memories of disaster, chaos, or decay can cling to sites and contribute to a negative sense of place. Temporally conditioned ideas about place can open up or foreclose possible futures.

No one group has a monopoly on the power to construct place. Culture and folk knowledge have historically belonged to both common people and the nobility, while elite worldviews have been challenged by those with fewer social, economic, and political resources. Multiple and contradictory places can be constructed on the same site, with places coexisting or competing across time and influencing the cultural lives of residents and visitors. These placemaking processes are occurring now. They have always been occurring in the present. In ages and eras past (with the ‘age’ and the ‘era’ themselves being human constructs), then-current conceptions of history were instrumental in the creation of place, and the places created in the past echo into future placemakings.

Senses of place travel across space through movements of people and ideas. Long-distance communication of place may previously have taken months, years, or centuries as peoples and individuals physically traversed landscapes and seascapes. Today’s information technologies, however, have not only produced opportunities for new kinds of people to communicate their knowledge and experience across great distances; they have also dramatically altered the temporalities of placemaking. Ideas and representations of place can be transmitted nearly instantaneously to individuals and groups spatially dispersed around the world.

Organised by Island Dynamics, this multidisciplinary academic conference on ‘Placemaking across time’ welcomes presentations on the interactions between place, culture, and time. Examples of potential topics include past senses of place; the cultural drivers and impacts of changes in place over time; the ways in which places are altered through selective processes of heritagisation; the coincidence of multiple places in a single location; how shifts in political and economic cultures alter place; conscious historical constructions of place; and how particular place ideals have risen in or fallen out of popularity over time.

Deadline for abstracts is 15 March 2025. Contact Adam Grydehøj ([email protected]) for details.

A multidisciplinary academic conference held in Denmark, 6-9 October 2025.

14/09/2024

Journal special section call for papers: 'Darkness'

Darkness, in the literal sense of absence of light, also refers figuratively to symbolic, material, and embodied states of gloomy, fearful, melancholy, or hidden phenomena at the intersection of cultural expression and place. As literal and figurative modality, darkness is only perceptible relative to particular cultural standards and conditions. It is a crucial element in the personal and social creation, interpretation, and maintenance of place, and the obscure or entangled tensions that shape cultural cartographies and their environmental underpinnings.

This special section of the journal 'Folk, Knowledge, Place' considers the complex manifestations of literal and figurative darkness in human knowledge systems, posthuman agencies, and the social-material environment. Articles selected for publication should address darkness as a constituent of culture and place as shaped by a constant negotiation between the visible and invisible, the known and unknown, or the shared and contested. Special emphasis is given to research that recognizes the ongoing relevance of various traditions of folklore, myth, legend, ritual, and belief, and related forms of cultural practice t present-day and historical manifestations of darkness.

The first drafts of articles for this special section should be sent for initial review to guest editor Anne Karhio at [email protected] by 15 February 2025, however we encourage authors to submit their draft as early as possible. Following initial editorial review and feedback, completed papers should be submitted via the journal’s online system by 15 May 2025. After this point, papers will undergo a peer review process with possible requests for final revisions before publication.

All completed manuscripts must follow the journal’s submission guidelines, which can be found at https://folkknowledgeplace.org/for-authors. Articles selected for publication must pass both editorial review and peer review, and authors are encouraged to contribute the journal’s scholarly community by participating in the review process during the publication period. The special section will be published in December 2025.

Folk, Knowledge, Place' (https://folkknowledgeplace.org) is a web-based, non-fee charging open access journal. The journal is global in scope and has its institutional home at South China University of Technology’s School of Foreign Languages.

For more information about the special section, please contact guest editor Anne Karhio at [email protected]. For more information about the journal 'Folk, Knowledge, Place', please contact co-Editor-in-Chief Adam Grydehøj [email protected].

https://folkknowledgeplace.org/post/2684-special-section-call-for-papers-darkness

Welcoming papers on complex manifestations of literal and figurative darkness in human knowledge systems, posthuman agencies, and the social-material environment.

22/05/2024

Conference call for papers: 'Placemaking across time: Histories of spatialised knowledge', 6-9 October 2025, Næstved & Karrebæksminde, Denmark, https://beewolfpress.com/placemaking/

Sites and locations exist in nature, but they are transformed into place through human knowing and experience, both individual and collective. People and societies create places–and out of them, spaces–as means of engaging with the world. Yet place is not just personal, social, and cultural; it is also temporal. Sense of place develops over time in a complex interplay of material and immaterial engagements between people and their surroundings. Perceptions of the past influence what is imagined in the present, both for good and for ill: Ascriptions of heritage and inheritance imbue locations with localised value to and for particular people, while memories of disaster, chaos, or decay can cling to sites and contribute to a negative sense of place. Temporally conditioned ideas about place can open up or foreclose possible futures.

No one group has a monopoly on the power to construct place. Culture and folk knowledge have historically belonged to both common people and the nobility, while elite worldviews have been challenged by those with fewer social, economic, and political resources. Multiple and contradictory places can be constructed on the same site, with places coexisting or competing across time and influencing the cultural lives of residents and visitors. These placemaking processes are occurring now. They have always been occurring in the present. In ages and eras past (with the ‘age’ and the ‘era’ themselves being human constructs), then-current conceptions of history were instrumental in the creation of place, and the places created in the past echo into future placemakings.

Senses of place travel across space through movements of people and ideas. Long-distance communication of place may previously have taken months, years, or centuries as peoples and individuals physically traversed landscapes and seascapes. Today’s information technologies, however, have not only produced opportunities for new kinds of people to communicate their knowledge and experience across great distances; they have also dramatically altered the temporalities of placemaking. Ideas and representations of place can be transmitted nearly instantaneously to individuals and groups spatially dispersed around the world.

Organised by Island Dynamics, this multidisciplinary academic conference on ‘Placemaking across time’ welcomes presentations on the interactions between place, culture, and time. Examples of potential topics include past senses of place; the cultural drivers and impacts of changes in place over time; the ways in which places are altered through selective processes of heritagisation; the coincidence of multiple places in a single location; how shifts in political and economic cultures alter place; conscious historical constructions of place; and how particular place ideals have risen in or fallen out of popularity over time. All presentations must have a clear focus on how people have known, experienced, conceptualised, and/or constructed place either in specific historical circumstances or across temporal scales.

Deadline for abstracts: 15 March 2025
Abstract submission: https://events.eventzilla.net/call-for-submission?eventid=2138632483.

If you have any questions, please e-mail convenor Adam Grydehøj at [email protected].

https://beewolfpress.com/placemaking/

08/04/2024

'Folk, Knowledge, Place' is seeking research articles. https://folkknowledgeplace.org/

This new open access journal creates openings for (re)framing, (re)imagining, and (re)connecting with field methodologies of people, place, and knowing; disrupting the epistemic sites of hierarchized power and knowledge relations; and mapping the multiple ways in which place is conceived, embodied, lived, and practiced.

Drawing upon insights from folklore studies, geography, and related disciplines, the journal publishes papers in a range of genres, styles, and forms, including research articles, review papers, and conceptual and methodological papers. Potential topics include customs and traditions, livelihoods, beliefs, cross-cultural relations, literature (whether oral or otherwise), pop cultural productions, digital practices, geopolitics, and overall sense of place and perception of identity.

02/03/2024

31 March is deadline for abstracts for the 'Folk, Knowledge, Place 2024' conference, being held in Singapore on 9-12 December 2024 at the College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University.

This is the first Island Dynamics conference since 2019. It will be an intimate event focused on engagement among delegates and getting to know one another out and about in Singapore. However, remote presentations are also possible for those who can't be there in person. The conference is connected to the journal 'Folk, Knowledge, Place', and a special stream has been set up for expedited editorial handling of submissions by conference delegates.

Conference theme
Studies of culture, history, literature, and art provide insights into our multiple senses of place. The pull of place—not only as epistemological, cosmological, and ontological forces, but also as deep emotional attachments—is always political. Emotional connections and attachments to place are deeply imbued with the cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity of people, land, and sea relations as well as with relations of colonisation, positionality, and dominance. While sense of place can bring belonging, security, and safety, places can also become landscapes of fear.

In a world dealing with recent challenges of a pandemic, new and old political unrests, long-term rivalries, forced migration, and the impacts of climate change, places can also become spaces of disorientation, characterised by disorder, division, and socia strife. Yet counternarratives that speak of love for place can transform places into spaces of hope, reconnection, healing, belonging, and freedom for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples the world over.

The multiple ways in which we envision and metaphorise place; speak, write, illustrate, and produce our landscapes and seascapes; the politics of land use; and life on land or sea (or away from it) reflect human efforts to live locally and translocally. Studies of ecologies, landforms, weather, rivers, reefs, rocks, and other natural phenomena also tell us much about how people spatialise and make homes in the world. Culture, lifeworlds, and place are mutually constitutive, and knowledge is always situated.

People are shaped by the environments in which they live, and the knowledge they create out of their place-based experiences influences those environments. Knowing and knowledge systems are developed collectively through relations between peoples and places. When people travel, they take places with them, and the changing physical attributes of place can challenge locally developed knowledges. Yet it is precisely our situation in place that makes it so difficult to avoid parochialism and narrow thinking—and that makes it so necessary to grapple with the complexities of relations between people and place. Increasingly, we sense an imperative for engaged, place-based, and collaborative coexistence that valorises shared trust and respect.

This hybrid in-person/digital conference creates openings for (re)framing, (re)imagining, and (re)connecting with field methodologies of people, place, and knowing; disrupting the epistemic sites of hierarchized power and knowledge relations; and mapping the multiple ways in which place is conceived, embodied, lived, and practiced. Potential presentation topics include customs and traditions, livelihoods, beliefs, cross-cultural relations, literature (whether oral or otherwise), pop cultural productions, digital practices, geopolitics, and overall sense of place and perception of identity. The conference also seeks historical or contemporary critical overviews of the multiple ways in which place has been theorised as well as work that contributes to ethical, environmental, and social change.

A multidisciplinary academic conference held in Singapore, 9-12 December 2024

12/12/2023

There is still time to submit an abstract to the 19th Islands of the World conference, being held in Lombok, Indonesia in June 2024.

This conference theme is split into the following six subthemes: 1. Climate change and environment 2. Island governance...

03/09/2021

Call for papers - ‘Island ecologies and the built environment: Interactions, planning, and protection’, a special section of Island Studies Journal, 18(1), May 2023.https://islandstudies.ca/sites/default/files/ISJ-CFP-EcologiesBuiltEnvironment.pdf

How do island ecologies and the built environment influence one another? The special section discusses island environmental, economic, and other issues in direct relation to spaces of human settlement and activity. How do ecological factors and human settlement practices influence one another? For example, where are island cities, towns, and villages located? How are they planned and developed? How do they link up with, or how are them disconnected from, other terrestrial and marine spaces? Similarly, how do particular ways of living with and on islands produce particular ecological results? Do real-life human settlement practices in island spaces indicate a need for different approaches to environmental conservation than in mainland contexts? How can terrestrial, marine, and coastal development best be coordinated to balance various human and environmental needs, in terms of infrastructure construction, spatial layout, industrial development, resource development, ecological protection, and cultural and social needs? How does the mental categorisation of some islands as existing within archipelagos and other islands as existing in isolation affect the ways in which people do or ought to treat islands?

For more information, please contact guest editors Huan Zhang ([email protected]) or Adam Grydehøj ([email protected]) and visit the call for papers: Interactions, planning, and protection’, a special section of Island Studies Journal, 18(1), May 2023.https://islandstudies.ca/sites/default/files/ISJ-CFP-EcologiesBuiltEnvironment.pdf

18/02/2021

Special section call for papers: 'Why is there no non-Western island studies theory?', Island Studies Journal, November 2022
https://islandstudies.ca/sites/default/files/ISJ-CFP-Non-WesternIslandStudies.pdf
Guest Editors: Adam Grydehøj, Ping Su, Yaso Nadarajah, & Elena Burgos Martinez

Background
In his essay ‘Our sea of islands’, the Tongan-Fijian scholar Epeli Hauʻofa (1994) writes of the “belittling view [of small, isolated, dependent Pacific island societies] that has been unwittingly
propagated, mostly by social scientists who have sincere concern for the welfare of Pacific peoples.” Although Hauʻofa’s criticism is in significant part targeted at the then-emerging field of island studies, his essay has come to be seen as a seminal text within this field. Yet like so many other non-Western scholars, Hauʻofa is today as likely to be treated as a primary source for non-Western conceptions regarding islands as he is to be treated as an expert and authoritative researcher. From its very inception as a distinct field, island studies has positioned itself as a challenge to taken-for-granted and outsider-dominated narratives of islandness.
Island studies has nevertheless struggled when it comes to the inclusion of non-Western scholars, both islanders and mainlanders (bearing in mind the problematic and artificial nature of both the Western/non-Western and islander/mainlander dichotomies). Like many other fields, island studies is implicated in the process by which the experiences of non-Western and colonised peoples are converted into academic capital within Western professional and financial frameworks.

Even as increasing numbers of non-Western scholars have begun contributing to island studies, a vast majority of prominent theorists who position themselves within the field are Western
(primarily male) scholars. Many non-Western scholars from both island and mainland contexts find their scope of recognised research circumscribed. Assumptions and assessments of expertise
tend to be regionally confined, and non-Western islanders in particular may struggle when seeking to move beyond the arts and humanities and into the more strictly gatekept realms of the
social sciences and environmental sciences. In addition, whereas Western scholarship has generally accepted that Western researchers from the mainland can legitimately study island contexts, many non-Western mainland scholars are asked to constantly justify and qualify their engagement with island research. Similarly, the globalised academic system frequently forces non-Western islander researchers to choose between either being acknowledged as legitimate scholars or being acknowledged as legitimate islanders (Gegeo, 2001). As a consequence, non-Western perspectives are at special risk of being seen as niche, limited, and biased (Grydehøj et al, 2021), and much non-Western research and theoretical inquiry has its status downgraded to that of anecdote or de-academicised to that of artwork. Tokenism is widespread, itself inspiring an equally problematic desire for a race-blind island studies that overlooks systemic injustices rooted in coloniality.

This special section
Taking its inspiration from Acharya and Buzan’s (2007) important work on ‘Why is there no non-Western international relations theory?’, this special section of Island Studies Journal questions
why island studies has struggled to genuinely engage with non-Western theoretical approaches and considers what impacts this has had on both the research field and on island communities.
Further developing Nadarajah and Grydehøj’s (2016) call for a ‘decolonial island studies’ and Gómez-Barris and Joseph’s (2019) emphasising of ‘coloniality and islands’, we ask how island studies can more effectively, more respectfully, and more openly approach non-Western perspectives, challenging rigid and exclusivist boundaries of island studies. The special section will include papers considering (among other topics):
• How have various national or cultural traditions of researching islands developed in non-Western contexts? (i.e. histories of island research in Japan, Chile, India, etc.)
• How do writers and researchers from outside the West engage (and not engage) in island studies?
• Why might island studies have difficulty appealing to non-Western scholars?
• What can non-Western theorisations of islands and archipelagos tell us about islandness?
• How could island studies become more epistemologically diverse?
• How do academia in general and academic publishing in particular condition opportunities for pursuing non-Western island studies theory?

How to publish in the special section
This special section will be published in November 2022 in Island Studies Journal (ISJ), but individual papers will be published online ahead of print as and when they complete the peer review and the editorial process. For further information, or if you are interested in submitting a paper, contact: Adam Grydehøj ([email protected]) or another special section coeditor. The deadline for final submission is 31 December 2021. All papers are subject to peer review.