Island Imaginaries: Introduction to a Special Section

ABSTRACT

Colonial empires, scientists, philanthropists and Hollywood studios have long sustained an image of islands as remote places with unique ecologies and cultures, experimental labs, or loci of escapism. The climate crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have contributed to a predominant view of islands as both exceptional spaces and testbeds to be scaled up onto continental or planetary levels. Likewise, the metaphor of the island is foundational to Western thought yet has been less explored in the context of scientific processes and technology development. Bringing together science and technology studies (STS) with critical Island Studies and related fields, this special section expands upon the spatial dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries to consider islands and their imaginations as both preexisting and channeling visions of science and technology. The introduced concept of Island Imaginaries captures the mutual constitution of island visions and their materialization in scientific, technological and technocratic endeavors that are imagined and pursued by scientific communities, policymakers, and other social collectives. Such an approach explores the co-constitutive dynamic of islands as sites for the foundation of technoscientific knowledge regimes, and the concomitant rendering of islands as conducive places for discovery and experimentation. The special section offers empirical case studies with insights into islands as synecdoche for larger wholes (the Earth), as experimental and exceptional sites for trialing business creation and political orders (in Singapore, and for Asia), and as variously interpreted laboratory paradise (of Hawai‘i). Further research themes for STS are suggested in the Conclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociotechnical imaginaries
• islands and archipelagoes
• space
• testbeds
• experimentation

Introduction

In early March 2020, as political leaders around the world planned lockdowns in response to the Corona pandemic, a brief trend commenced among young employees of U.S.-based tech companies. To sit out the pandemic, many figured that ‘if we have to work from home, we might as well go rent a house in Hawaii’ (Wolfe, 2020). Meanwhile, in Hawai‘i, residents shared their discontent on social media regarding Governor Ige’s late and lax restriction of tourists coming to the Islands. At the same time, on the northernmost inhabited island Kaua‘i, the Mayor imposed a curfew and let visitors know that ‘Kauai is on vacation’ (from tourism)’ (Letman, 2020). A month later, the mayor of the capital Honolulu (on Oahu) provoked a dust-up by suggesting to ‘use some neighbor islands [like Kaua‘i] as a test case’ to reinstate the tourism economy, given Kaua‘i’s low Covid-19 case numbers (Parachini, 2020). Subsequently, politicians and health practitioners were appalled over the suggestion of treating people on Kaua‘i like ‘guinea pigs’ (Parachini, 2020).

Public health measures to shut off a bounded land mass, the sense of being treated like experimental subjects, and the irony of recovered places serving to reestablish economic viability while inevitably linked to infection risks (from tourists), speak to broader questions of what constitutes islands. The Corona pandemic throws into relief dominant epistemological contours that frame islands: as escape, containment, exceptional space, test-bed, or place-specific laboratory. In technocratic views of potential pandemics, islands may be ‘rank[ed]’ according to their suitability as ‘potential refuge for human survival’ (Boyd and Wilson, 2020, p. 1), while islanders’ perspectives are rarely considered.

Yet beyond grave global health scenarios, (neo)colonial empires, militaries, and philanthropists have long taken advantage of, and reinforced specific virtues of islands by turning them into experimental spaces: extracting natural resources to their complete ruins, such as phosphate mining in Pacific islands like Banaba (Teaiwa, 2014), conducting nuclear tests to study repercussions in islanders’ bodies (Barker, 2004; Lemov, 2005), or evicting island populations to install U.S.-American satellite systems (Oldenziel, 2011), to name but a few. Hollywood movies, in turn, have perpetuated images of islands as compelling and uncanny spaces deprived of civilization and the contagion of modernity: in The Beach and Cast Away, white European protagonists think of themselves as discoverers of pristine island, while the sci-fi movie The Island tells the story of a pathogen-free island in a contaminated world – not unlike tech employees flocking to Hawai‘i during the recent pandemic.

The etymological root of ‘island’ is the Roman insula, which referred to both a medieval jurisdiction and physical place (O’Gorman, cf. Gillis, 2004, p. 15), that is, the crafting of a polity, and the very place. Moore’s Utopia (1516), an imagined island and sociopolitical system, Rousseau’s envisioned islandness for homme natural (DeLoughrey, 2001, p. 29), or Stephenson’s Treasure Island (1883) published when the British Isles formed as modern state, all exemplify this duality in Western imaginations of utopian islands: both the absolute power and ascribed geographic taxonomy of islands as bounded landmass, which is foundational to modernity, nationalism, and colonialism (Redfield, 2000; Dodds and Royle, 2003; Gillis, 2004; Steinberg, 2005; Balasopoulos, 2008; McMahon and André, 2018). In an age of continents, which commenced with the colonization of America (see Lewis and Wigen, 1997), controlling large land masses seemed key, while islands were rendered less significant. The term island is thus deeply rooted in (shifting) Euro-centric epistemologies. This is also evident in post-colonial critiques of belittling depictions of ‘small’ Pacific islands (Clifford, 2001; Hau‘ofa, 1993), while many Indigenous Peoples of North America relate to the continent as Turtle Island, thereby upending the common continent-island juxtaposition. What counts as islands is thus inseparable from what counts as ‘mainland’ (Edmond et al., 2003), and consequently, whose perspective counts.

In the 1800s, the island started to figure more centrally as ‘visibly discrete object’ for scientific conducts (MacArthur and Wilson, 1967, p. 3), such as the Galapagos Islands that were cardinal for Charles Darwin’s evolution theory (Beer, 1998; Raby, 2017, chapter 3; Hennessy, 2018). Throughout the twentieth century, islands have served as inconspicuous military bases of empire (Vine, 2009), international tax havens (Maurer, 2001), central loci for global communication networks (Starosielski, 2015), and testing ground for novel technologies and policies, e.g. ‘smart’ innovation programs, or energy systems (Watts, 2019; Laurent et al., 2021). As such, islands also render visible some of the problems that authorities on so-called mainlands wish to outsource. For instance, while claiming to adhere to European ideals of solidarity and human rights, the European Union’s migration policy keeps refugees out (i.e. on Greek islands). The burn-off of the refugee camp Moria on Lesbos brutally illustrates both the EU’s insufficient response to this humanitarian crisis, and the Union’s political fragility at its ostensible edges.

These are but a few examples why a critical conceptual take on imaginations of islands matters, and to ask what is at stake and for whom when these materialize in technological projects and scientific endeavors (Taitingfong, 2020). Bringing island scholarship in STS and related fields (Lemov, 2005; Greenhough, 2006; Farbotko, 2010; Guggenheim, 2012, pp. 111–112; Raby, 2017; Hennessy, 2018; Watts, 2019) in conversation with Island Studies (Gillis, 2004; Fletcher, 2011; Grydehøj, 2017), this special section takes up the discussion on the linkages of imagined and physical islands. Specifically, it poses the following questions: First, what are island imaginaries when considered as sociotechnical imaginaries? Second, how do island imaginaries manifest in taken-for-granted (Western) natural and social theories, and related experiments? Third, in what ways do such imaginaries corroborate islands as technoscientific laboratories, exceptional spaces, or synecdoche of larger land masses?

To address these questions, we approach ontologies and norms of islands as co-produced: what an island is, and how one ought to understand and live in and with it (see Jasanoff, 2004). The three contributions (Gugganig, 2021; Laurent et al., 2021; Webb, 2021) attend to the co-constitutive dynamic of islands as sites for the foundation of technoscientific knowledge regimes, and how scientific, technological and technocratic systems in turn render islands conducive places for discovery and experimentation. After an overview of imaginaries in STS, and island research of interest to an STS readership, the concept of Island Imaginaries will be outlined, and explicated along the three contributions. The introduction ends with concluding thoughts for future work.

Imaginaries in STS

In STS, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries has been employed to theorize how technology initiatives are inflected by visions of desirable futures, and how, conversely, these initiatives perpetuate (or contrast) preexisting frames of reference and political cultures (Jasanoff and Kim, 2009, 2015; Müller and Witjes, 2014; Felt, 2015; Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff, 2017). The concept builds loosely on Benedict Anderson’s (1991) work on imagination and national identity, which initiated a prolific engagement with the role of imagined communities of belonging. With regard to technoscience, imaginaries may have social and political significance for both perpetuating implicit understandings of proper scientific conduct, and for shaping (national) identity (see Fortun and Fortun, 2005). Put differently, science and technology are co-produced with political regimes, legal frameworks, or geopolitics – with social order – in the sense that what the world is cannot be separated from the ways humans envision, normalize, and live in it (Jasanoff, 2004). Imaginaries are thus crucial building blocks of (scientific) knowledge regimes and their (technological) material manifestations.

Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim (2009) elaborate further that technoscientific imaginaries are per se social imaginaries, embodying specific visions of society (p. 123). Their concept of sociotechnical imaginaries depicts such ‘collectively imagined forms of social life and social order [that are] reflected in the design and fulfillment of nation-specific scientific and/or technological projects’ (p. 120), as well as of corporations, social movements, or professional societies (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 4). While much literature on sociotechnical imaginaries attends to the political unit of a nation, applying the concept to islands is helpful, for the same mobilized virtue as (physically) bounded entity. For instance, Ulrike Felt’s elaboration of Austrian technopolitical identity that is based on ‘keeping technologies out’ of the national territory (2015) shows parallels to anti-GMO activists fostering Hawai‘i as a paradise that is void of GMOs, and far away from the (US-American) mainland (Gugganig, 2021). Importantly, acknowledging the existence of parallel imagined worlds (Appadurai, 1996), sociotechnical imaginaries may be contingent, and change over time (Hess, 2014; Jasanoff and Kim, 2015).

Sociotechnical imaginaries encompass four dimensions, including difference across political regimes, time, space, and the relationship between collective formations and individual identity (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015, pp. 21–23). While they are also significant in the context of islands and archipelagoes, it is the co-constitutive dynamic of spatial imaginations and science and technology (p. 22) that is their most defining dimension. Here, the concept of geographical imaginary provides valuable inroads. As Karen-Sue Taussig (1997) argues, ‘understandings of geographical behavior are a product of the way people imagine the social world, whether or not what is imagined actually exists’ (p. 497), thus pointing to the ‘taken-for-granted spatial ordering of the world’ based on value-laden configurations (Gregory et al., 2009, p. 282).

Attending to imaginaries allows for understanding how social and cultural conceptions of islanders, islands, or the mainland are inseparable from power relations, racialized conceptions, and geographical locality (see McNeil et al., 2017, p. 447). For instance, Peter Redfield’s Space in the Tropics (2000) explores how Guiana’s Devil’s Island transitioned from a peripheral penal colony for France to a geopolitically prestigious European center, the European Space Port, for launching rockets two centuries later. Attending to the different spatial and temporal frames that shaped Devil’s Island, the book traces how the island served (geo)political interests, while concurrently being shaped by them. A more recent body of work in critical geography and urban studies also explores spatial imaginaries as ‘deeply held, collective understandings of socio-spatial relations that are performed by, give sense to, make possible and change collective socio-spatial practices’ (Davoudi, 2018, p. 101). Spatial imaginaries thus have an important performative function, as they provide grounds for constructing spatial relations of power that in turn reinforce space (Baker and Ruming, 2015; Watkins, 2015; Granqvist et al., 2019).

Besides valuable exceptions (Greenhough, 2006; Oldenziel, 2011; Watts, 2019),¹ islands and imaginations of islands have so far not received much attention in STS, nor undergone a systematic review. One reason might stem from the field’s tendency to focus on Euro-American discourses, and its rather slow uptake of post-colonial theorizing and engagements with space (Anderson, 2009; Harding, 2011; Law and Lin, 2017; Lyons et al., 2017). The following section links work on sociotechnical imaginaries in STS with scholarship that deals with (1) island imaginaries, (2) islands as laboratories, and (3) islands as geopolitical infrastructure, and informs the subsequent conceptualization of island imaginaries.

Island Meanings and Imaginations – Conceptualizations of Islands

Island Imaginaries

Not least since theorizing Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), literary studies scholars have attended to the utopian, political, sociological and colonial depictions of islands in literature, with the common trope of the stranded, lonesome, white man (Loxley, 1990; Redfield, 2000; DeLoughrey, 2001, p. 22; Beer, 2003). In Islands of the Mind, a canonical reference in Island Studies, John Gillis (2004) argues that Western thought is not merely defined by islands as physical site, but as key metaphor. In this interdisciplinary field, there is an oft-lamented tension between analyses of metaphorical or physical properties of islands, reflecting respective proclivities among literary studies and geography scholars (Dodds and Royle, 2003; Hay, 2006; Fletcher, 2011; Ronström, 2012; Rankin, 2016; Grydehøj, 2017). Political geographers similarly approach islands and archipelagoes as both material site and political concept through which to analyze ontologies of power (Mountz, 2014).

In the reviewed literature,² imagination and materiality of islands is either separated into two reflective strands of research, or these properties are analyzed in tandem. Overall, ‘island imaginaries’ is either a generic and unspecified phrase, or it depicts a repository for mainland and/or colonizers’ geographical imaginaries that are mapped onto islands to foster a (touristic) paradise, peripheral shelter, trading post, or ideal test site for technologies (Grove, 1996; Sheller, 2007, p. 27; Hong, 2020; Skjølsvold et al., 2020). As anthropologist Burkhard Schnepel (2018) states, island imaginaries display a Western framing in five forms: as isolated, virgin ‘no-man’s land,’ diverse and créole, liminal, and geographically finite (pp. 19–20). Such interpretations of island imaginaries highlight underlying Eurocentric visions of a cliché warm, tropical island (Riquet, 2016).

For other scholars, island imaginaries capture more centrally the material-semiotic dynamic, that is, how the physical and metaphorical properties of islands are mutually constitutive. For geographer Steinberg (2005), ‘island imaginaries played such an important role in British idealizations both of itself and its colonial “others” that island designations were sometimes invented for colonial territories,’ such that British Guiana was long referenced as an ‘island’ (p. 255). That a continental colony was classified as an island shows that geographic categories are always socially (imaginatively) variable, which in turn affect the political structure of such places, in this case Great Britain and Guiana.³ Imagined islands have also become foundational for virtual islands (Jackson and della Dora, 2009). Attending to how technological systems render islands legible or illegible, Mimi Sheller (2009) shows that cyber islands in the Caribbean conflate imaginations of real and virtual through movement of capital; via software-supported offshore finance, wealthy non-citizens, tourists, and service workers (p. 1399).

These cases also demonstrate the different material consequences for colonizer/colonized, mainland/island. Drawing on Edward Said’s concept of imagined geographies (1979), postcolonial studies scholars Uma Kothari and Rorden Wilkinson (2010) define island imaginaries as colonial imaginaries. In the case of tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, the authors show how colonial imaginaries establish parallel visions and material manifestations of islands not only as exoticized paradise, but also as military and incarceration outpost that enable political interventions, like tourist development (see also Taussig, 2004; Baldacchino and Tsai, 2014; Kothari and Arnall, 2017; Cressy, 2020; Gugganig, 2021). It is both the mutuality between imaginaries and material manifestations, and their parallel existences that are foundational to the concept of Island Imaginaries introduced here (see more below).

Islands as Laboratories

A prominent conception of islands is that of a laboratory for scientific-technological projects, and as key sites for emerging scientific disciplines, theories and concepts in ecological, sociocultural, political, and literary realms (MacLeod and Rehbock, 1994; Rankin, 2016; Baldacchino, 2018). In fact, disciplines like evolutionary biology, volcanology and biogeography owe their establishment to physically bounded land masses (MacArthur and Wilson, 1967; Wilson and Simberloff, 1969; Vitousek, 1995). Anthropology long narrated its disciplinary object – culture – as a bounded object best studied on islands (Eriksen, 1993; Terrell et al., 1997; Gillis, 2004, p. 116; Ronström, 2012), while archeologists have conceived of islands as credible spaces to understand humans’ past (Kirch, 1997; Leppard et al., 2021; see for a critique of these conceptions, Rainbird, 1999; Terrell, 2020). Other scholars have pointed to islands’ lure as purported tabula rasa, that is, as fecund repositories and ideal laboratories for technoscientific inquiry (King, 1993; Baldacchino, 2007, p. 166). Many anthropologists followed the natural sciences’ laboratory rationale (Gillis, 2004, p. 116; Lemov, 2005).

Beth Greenhough (2006) calls this phenomenon island-as-laboratory model: the repurposing of a simplistic, bounded conception of islands in evolutionary sciences (in her case, for population genetics in Iceland). In contemporary times of climate change, islands often figure as laboratory models for vulnerability (Moore, 2010),⁴ conservation (Hennessy, 2018), sustainability (Grydehøj and Kelman, 2017) and as a synecdochic lessons on a global scale (Lazrus, 2012). Maintaining an island-as-laboratory model requires a constant policing of their shores to stabilize epistemic regimes (Greenhough, 2006, p. 226) in order to keep certain forms of knowledge in, and others out (see Felt, 2015). As Farbotko shows with regard to climate change, island laboratories ‘seem to underscore a regressive desire for a world of stable boundaries around, and absolute spaces of, knowledge’ (2010, p. 53). Hence, islands are not compartmentalized entities (Grydehøj, 2017, p. 9) but as laboratories they are fundamental building blocks of techno-scientific modernities and their epistemic legacies.

Islands may take on the form of an exceptional space, but also a more mundane one. As Guggenheim (2012, p. 111) points out, most islands-as-laboratories are rather locatories, where the geography of a specific place, in this case an island, matters. Conversely, islands and island communities may share many concerns with other places, such as coastal regions in times of climate change (Lazrus, 2012, p. 287), which points to the limitations of rendering islands exceptional spaces (Ronström, 2012). Rather than clear distinctions, this special section suggests a continuum along exceptionalism and scalability (see Laurent et al., 2021), where location may or may not matter, depending on the visions and means of involved politicians, philanthropists, residents, and scientists at a specific time and place (see more below).

Islands as Geopolitical Infrastructure

Islands are also conceivable as infrastructure in terms of the relations they establish, and the circulation of goods, services, and people they enable (Star, 1999; Slota and Bowker, 2017). Far from being mere technical objects, infrastructures are relational in the sense of a continuously interwoven network of social organization, moral order and technical integration (Niewöhner, 2015, p. 2) that enable various forms of global governance (Mayer and Acuto, 2015) and resistance. The concept of infrastructure is well-suited to understand (geopolitical) placemaking practices, as the question is not what an infrastructure is, but when (Star and Ruhleder, 1996) and to whom. As such, infrastructures encompass a central anxiety of modern life – ‘the idea that we increasingly depend on vast, complex, interconnected webs of essential systems that may be unexpectedly vulnerable, placing economic and political stability at risk’ (Henke and Sims, 2020, p. 9; see also Klimburg-Witjes et al., 2020).

Islands figure prominently in these global-economic and geopolitically networked infrastructures (Starosielski, 2015; Watts, 2019); whether as steppingstones for territorial claims, or outposts of national and economic interests inscribed in, and enabled through infrastructural projects. Concurrently, notions of boundedness corroborate territorial nationalism and political dependency (Dodds and Royle, 2003). With more than half of the disputes under the Law of the Sea spurred by ownership conflicts over small islands, they form an integral territorial space of global geopolitical networks (Ratter, 2018). The trope of the isolated, remote island mystifies and conceals the extent of militarization (DeLoughrey, 2013), and goes back at least to the 1950s U.S. ‘strategic island concept’ that normalized islands as central ‘bases of empire’ (Vine, 2009, pp. 41, 186). During the Cold War, islands were – in many cases forcefully – cluttered with large-scale technological infrastructures, such as ground-stations for global satellite surveillance (Oldenziel, 2011). While closed off from public scrutiny, Pacific Islands have become central nodes of U.S. global power (p. 21), and figure centrally on maps of international maritime migration, where their inhabitants are subjected to mainland border management strategies (Baldacchino and Milne, 2006; Godenau, 2012; Loyd et al., 2016), detention, and torture (Taussig, 2004, p. 288; Mountz, 2011). With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military shifted to virtually simulated islands as offshore bombing sites for computer-simulated weapons training (Sheller, 2007), highlighting once again the constitutive power of (virtual) islands.

Conceptualizing Island Imaginaries

As mentioned earlier, scholars in Island Studies have problematized a bias towards either physical or metaphoric aspects of islands, arguing that ‘human encounters with physical space [islands] are always already managed by our position in linguistic and cultural systems of representation’ (Fletcher, 2011, p. 19; Rankin, 2016). This material-semiotic division has been countered through such concepts as ‘islanding’ to refer to the co-construction of material and imaginative processes (Gillis, 2004), or nesology, which attends to the simultaneous geopolitical and aesthetic registers of islands (Balasopoulos, 2008). This scholarship speaks to the questions posed here as to what imaginaries manifest in prevalent scientific knowledge regimes, and how they in turn corroborate islands as techno-scientifically conducive spaces. An analysis of the relation between islands and their (technoscientific) rendering highlights that ontology and normativity do not stand in sequential logic to each other, but that they are co-produced in temporarily and location-specific ways.

Taking up the spatial dimension of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2015, p. 22), this special section approaches islands (both material and metaphorical) as preceding and channeling future visions of scientific-technological projects. Thus, Island Imaginaries as used here is an umbrella term that refers to the mutual constitution of island visions and their materialization in scientific, technological and technocratic endeavors that are imagined and pursued by scientific communities, policymakers, military leaders, industry representatives, social movements, and other social collectives. In this sense, imaginations of islands are not (merely) mapped onto a place like a blueprint. Rather, metaphoric depictions, such as islands-as-laboratories, and emphasized physical characteristics, like boundedness, are always reciprocal. Hence, island imaginaries are not mere imaginaries, as both terms – island and imaginaries – reflect this mutuality. This is significant to work in STS, as islands and island imaginaries are foundational to (Western) technoscientific knowledge regimes, while scientific and technological systems in turn render islands exceptional places (Ronström, 2012), synecdoches that are scalable to larger wholes (Baldacchino and Tsai, 2014, p. 15; Skjølsvold et al., 2020; Webb, 2021) or similar to other places, i.e. to coasts. This raises further the question how innovation and islands are co-produced in policies, what island imaginaries emerge as a result, and how they shape islanders’ lives.

There are several aspects that are important to highlight. First, imaginative islands, such as virtual islands (Sheller, 2007) or planets as islands (Webb, 2021), may be just as foundational for island imaginaries as physical characteristics. Second, island imaginaries are not per se defined by physical/political boundaries, but it is a characteristic frequently employed and may be challenged over time. Third, just as sociotechnical imaginaries (Hess, 2014; Jasanoff and Kim, 2015), island imaginaries may change, exist in parallel or overlap with others. Fourth, and related to that, imaginaries of islands – exceptional space, laboratory, locutory, geopolitical infrastructure, or synecdoche for larger entities, etc. – are not necessarily distinct categories, but are better understood along a continuum from exceptionalism to scalability. Importantly, such visions are never stagnant, but change over time, depending on specific places and actors, and their means and aspirations.

Finally, perspective and location matters. Repeated ‘writing-about-islands’ (Grydehøj, 2017, p. 8), and subject framings resorting to ‘we,’ and ‘our’ fascination with islands (Baldacchino, 2004; Gillis, 2004, 2007, p. 276) also amplify who is speaking (DeLoughrey, 2001, pp. 22–23; Fletcher, 2011; Nadarajah and Grydehøj, 2016). This requires questioning dominant epistemologies that have normalized ‘the island,’ like Merriam-Webster’s definition as isolated entity (DeLoughrey, 2001, p. 27). In the words of Buzan and Waever (2003), ‘[h]ere’ is not a perspective’ (n.a.), and this should invite scholars to cultivate epistemological diversity, such as more fluid theorizations of land and sea (Beer, 2003, p. 33; Okihiro, 2009).⁵

In this context, Indigenous concepts that defy belittling and stagnant depictions of islands (Hau‘ofa, 1993; Teaiwa, 2014; Perez, 2015; Ingersoll, 2016; Taitingfong, 2020) are important analytical interventions. A powerful example of island imaginaries subverting the common isolation-framing is Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands) and Aka Niviâna’s (Kalaallit Nunaat from Greenland) poem and video Rise on climate change’s effects on their islands (Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna, n.d.). Their call is directed to the (continental) metropoles of the world that will just as much be implicated in climate change, only slower. Through their explicit addressing, the poets disrupt the presumed hierarchy of mainland vs. island, thereby unearthing the colonial legacy of resource extraction that has now washed both on the shores and onto the discourses of such supposed centers. Through their hydro-feminist approach, the poets not only critique colonial and environmental regimes, but also extend Island Studies frameworks of the archipelagic (Faris, 2019).

Contributions

The thesis that scientific readings and technological applications establish islands as conducive spaces, and physical islands in turn facilitate technoscientific knowledge regimes is illustrated well in the three case studies of this special section. Some focus more on the spatial/technoscientific imaginations that constitute islands, as physical or imagined space (Webb, 2021), while others highlight how physical islands take on forms as exceptional or scalable places (Gugganig, 2021; Laurent et al., 2021). Again, these approaches are not one-dimensional or sequential, but reveal potentially overlapping spheres, and are a matter of analytical choice.

The first contribution, Gaze-scaling: Planets as Islands in Exobiologists’ Imaginaries, by Claire Webb takes the reader to different scales of islanding to show that scientific readings and technological applications not only shape islands and their populations, but also that the imagined island catalyzes scientific projects. Her contribution traces 1950s U.S. scientists and engineers who chartered the new field of exobiology to search for organic life beyond Earth. Drawing on historical documents, she queries how scientists’ expected and realized view from beyond the Earth informed their view back onto their own planet. The paper explores how exobiologists imagined planets, including the Earth and the Moon, as biospheres in need of preservation in similar ways that naturalists’ and conservationists conceived of (earthly) islands as closed, ecologically rich, yet vulnerable systems.

Through technologies of then-advanced imaging systems, scientists shifted their gaze back and forth between Earth and other celestial bodies from outer space. Exobiologists enacted what Webb calls ‘gaze-scaling’ by which engineers’ visual technologies coalesced with scientists’ imaginations of planets as archipelagic islands in need of conservation, constituting a planets-as-islands imaginary. In detail, exobiologists imagined planets as islands by pairing islands’ presumed polarity, enclosure vs. expansion. The dueling aspects of terrestrial islands – bounded, isolated laboratories of life – were scaled to outer space as scientists found ways to relate Earth to imagined life-filled, extraterrestrial places. The paper illustrates in vivid ways how island imaginaries centrally relate to imagined islands to foster particular ideas of outer space conservation and colonization.

Brice Laurent and his colleagues’ article The Test-Bed Island: Tech Business Experimentalism and Exception in Singapore illustrates the second dimension of island imaginaries: how physical islands serve technoscientific knowledge regimes. The authors do so by analyzing Singapore’s significance through, and for, technocratic measures and experimentation. The Singaporean government’s Smart Nation program frames the island city–state as seemingly contrasting exceptional territory and territory of exceptions in order to connect to Asia as conducive site for technology tests of all kinds. Here, island imaginaries depict a different dual dynamic: the tension between islands as exceptional and non-exceptional space, or scalability. Turning the island into a test-bed relies on a politics of exceptionality, which connects the testing site to the rest of the world while concurrently delineating exceptions in terms of geography, regulation, and Asian population. The authors refer to this regime of innovation as ‘tech business experimentalism,’ where exceptionality is a malleable political tool that never works without, indeed relies on its opposite.

This case also exemplifies how islands are not just imagined suitable laboratories based on geographic enclosure or natural habitat, but also for an imagined socially cohesive population (Baldacchino, 2004; Sheller, 2009). In that sense, Singapore’s infrastructures and populations are co-produced with technological activities to thrive for global business purposes. The paper critically examines how politicians’ technocratic practices and entrepreneurs’ experimental studies render Singapore a seemingly ideal Asian test-bed, while cautioning to attend to how exception is mobilized for processes of inclusion and exclusion. With notions like ‘living labs’ and ‘regulatory sandbox’ proliferating in public policy-making (p. 19), it offers a contribution to critical theories on experimental practices for innovation purposes, and the discourse and practice of exception (see also Engels et al., 2019).

The final paper, Mascha Gugganig’s Hawaiʻi as a Laboratory Paradise: Divergent Sociotechnical Island Imaginaries, investigates the model of islands-as-laboratories for scientific and techno-political projects in Hawai‘i, both in early natural sciences and the more recent case of agricultural biotechnology. Her paper takes up the dynamic of physical islands and imaginations by explicating different sociotechnical imaginaries that mobilize the notions of laboratory and paradise in divergent and overlapping ways. Tracing the significance of the Hawaiian archipelago for scientific discoveries and the establishment of disciplinary fields, she finds an ecological island imaginary of Hawai‘i as a ‘laboratory of nature’ and ‘hosting paradise’ for natural sciences.

This formulation contrasts another ecological island imaginary of anti-GMO activists of agricultural biotechnology who render Kaua‘i a paradisiacal site, albeit in a different way. While sharing certain epistemic commitments, here Hawai‘i is a ‘laboratory on nature’ and a ‘nonabsorbable paradise’ that cannot contain detrimental experimentation (research and development of genetically engineered crops, pesticide use) on the island. These two imaginaries stand in contrast to each other, yet also overlap with a different imaginary: politicians and industry leaders fostering an agribusiness island imaginary where Hawai‘i figures as ideal laboratory and, again, hosting paradise, yet this time to advance global food production and business creation. Examining how laboratory and paradise tropes are mobilized in tandem with, or opposition to science and technology offers insights to heterogeneous dynamics that go beyond conventional categories like biodiversity, science, or culture.

Conclusion

While writing this introduction, the Covid-19 pandemic made visible the contours, epistemologies and politics of islands. Oher crises have also shown that islands and archipelagoes are anything but simple, ‘small’ (Hau‘ofa, 1993) land masses: while for many European tourists the Greek islands are a welcoming escape from work and winter, for refugees they become the last resort for survival, or a dead-end on their way to Europe and better living conditions. Escaping to and escaping from islands are thus deeply political imaginations and endeavors that illustrate different, often conflicting island imaginaries; the tourist island may coexist with, or absorb the island as military base (see Kothari and Wilkinson, 2010).

These examples point to several themes in this special section that are captured in the three main questions. First, what are island imaginaries when analyzed as sociotechnical imaginaries? By attending to spatial imaginations as both preexisting and channeling visions of science and technology (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015, p. 22), such a perspective affords a view on the co-constitution of imaginations and materialities. An island’s physical attribute as land bound, ‘remote’ (Clifford, 2001) land mass is not more or less neutral than the fact that various (colonial) scientific disciplines and theories emerged with, and through spatial imaginations of this and other physical attributes. This is for instance evident in how academic (sub)disciplines, from anthropology to volcanology, derive some of their key concepts from islandic settings, thereby also perpetuating specific (scientific) understandings of islands and archipelagoes. The introduced concept of Island Imaginaries offers a tool to analyze this mutual constitution of island visions and materializations that are pursued by authoritative communities in science, policy, government, industry, military, social movements, and other social collectives.

Analyzing such island imaginaries could employ different angles, as reflected in the second and third question: How do island imaginaries manifest in well-established biological and social theories and concepts, and related forms of experimentation? How do such imaginaries in turn corroborate islands as technoscientific laboratories, exceptional spaces, or synecdoche of larger land masses? These approaches are not mutually exclusive, as one may focus more on the spatial/technoscientific imaginations that constitute physical or imagined islands (Webb, 2021), or on how physical islands take on forms as exceptional or scalable places (Gugganig, 2021; Laurent et al., 2021).

In her contribution, Claire Webb explores how exobiologists enacted gaze-scaling, when engineers’ visual technologies coalesced with scientists’ imaginations of planets as archipelagic islands in need of conservation. The resultant planets-as-islands imaginary illustrates how imagined islands fostered particular ideas of colonization, outer space conservation and scientific theories. Both Gugganig (2021) and Laurent et al.’s (2021) contributions start from the analytical perspective on physical islands’ role for technoscientific and technocratic knowledge regimes. Gugganig explores the central notion of the laboratory and paradise in Hawai‘i, both for the establishment of natural sciences, and in the contemporary agricultural biotechnology. Her analysis shows that different island imaginaries (environmental or agribusiness) may share epistemic commitments, while these key tropes also indicate different visions of the Hawaiian archipelago: as laboratory of or on nature, as hosting or nonabsorbable paradise, for scientific discoveries, conservation efforts, or (bio)technological experimentation. Laurent and his colleagues (2021) attend to a dual technocratic rendering in an island imaginary of Singapore as test-bed for innovation; that is, as both an exceptional territory and territory of exceptions. Along a regime of innovation that the authors refer to as tech business experimentalism, they show that exceptionality – of Singapore – never works without, in fact relies on not being too exceptional. Mobilizing these different yet complementary island imaginaries is critical for policymakers and entrepreneurs to render Singapore as test site for all kinds of technology development that is scalable to an (equally imagined) Asia.

This special section is also an invitation to social scientists to develop more fine-grained and critical approaches towards imaginaries of islands. Not just in times of a pandemic, migration or climate crisis do islands serve as laboratory models for vulnerability, sustainability, or economic, socio-political and scientific experimentation. Concurrently, future research may explore further what can be learned from islands as model systems (Douglass and Cooper, 2020; Leppard et al. 2021), including its underlying epistemological commitments. Political regimes and other authorities may also operationalize islands and archipelagoes as geopolitical infrastructures for territorial claims (e.g. Falkland Islands), as sites to keep detainees away from the center (e.g. Guantanamo Bay, Robben Island, Alcatraz, Devil’s Island), or as seemingly peripheral bases of empire (Vine, 2009; Oldenziel, 2011).

Concurrently, more research is needed on dominant island imaginaries in research and policy, and on what the (material) consequences are for islands and islanders. For instance, how are innovation and islands co-produced in research clusters like the European Union’s ‘Islands of Innovation’ project,⁶ and what dominant island imaginaries does it foster? here is also much research to be done on (Silicon Valley) sociotechnical vanguards’ neoliberal visions of creating and fostering high-tech islands as haven for sustainability and cure for all human maladies. Instances like Peter Thiel’s failed ‘Floating Island Project’ also highlight the need to interrogate failure in these island vanguard visions. In that sense, more research is needed on such sociotechnical vanguard visions of islands that may eventually develop into sociotechnical imaginaries (see Hilgartner, 2015). With the increasing occurrence of extreme planetary and global conditions (climate, pandemic, migration), policymakers, philanthropists, and venture capitalists will likely continue to turn to islands for answers. STS scholarship has much to contribute to these debates.

Imaginations of islands are profoundly shaped by postcolonial power relations, geographical locality, and perspectives. This requires reflecting on shared assumptions, such as that a readership is a mainland audience. We are aware of the fact that all authors of this special issue are outsiders to those islands they describe. More research is thus needed on alternative imaginaries fostered among island inhabitants, and on how they may perpetuate colonial imaginaries, e.g. essentialized depictions of islands as paradise (Kothari and Wilkinson, 2010, p. 1409). Alternative island imaginaries can incorporate more fluid conceptions of islands between land and sea, like terripelagoes (Perez, 2015), which may indeed question the very concept of islands.

Acknowledgments

This special section grew out of a panel at the 4S annual meeting in 2017 (Boston) where Rebecca Lemov offered valuable comments as discussant. We would also like to thank Les Levidow, Maximilian Mayer, Phoebe Sengers, Mark Currie, and all reviewers for lending their time to review individual papers and provide constructive feedback. Many thanks also go to Sebastian Pfotenhauer for the ongoing support and to Killian Weißer for assisting in the literature review.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mascha Gugganig

Mascha Gugganig is an anthropologist and STS scholar whose work includes research on contested technologies in agriculture and food production, as well as multimodal arts-based, and collaborative research methods. She is currently the Alex Trebek Postdoctoral Fellow in AI and Environment at the University of Ottawa, and a Research Associate with the Munich Center for Technology in Society at the Technical University Munich.

Nina Klimburg-Witjes

Nina Klimburg-Witjes is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. In her work at the intersection of STS and critical security studies, she explores the role of technological innovation and knowledge practices in securitization processes with a particular focus on sensors, space infrastructures and cyber security.

Notes

1 Other research stemming in part from the Call for this special section includes Bocci (2019) who traces science imaginaries through material assemblages of human and other-than-human actors, and Skjølsvold et al. (2020) who discuss material and social traits that make islands favorable for innovation activities.

2 The review includes literature from Island Studies, geography, literary studies, post-colonial studies, anthropology, history, political science, and work that refers to ‘island imaginaries.’

3 Steinberg also reminds his readers that the vision of the modern, Westphalian state as territorially bounded unit is profoundly insular (2005, p. 255). On England’s historical political, legal and military ties, see Cressy (2020).

4 See Douglass and Cooper (2020) for a different argument, namely, that archaeological and paleoecological research on islands can provide key insights to precolonial climate change.

5 Of the large submission of abstracts to the Call for Papers (50), there were no island-perspective approach (see also Grydehøj 2017, p. 9), which may also question the focus on (and existence of) ‘islands.’

6 https://www.interregeurope.eu/islandsofinnovation/ [accessed April 28, 2020].