Geomythology, the study of the relationships between supernatural narratives and physical geography, is claimed to have the ability to shed light on both nature and culture. Much geomythology research arising out of the natural sciences approaches supernatural narratives and folk culture as sources of information about past geological events. Taking a folklore studies approach, we use a study of topographical legends and other stories concerning the goddess Guanyin on the island of Mount Putuo, China to argue that neither oral nor written narratives are reliable sources of information about the past. Focusing on identification of Putuo with the mythical otherworld Potalaka, appearances of Guanyin at Tidal Sound Cave, and the location of the sacred Purple Bamboo Grove, we show the difficulties that arise in seeking to interpret supernatural narratives as straightforward results of natural phenomena. The relationships between culture, narrative, religion, and place are highly complex, and intertextual relationships contribute to constantly changing cultures and environments. We advocate culturally and geographically contextualised studies of myth, legend, and nature, and we question the usefulness of geomythology approaches to research.

This article examines the Hakka cultural inheritance and identity negotiations in Easton Lee's Heritage Call: Ballad for the Children of the Dragon. It argues that the collection of poems constructs Chinese-Jamaican identity through the interplay of ancestral memory, everyday practice and relational belonging. The article first explores ways of reimagining the Hakka ancestral homeland as a narrated and ethically charged space, rather than as a fixed origin of return. It then looks at the way in which Lee presents food, rituals, language and shop routines as embodied practices of cultural transmission. Finally, it shows how Hakka heritage is negotiated in Jamaican family and community lives. Ultimately, Lee's poetry imagines Chinese Jamaican belonging as a creolised formation rooted in memory, performance, and translation.

In this response to Davies and Lai’s (2025) commentary ‘Is “Island Study” but a Form of Land Study?’ we advance the case for attentiveness to islandness within planning studies. Even though islands possess diverse characteristics, and it is impossible to formulate a universal definition for island or set of universal characteristics of islandness, perceptions surrounding islandness remain important for how people think about and engage with space. Because people often treat islands as distinctive spaces requiring special planning and management solutions, a sense of islandness can profoundly impact the development of human settlements.

This article examines Caribbean futurism as articulated in Oonya Kempadoo’s creative project, including both the novel Naniki and the Naniki Immersive location-based experience. By situating the novel within the speculative tradition of time and space in Caribbean literature, the article analyzes Kempadoo’s decolonial deep time narrative as a means of reclaiming suppressed Caribbean histories, as well as her submerged storytelling, through which she imagines symbiotic multispecies communities in response to an environmentally ravaged Caribbean. By foregrounding the interrelations among technology, literary imagination, and cultural expression across the Naniki project, the article finally explores how Kempadoo envisions sustainable and interactive Caribbean futures. It argues that, by mobilizing Caribbean knowledges and sensibilities, Kempadoo proposes alternative ways of living that address intertwined histories and contemporary forms of oppression and exploitation affecting both land and people. In doing so, her work invites participants to become agents of change in shaping and inhabiting an alternative Caribbean future through highlighting the political intervention of Caribbean futurism.

hinese folklore studies possesses a long, complex trajectory shaped by local social, cultural and political discourses. While European and North American folklore often seeks ‘the past in the present’, this guest editorial introduction argues that Chinese folklore operates by finding ‘the present in the past’. We discuss the academic discipline of Chinese folklore studies as part of Chinese folklore itself, exploring the connections between folklore; folklore theories; and Chinese understandings of national culture, traditions and the past. The paper examines folklore in relation to constructions of Chinese history and the impact of the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) movement, which integrates fragmentary folklore into the nation’s grand historical narrative. The introduction also outlines how digital communication technologies and social media are reshaping contemporary folklore and performance practices. Collectively, the special section’s empirical papers highlight the continuous negotiation of authenticity, lineage and commercialisation, demonstrating that while traditions adapt or decline, Chinese folklore remains a dynamic, evolving process that continually thrives in the present.

The study of islands in speculative fiction intersects with cultural geography, political theory, and literary futurology. It unfolds within the concept of relational shifts between islands and continents, the deconstruction and reconstruction of the East-West binary, and the dynamic interplay between technology and human knowledge systems. As one of the most technologically and socially imaginative forms of literature, speculative fiction positions humanity within a vast coordinate system spanning the local, the global, and even the interstellar. In so doing, it examines and reflects upon the past, present, and future of human civilization—ultimately offering insights that may contribute to a more harmonious and sustainable future. Building on these themes, this special section explores how islands are represented and imagined in speculative fiction, including science fiction, to uncover the unique qualities that distinguish future-oriented island narratives from their traditional counterparts. The papers included here can be divided into three key thematic categories: (1) islands as liminal spaces for seeking identity and redemption, (2) islands as sites of ecological and economic crisis, and (3) islands as realms of colonial and utopian imaginations.

Island studies has had much to say about why understanding perceptions of islandness matters for understanding the world, and it has often questioned what islandness is. Island studies has nevertheless often taken for granted that islandness ought to be perceived and has often seen islandness as something good that requires preservation. The act of studying islands per se introduces the risk that a researcher will look for and look at islands without considering whether the islands they are seeing really exist to everyone, and whether they exist for certain other people in the ways the scholar believes them to exist. In this paper, we argue that there can never be a universally or objectively correct understanding of islands, as these are socially constructed geographical phenomena. Building upon the authors' own personal engagements with questions of islandness in China, Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland, and Fiji, we suggest it is important for scholars to think carefully about why and how islandness matters in particular places—or else to acknowledge what motivations and power relations drive them to ascribe island status.

This study employs Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to investigate maternal agency in Family Language Policy (FLP) among six African-Chinese intermarriage families in Guangzhou, China. Drawing on seven years of ethnographic work, including participatory observations, interviews, and focus groups, the study traced how mothers negotiate FLP within dynamic networks of heterogeneous actors (fathers, children, resources, institutions, peers, auxiliary caregivers, and technologies). Findings reveal maternal agency as an emergent network effect, contingent on mother's problematization of language development and continuous interessement, enrolment, and mobilisation of the actors. Yet these efforts were systematically disrupted by competing actor-networks: fathers prioritising provider roles, children asserting Mandarin-preferring counter-networks, and economic pressures capturing material resources. The study advances FLP scholarship by demonstrating ANT's utility in tracing temporal, contested, and scale-blurring agency dynamics, while practically advocating for peer-integration initiatives and parental training to support African-Chinese intermarriage families in China.

This paper uses affordance theory to understand setting as a technology that performs narrative work. We focus on the changing role of island settings in the history of science fiction (sf) literature and film (including sf horror). Island settings have been used for their affordance of confinement, which can produce feelings of fear and produce the monstrous, both within the narrative and for readers/viewers. As changing sociotechnical contexts have reduced the island setting’s ability to provide this affordance, users have increasingly turned to other settings that better afford spatial confinement, including sailing ships, alien planets, spaceships, and haunted houses.

This paper analyses two novels by Gustav Meyrink—The Golem (Der Golem, 1915) and The White Dominican (Der weiße Dominikaner, 1921)—through the lens of Chinese religion. Although Meyrink is an influential author in German Modernism, occult and supernatural fiction, the paper shows that his literary vision was strongly influenced by Chinese religion, particularly Buddhist and Daoist traditions, mediated through contemporary Orientalist scholarship and the religious activities of the Theosophical Society and related Western esoteric movements. By examining the previously neglected elements of Buddhism and Daoism in Meyrink’s work, the paper sheds light on how the growing popularity of Chinese religious traditions in wider Western society influenced literary production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The paper highlights the need for greater attentiveness to the intellectual connections between China and Europe when undertaking critical analysis of fiction from this period.

In the face of global problems, efforts are being made to construct sustainable city role models. However, the very proliferation of self-proclaimed exemplars of sustainable urbanism over the past decades suggests that planners and decisionmakers still lack actionable knowledge of how urban sustainability might be achieved in practice. Drawing upon the authors' decades of experience crossing the realms of urban planning scholarship and practice, this paper deploys the concept of conspicuous sustainability to consider the case of Copenhagen, Denmark, examining why sustainable city projects seem so poor at prompting policy learning of good practices in urban development. Sustainable city developments in Copenhagen such as & Oslash;restad, Lynetteholm, and Amager Bakke illustrate how green-looking archicture, the spectacle of sustainability, and strongly spatialised zones of urban exceptionalism contribute to a condition in which sustainable city rhetoric presupposes policy success and in which urban decisionmakers are incentivised to conspicuously promote even large-scale, complex projects as completely successful, regardless of the difficulties that have been encountered during their implementation. We conclude that it is necessary to find methods of communicating both success and failure in urban development.

This article studies Western (primarily Anglophone) representations of the Dan people (boat people) and the boat clusters on which they lived, relative to the mainland, in the island city of Guangzhou, focusing on 1842-1900. A change occurred over time, as the Dan went from being in close interaction with Westerners prior to the Opium Wars to being peripheral to Western interests and activities. This shift is evident in Western writings, and negative representations of the Dan came to dominate in the late nineteenth century. This mirrored changing sociospatial power relations between Westerners and the terrestrial Chinese, as Westerners increasingly gained access to the onshore city of Guangzhou itself, in part from the colonial island enclave of Shamian. Changing crosscultural interactions affected how the Chinese Others were perceived and ultimately how the Chinese whole was intertextually constructed in Western colonial discourse.

Challenges to social, economic, and environmental sustainability are global in scale, yet sustainable development policies must be implemented locally. There has been a tendency for sustainable urbanism projects to engage in the conspicuous sustainability of spatially bounded and highly visible sustainability achievements, rather than spatially expansive, long-term achievements. China's complex system of multilevel governance encourages policy experimentation, but it is also frequently productive of entrepreneurial urbanism and intercity competition. This paper analyses spatial planning documents concerning Hengqin (Zhuhai Municipality, Guangdong Province), an island adjacent to Macao SAR, to show how the ambitions for a new-build district's contributions to sustainable development have become more spatially expansive and ambitious over time. This has occurred alongside changes in project leadership (from city, to provincial, to central government leadership) as well as a deepening awareness of the Greater Bay Area as a region for crossborder policymaking. The paper argues that crossborder perspectives are vital for genuine sustainable development but face certain obstacles in relation to the sites at which policy decisions are made.

As greater attention has been paid to island research in China, interactions between Chinese and international island scholars have increased. However, research has tended to take an ‘islands of China’ approach, which perceives China as a continental country surrounded by a large number of islands. The present paper proposes an alternative ‘island China’ perspective, informed by selected Chinese traditions of thinking about islands and the sea, that captures the role islands have played and continue to play in Chinese culture. Drawing upon Fei Xiaotong’s reflexive concept of ‘cultural self-consciousness’, we consider the cultural history of island China, including conceptual tensions between the binaries of continent/island and center/periphery, conceptions of land dwellers and water dwellers, the role of islands as hubs of cultural transmission, and the formation of maritime societies across East and Southeast Asia. We also argue that this cultural history ought to influence island governance in China today.

This article traces Guangzhou's urban modernization in the late-Qing and early-Republican eras, with an emphasis on official and public discourses. Focus is placed on interactions between the colonial island enclave of Shamian, separated from the mainland by the Shaji Canal, and the Changdi waterfront that was built on the mainland as a Chinese reaction to the foreign island. Shamian and its Bund exhibited a Western urban modernity that prompted both admiration and anticolonial sentiment in the wider Chinese community. Guangzhou's government reacted to developments on Shamian by constructing Changdi as a modern waterfront district on the north shore of the Pearl River, opposite Shamian. Discourses of urban modernization evolved and underwent cross-cultural exchange throughout. This article takes an island studies approach to analyze the spatial and discursive coproduction of the geographically restricted nearshore island as a colonial enclave and the vast Chinese mainland city striving for self-determination and urban modernization.

Discussions of migration are often dominated by negative discourses, focusing on issues such as security, threats, and governance, while ignoring the function of migration in renewing and creating local cultures, knowledges, and place itself. This article uses securitisation theory to analyse the causes and operation strategies of these negative discourses. The article first discusses the role of migration research in the journal Folk, Knowledge, Place, then explores the securitisation of migration and the collusion between discourse and politics of migration. It advocates a bottom-up perspective, rooted in ethnography, to study the politics of scale in migration. Finally, the paper uses migration to expand the concept of place beyond terrestriality and toward an understanding of water-place.