Response: the Anthropocene Islands agenda

We respond to the generous and constructive commentaries on ‘Anthropocene Islands: there are only islands after the end of the world’ (Chandler and Pugh, 2021) by Craig Santos Perez, Claire Colebrook, Stephanie Wakefield, Elena Burgos Martinez, Kevin Grove, Sasha Davis and Mimi Sheller. We engage and think with their contributions as part of the process of forming a critical research agenda using the initial article as a springboard or platform for discussion - rather than as a set of research conclusions or a polemical statement. The contributions, to our minds, work in critical relation to the field and develop it in significant ways

Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds

The island has become a key figure of the Anthropocene – an epoch in which human entanglements with nature come increasingly to the fore. For a long time, islands were romanticised or marginalised, seen as lacking modernity’s capacities for progress, vulnerable to the effects of catastrophic climate change and the afterlives of empire and coloniality. Today, however, the island is increasingly important for both policy-oriented and critical imaginaries that seek, more positively, to draw upon the island’s liminal and disruptive capacities, especially the relational entanglements and sensitivities its peoples and modes of life are said to exhibit. Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds explores the significant and widespread shift to working with islands for the generation of new or alternative approaches to knowledge, critique and policy practices. It explains how contemporary Anthropocene thinking takes a particular interest in islands as ‘entangled worlds’, which break down the human/nature divide of modernity and enable the generation of new or alternative approaches to ways of being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). The book draws out core analytics which have risen to prominence (Resilience, Patchworks, Correlation and Storiation) as contemporary policy makers, scholars, critical theorists, artists, poets and activists work with islands to move beyond the constraints of modern approaches. In doing so, it argues that engaging with islands has become increasingly important for the generation of some of the core frameworks of contemporary thinking and concludes with a new critical agenda for the Anthropocene

Islands and the rise of correlational epistemology in the Anthropocene: rethinking the trope of the ‘canary in the coalmine’

Once on the periphery of international debate, today small islands are seen by many as key to unlocking new ways of thinking about climate change and developing new practices of adaptation in the epoch of the Anthropocene. These approaches differ starkly from modernist, linear, causal frameworks that construct islands as vulnerable objects that require ‘saving’ or ‘protecting’. Instead, islands become instruments of productive knowledge, laboratories for investigation and learning, fundamental to an alternative, correlational, epistemology. In analysing these approaches, we take the prolific trope of islands as the ‘canaries in the coalmine’ in order to draw out the ontological implications of instrumentalising islands as ‘correlational machines’ in the Anthropocene. We raise fundamental problems with this literal instrumentalisation of islands and islanders, drawing out how these logics reduce island life to merely sensing and attuning to the co-relational entanglements of the Anthropocene, rather than offering higher normative aspirations for political change

Anthropocene Islands: there are only islands after the end of the world

Many Anthropocene scholars provide us with the key take home message that they are writing ‘after the end of the world’. Not because they are writing about apocalypse, but because they are engaging the Anthropocene after the profound crisis of faith in Western modernity which has swept across academia in recent decades. Here the dominant problematic of contemporary Anthropocene thinking has rapidly turned away from modernity’s human/nature divide to that of ‘relational entanglements’ (Weinstein and Colebrook, 2017; Giraud, 2019). Thus, Anthropocene scholarship is taking a particular interest in geographical forms and cultures which are held to bring this problematic to the fore for more intensive interrogation. In this paper we examine how the figure of the island as a liminal and transgressive space has facilitated Anthropocene thinking, working with and upon island forms and imaginations to develop alternatives to hegemonic, modern, ‘mainland’ or ‘one world’ thinking. Thus, whilst islands, under modern frameworks of reasoning, were reductively understood as isolated, backward, dependent, vulnerable and in need of saving by others, the island is being productively re-thought in and for more recent Anthropocene thinking. We explain how islands have shifted from the margins to the centre of many international debates, becoming emblematic sites for understanding relational entanglements, enabling alternative forms of thought and practice in the Anthropocene

Conclusion: A Critical Agenda for the Anthropocene

This conclusion restates the argument of the book that the engagement with islands in many debates today is not merely caught up in the slipstream of contemporary social and philosophical trends but is important to the ontological and onto-epistemological framing and tools of the Anthropocene. It clarifies that the book undertakes an analysis of the ‘work’ that thinking with islands, island imaginaries, island writers, artists, poets, activists, and island problematics is doing in these debates. Not only thinking about, but ‘with ‘islands has become an important resource for alternative and non-modern relational ontologies and understandings in the Anthropocene. The authors suggest that there is a need to not only critically focus upon how the modern episteme reductively grasps islands but to also establish a new critical research agenda focused upon how islands are being enrolled in debates about the Anthropocene as key sites for understanding relational entanglements and in the generation of many different forms of relational ontology and ways of knowing. Working with islands or relational thought per se is not one homogenous ‘other’ to modernist or mainland approaches, and so the chapter clarifies why it is important to start a new conversation about how we engage in working through the rich variety of possibilities and opportunities that these approaches afford. In conclusion the chapter elaborates upon how the authors see this book as an initial opening for a new critical agenda for island studies in the Anthropocene

There are Only Islands After the End of the World

Summarising the contemporary shift towards working with islands in the Anthropocene in a set of concepts, this introduction outlines the key tropes of ‘relational entanglements’, ‘relational awareness’ and ‘feedbacks’ in writing on islands. Working with islands plays an increasingly notable role in Anthropocene thinking as it is precisely with islands that these relational effects come to the fore. Island ‘differences’ – the attributes, relational affordances and powers associated with islands – have put working with islands to the forefront of Anthropocene research and theory. Outlining the rationale for the structure of the book this chapter highlights the key elements of a critical agenda for island studies: focusing upon relational ontologies (Resilience and Patchworks) and relational onto-epistemologies (Correlation and Storiation), and ultimately the importance of island studies in the Anthropocene. To understand why and how Anthropocene thinking is as it is today, is only possible if we are able to more fully consider how and why working with islands is playing such an important and generative role

Correlation: Registers of Change

Chapter 4 analyses how Correlation approaches maintain a knowing human subject and a world of patterned regularity amenable to policy intervention. Here, the island emerges as a ‘correlational technology’ where changes are seen as early indicators of climate change. Central however, is an (onto)epistemology of inter-relation and correlation rather than one of linear cause-and-effect: we move from a temporal and spatial line of movement to one of synchronicity. Correlational modes are deployed for sensing global warming, rising sea levels and other shifting planetary conditions. As islands are reinterpellated as ‘living laboratories’, the authors argue that the island is seen as enabling the generation of onto-epistemologies operating on correlative not causal principles. In addition to such correlational practices as the evolutionary patterns of island life, there is the widespread celebration of Indigenous islanders’ correlational abilities, useful in the ‘forecasting of extreme weather conditions’. Such approaches have received a high-tech boost in the Anthropocene, taking the algorithmic form of the, ‘if this … then that’ logic associated with Big Data, the Internet of Things and the trope of the ‘smart island’. Here, prolific use of Big Data combined with extensive networks of sensors or tracking social media on islands enables rapid policy responsiveness. The authors demonstrate how working with islands as sites for understanding relational entanglements and feedbacks plays an important role in the generation and exponential development of Correlational onto-epistemologies in broader Anthropocene thinking

Patchworks: The Ontology of the World

Chapter 3 turns to ‘Patchwork ontologies’. Compared to Resilience, Patchwork ontologies shift debate towards affirmation and replace the modernist imaginary of islands with a more open ontology of spatial and temporal becoming. While this remains a relational understanding, Patchwork ontologies are more disruptive, destabilising the ‘solutionist’ or instrumentalising aspects of Resilience; making them more open, less governmentalising and human-centred. This is reflected in the work of the many ‘Patchwork ontologists’, critical thinkers, artists, designers, experimenters and poets who today frequently turn to islands and islander life to draw out how entanglements of relation are never fixed. Patchworks instead attend to disturbances and how islands are powerful ways of expressing processes of world-making. A key figure here is Glissant, and his focus upon ‘giving-on-and-with’ ‘Relation’, which pushes thinking with islands to the point that we can never stand outside and grasp (island) relations, only immerse ourselves in the texture and turbulence of the weave. For patchwork approaches, thinking with islands then becomes a ‘verb’ (Teaiwa) and practice of ‘staying with the trouble’, opening ourselves to relational affects – an immersive process of becoming which is today being developed by a wide engagement with islands and islander life

A Variability Study of the Typical Red Supergiant Antares A

Red giants and red supergiants have long been known to be variable. In the last 40 years many of the features of this variability have been associated with large convective cells. Unfortunately, due to the long timescales of these variations they are not well studied, with the exception of the bright M-class supergiant Betelgeuse (α Orionis, M2 Iab). Betelgeuse has been well studied both observationally and theoretically, and has many features that are well described by models of convection. It was these studies of Betelgeuse that provided the main motivation for this thesis. We ask if the dramatic motions seen in the atmospheres of Betelgeuse (Gray 2008 amongst others) are typical of red supergiants and if their variations can be described by convective motions as is the case for that enigmatic star. Sixty-five spectra of the M-class supergiant Antares A (α Scorpii A, M1.5 Iab) were obtained at the Elginfield observatory from April 2008 until July 2010. These data were combined with historical radial velocity measures, Hipparcos photometry, and AAVSO photometry. From these data we determine four scales of variability: ~7140 days, 2167 days, ~1260 days, and ~100 days. The longest of these periods is found from the AAVSO photometry and cannot be confirmed by any of the other data. A period of similar length has been reported in one previous study but no analysis was completed. A period of this length (~7140 days; 19 years) is consistent with suspected rotation rates for red supergiants, though it is also plausible that episodic dust ejection could cause such a variation. The 2167-day variation was found from historical and present radial velocity measures. Due to the shape of the radial velocity curve, and a phase shift compared to the temperature curve, we interpret this period as a pulsation or a long secondary period. The ~1260-day period found from both sets of photometry and the 100-day timescale found from our spectral analysis are both interpreted along with a handful of periods found in the literature as arising from convection