Even as coal mining expands across regional Australia, harming most aspects of Country, moments of possibility continue to emerge through reflecting on, and being with, water places. This reflection recounts a walk along the Goulburn River, a waterway now partly shaped by extractive practices, to The Drip, an important water place. The walk formed part of the process of developing an exhibition on Ngayirr Ngurambang (sacred Country), curated by co-author Aleshia Lonsdale, a local Wiradjuri woman, and featuring artworks by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. By sharing this account, we aim to foreground relational connections grounded in Ngayirr Ngurambang. We argue that centring Indigenous understandings of water places, and deepening non-Indigenous understandings of what Country means, can help open up alternative futures. We also suggest that walking with Country and engaging with artworks that convey what Country means-by First Nations and non-First Nations artists-offers practical ways to decentre settler-colonial power, practices, and knowledges.
Roffey's 2012 novel, Archipelago, provides a fruitful context for readers to consider the possibility of an archipelagic ontology and its potential as an alternative model to understand and address the climate crisis. This essay begins with a reflection on modern society's control-oriented approach to the environments and relates it to a terracentric way of life and worldview. It then uses the idea of 'wet ontologies' to examine how water in its various forms frustrates humanity's tendency to control the environments and, in doing so, attunes humanity to a less controlling way of life and relationship with the environments. Thinking with Glissant and new materialism, the essay further shows that an archipelagic ontology can lead to two affective-ethical components: 'oceanic care' and 'non-controlling responsibility.' Both are instrumental in facilitating a global transition to a less individualistic and less anthropocentric way of life in the Anthropocene.
This article examines the dynamics of social stratification and mobility among fishing communities in Tegal, Central Java, focusing on how patron-client relations structure access to capital, labour, and markets. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2024 in Muarareja (involving small-scale fishing operations) and in Tegalsari (with larger vessels), the study employs a qualitative approach combining in-depth interviews, participant observation, and documentation. The analysis identifies three major strata: boat owners, skippers, and crew whose positions are determined by access to financial resources and fishing assets. Evidence shows upward mobility when crews or skippers accumulate savings or secure bank loans using land or house certificates, while downward mobility occurs when boat owners lose assets due to debt, poor catches, or mismanagement. Patron-client networks with banks and middlemen regulate capital flows and fish trade but also entrench dependency. Beyond economics, cultural meanings, boat ownership as prestige, auction halls as arenas of negotiation, and beliefs in mystical practices shape mobility trajectories. By integrating structural and cultural perspectives, the article contributes to understanding stratification and mobility in Indonesian fisheries and underscores the need for safer credit systems and transparent market mechanisms.
This article examines how islands are represented as post-violence spaces in contemporary literary scholarship. Drawing on Critical Island Studies and employing a Narrative Literature Review (NLR), the study synthesises interdisciplinary literary research analysing island narratives in relation to violence, trauma, fear, and resistance. Rather than treating islands as neutral or isolated settings, the article conceptualises them as relational landscapes shaped by colonial structures, mobility, and global violence. Using relationality, structural and cultural violence, and trauma belatedness as analytical lenses, the synthesis identifies recurring patterns across literary contexts. The findings show that island narratives position insularity at the intersection of isolation and connectivity, where colonial domination, displacement, and repression shape spatial relations and social life. Within these conditions, fear, trauma, resistance, and healing emerge as co-present and non-linear processes embedded in memory and everyday relations. By synthesising diverse literary scholarship, the study demonstrates how archipelagic literature illuminates the persistence of violence and relational practices through which communities sustain meaning and continuity. The study highlights the value of interdisciplinary literary approaches bridging island, violence, and trauma studies.
This study examines the maritime practices and related socio-economic-ecological relations that have produced an aquapelago in the lagoon space around Luang, one of Indonesia's outermost small islands. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, our findings demonstrate that traditional marine resource practices produce differentiations of marine space determined by ecological rhythms and related temporalities, social roles and scales of activity. These practices and their outcomes demonstrate that aquapelagos are complex and volatile spaces that are continuously configured and negotiated by interactions between human and non-human entities, their activities and environmental processes. These spaces also function as sites of knowledge production, where ecological understanding is developed and continuously adapted through embodied experience and intergenerational transmission. As importantly, our study emphasises the extent to which aquapelagic spaces are shaped by unequal access to resources, differentiated mobility capacities and social structures that regulate participation in local livelihood activities. Furthermore, increasing integration into global economic networks, particularly through high-value marine commodities, illustrates the extent to which local fishing practices are embedded within broader processes of commodification and value chains that determine patterns of spatial use and access. By foregrounding everyday practices as the basis of spatial production, this study demonstrates that aquapelagic spaces and temporalities are continuously reconfigured through the interplay between livelihood practices, ecological dynamics and global political-economic processes.
This article takes stock of two decades of scholarship on micronationality and islands, tracing the evolution of the field from marginal curiosity to a conceptually rich interdisciplinary domain. Drawing on Shima's Micronationality Anthology, related special issues, and wider contributions, the review identifies six recurring motifs: identity and performance, governance and community, legal and political sovereignty, islandness and spatiality, tourism and branding, and digital micronations. Micronations are shown to enact sovereignty through performative artefacts (e.g., flags, constitutions, rituals) while islands provide bounded and legible stages for these experiments. Legal analyses highlight the paradox of contingent sovereignty, where recognition proves more decisive than criteria of statehood. Island Studies frames micronations as laboratories of scale, enclosure, and connectivity, while cultural and media perspectives emphasise their entanglement with tourism, art, and digital infrastructures. Methodological pluralism underscores the interdisciplinarity of the field. This article advances a synthetic framework of performative relational sovereignty, positioning micronations as sites for rethinking legitimacy, recognition, and the cultural practice of statehood.
This article addresses the issue of temporality within Island Studies and examines the potential for integrating a temporal dimension into the predominantly spatial framework, which currently shapes much of island scholarship. The first section engages with key theories and authors in time studies, exploring opportunities for Island Studies arising from the temporal turn. The second section draws on interdisciplinary research that problematises temporalities in island-based investigations. The final section critically examines the problem of temporality in Island Studies through the concept of rogue viewpoints. Through this lens, temporality is reconceptualised as marginal, disruptive, and nonlinear, thereby enhancing the understanding of islands on their own terms and expanding their epistemic potential. The article contends that supplementing the field's spatial orientation with temporal perspectives offers significant epistemological and practical implications for future research in Island Studies.
This article examines Daiva Dasakam (1914), a ten-verse Malayalam prayer by Sree Narayana Guru, as a subaltern aquatic theology emerging from the caste-stricken social geography of colonial Kerala, India. The hymn, originally intended as a collective prayer, is still used today across the Ezhava community, a caste historically subjected to untouchability and socio-spatial exclusion. Reading Guru through the frameworks of aquapelagic studies and political devotion, we argue that the hymn relocates the divine from Brahmanical land-based hierarchies to an egalitarian maritime imaginary. This aquapelagic shift enables Guru to imagine a 'touchable' God and a collective of devotees navigating beyond the reach of caste authority. The analysis demonstrates how Guru's poetic theology refuses Brahmanical legibility and constructs a heterotopic space at sea. It becomes an act of theological self-authorisation that speaks to the politics of lower-caste emancipation. This article places caste and subaltern littoral poetics at the heart of aquapelagic thought, contributing to a Blue Humanities that is expanding geographically and becoming increasingly attentive to the marginalised epistemologies of the Indian Ocean world.
Following Homi Bhabha's Third Space theory, this study undertakes an analysis of Moniquill Blackgoose's fantasy novel To Shape a Dragon's Breath (2023), which skilfully delineates a multi-faceted, three-dimensional network of island-mainland spatial interaction via the protagonist's identity practice, cross-cultural negotiation, and power reconstruction. Through a fantasy narrative in which Anequs, an Indigenous girl from Masquapaug Island, enters an "Anglish" coloniser-dominated dragon academy, the book effectively unveils three profound colonial dilemmas: colonial spatial othering that constructs islands as backward and exploitable peripheries; colonial erasure of Indigenous history and traditional knowledge; and the fragmented identity predicament of Indigenous subjects trapped in racial, patriarchal, and cultural oppression. Simultaneously, the work displays the Indigenous subject's capacity for active resistance: Anequs rejects colonial mimicry and cultural subservience, upholds the Masquapaug traditions of human-nature symbiosis, ecological wisdom, and communal equality, and presents a pluralistic spatial community that transcends binary oppositions, respects cultural differences, and preserves communal autonomy.
Sebesi Island provides an illuminating context for exploring mobility, resilience and livelihoods on small islands. Despite its remote location in the heart of the Sunda Strait and its exposure to environmental hazards-including volcanic eruptions from Mount Anak ICrakatau, earthquakes, tsunamis, and illegal sand mining-the Sebesi community has cultivated adaptive livelihood strategies and demonstrated enduring resilience. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and oral histories, this study situates Sebesi within the growing discourse of Islandness and mobility, framing mobility not simply as movement but as a relational, transformative, and place-anchored strategy of survival. The findings reveal that Sebesian mobility-expressed through interisland farming, trade, motorcycle workshops, junk businesses, harbor portering, and community lending-enables livelihood diversification and economic resilience. Rather than seeking displacement, residents choose to remain and adapt, continuing to live their lives, where movement becomes a response to structural marginalisation and environmental precarity. Furthermore, Sebesians succeed in retaining place-based identity while navigating systemic constraints. By integrating global island scholarship with localised knowledge from Sebesi Island, this paper bridges a critical gap in small-island research, offering a bottom-up perspective on how mobility fosters resilience and sustainable livelihoods. Ultimately, it argues that remoteness catalyses-not curtails-entrepreneurial adaptation, positioning mobility as a central strategy for island communities to survive and thrive.
The current article aims to shed light on the way three Iraqi authors-'Abd al-Rahman Majid al-Rubay'i, Gha'ib Tu'ma Farman, and 'Aliya Mamduh-refer in their works to two main bodies of water: the Tigris River and the marshes in Southern Iraq. It begins with a review of how the Tigris River has been depicted in Arabic poetry throughout the years and then explores the functionalities of the Tigris in prose works, both as a reflection of the characters' inner world and as a means of social criticism. The final part of the article discusses life in the marshes through a short story written two decades prior to the drainage of the region imposed by Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the 1991 revolt and the Gulf War. Since the stories are rooted in the authors' intimate knowledge of the region, they can be interpreted as having a historically informative function, adding the aspect of human emotional experience to what is usually examined through quantitative data alone.
This article examines the multifaceted role of urban markets in post-War Okinawan society, arguing that these commercial spaces have been functioning as critical nodes of community cohesion, cultural transmission and collective resilience that extend far beyond their economic purpose. Through an interdisciplinary lens incorporating ethnographic methodology, oral history, archival research and visual and sound mapping of the communicative ecology of machigw & amacr; (small markets) in the Okinawan capital, Naha, this study demonstrates how Okinawan markets exemplify the concept of 'social infrastructure'-physical spaces that facilitate social interaction and community building. The research draws on these methods to trace the evolution of the machigw & amacr; from its establishment as black market in the post-war era through contemporary challenges posed by tourism commodification, the COVID-19 pandemic, generational shifts and urban development. The findings reveal that machigw & amacr; has historically operated and continues to do so as embedded social ecosystems where economic transactions have been mediated by gender, kinship networks, reciprocal relationships and shared historical trauma. However, these communal functions are facing significant threats from tourism-driven spatial reorganisation and disrupted intergenerational knowledge transfer that risk bypassing community needs. Despite these challenges, the machigw & amacr;'s evolution shows that it has the capacity to maintain aspects of its social infrastructure while adapting to contemporary pressures, at least for now.
Water, a vital element of the planet, has socio-cultural value that is now recognised by both humanities and hard sciences, and aquatic landscapes are fluid meeting places of nature and culture, result of processes and interactions between living beings. Collective domains, primary legal organisations, have existed in Italy since before the State and manage territories that also include water in its various forms. The communities, custodians of the resource, guarantee its rational and sustainable use, opposing the capitalist exploitation of this asset. These spaces are influenced by and in turn influence local dynamics that have repercussions on a global scale. This article presents the case study of an Italian Alpine collective domain that is fighting alone through legal channels to regain custody of its resource, which for decades has been the subject of speculation and revenues that are not invested in the territory but taken elsewhere: those who use and do not own impoverish the living environment both by subtracting assets and by disrupting the social fabric.
This article examines how two little-known mid-Qing (1644-1911) Chinese novels, Xiyi Meng and Haiyou Ji, construct alternative territorial imaginaries of Qing China through a constellation of aquatic elements, including submarine archipelagos, the whirlpool phenomena and river systems. Drawing upon recent scholarship on aquapelagos, it shows that the two texts display a fluid spatial continuum that reconceives Qing geography and redefines Chineseness through the centrality of waters. It situates both novels within a genealogy of Chinese island writing as well as the historical context of late imperial China, in order to shows how they reshape imperial discourses of islands into a critique of the Qing empire. It also utilises multiple mid-Qing maps to provide visual representation of the novels’ innovative assemblages of aquatic spaces as well as their imaginative underwater archipelagos marked by riverine geographies. In so doing, this study argues that both novels embody the processes of cultural assimilation and fragmentation that characterised Qing imperial expansionism. It challenges the homogenising paradigms of continentalism and nationalism that has informed contemporary concepts of China, contributing to the envisioning of decolonial futures.
This ethnographic-based research article explores the intricate transition from nomadic aquapelagic lifestyles to situated marine governance among Southeast Asian Sea Nomads (Sama-Bajau, Orang Suku Laut, Urak Lawoi and Moken). It highlights how, despite physical sedentarisation, a resilient nomadic mindset endures through adaptive practices such as seasonal migration that enable these communities to swiftly navigate socio-ecological challenges. The current situation of Sea Nomads becomes critical when understood in relation to governance and potential conflicts that demand nuanced exploration. On land, Sea Nomads encounter myriad challenges, including discrimination in terms of land access and broader developmental concerns. At sea, the designation of protected marine areas poses challenges to their traditional aquapelagic livelihood patterns, preservation of local wisdom and access to sacred marine spaces. Temporary shelters in the forms of babaroh, bagad and saphaw, which are constructed in littoral areas, create the dynamics of accessibility to both the seascape and landscape. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the socio-ecological dynamics and multifaceted dimensions of intricate interplay between traditions and modernity in contemporary Sea Nomads. The article also contributes to the general study of aquapelagic societies by examining their reaction to governmental attempts to standardise the bases of their livelihoods and lifestyles with regard to terrestrial norms.
This integrated article and photographic essay have been developed from a shared experience of one year along the banks of a short stretch of the Retrone River, in Vicenza (Italy), between a geographer and a photographer, merging these disciplines into a single reflection on inhabiting and understanding the margins-the riverbanks. The proposition of geo-photography as an interdisciplinary research method situated at the intersection of science and art, is put forward, in the wake of creative geographies. This approach, which is rarely adopted in the geographical academic world, aims to raise awareness and cultivate sensitivity towards waterways. However, it is of significant value in the investigation of the ongoing transformations in the urban landscape where the river flows and it appears to hold great promise in opening new perspectives, especially in the capacity of exchange and communicating with other ongoing initiatives for the protection of the riverscape. This approach involves a repositioning of the focal point to encompass the intricate interplay between water and land. The objective is to transcend the conventional anthropocentric and exploitive paradigm on waterscapes in favour of an egalitarian interspecies research approach within this landscape.
The watershed of Mexico is a noteworthy example of profound anthropogenic impact on the environment. This paper examines the early modern conceptualisation of the Basin of Mexico, linking this process to water management and, more broadly, to hydropolitics. The representation of Tenochtitlan merged practical and symbolic meanings, shaping projects that aimed to transform both society and the environment. Water management initiatives carried significant ideological and political implications, which unfolded in contested ways, reflecting competing interests and perspectives in what has come to be known as hydropolitics. Since the first European depiction of Tenochtitlan, the so-called Map of Cort & eacute;s, symbolic strategies were employed to legitimise Spanish conquest. However, in other contexts - particularly in Venice - an alternative and more positive interpretation of Tenochtitlan emerged. Despite their differences, 16th century Venice and Tenochtitlan shared not only representational similarities but also certain water management strategies, rooted in analogous hydropolitical frameworks that considered local communities and the centrality of the lakes. While Venice has maintained this policy to the present day, the Basin of Mexico saw a shift in hydropolitical dynamics from the 17th century onward, as urban perspective and interests increasingly imposed over surrounding communities and the lake environment.
Land use changes can pose threats to natural ecosystems already challenged by anthropogenic pressures and increase societal exposure to river-related risks such as floods. In the Tagliamento river basin, a reference ecosystem for the restoration of Alpine rivers, land use planning was identified by locals as a major flood risk management issue. Here, we present evidence of the evolution of land use in the basin and explore the synergies between river conservation efforts and ecosystem-based land use planning. We present two storylines, one about a village that moved across the river and a second about a village that became an island. The analysis of the two storylines suggests a narrative that highlights (i) the preservation of natural regulatory functions in the middle course and (ii) the reactivation of fluvial corridors and wetlands in the lower course. Past documents highlighted that land use plans should account for threats posed by multiple hazardous phenomena (e.g., floods and droughts) to natural and human assets. We provide suggestions for future land use plans in the river basin integrating local knowledge and historical evidence into contextdependent storylines to convey risk-related concepts to the public.
