Refuge or retreat: resilience and the mediatization of Scotland’s island space

ABSTRACT

Islands are significantly on the agenda in Scotland. Media accounts – news, features, and other creative narratives – textually frame the representational terrains of island policy, agency and community. Such mediatization informs and responds to certain ideas and discourses of our island geographies. It typically includes what could be considered good islandness: that is, islands as good lifestyle havens, sites of social resilience and adaptive social renewal. During the COVID-19 pandemic, certain spaces and geographies were notably re-evaluated. Sites of ‘isolation’, ‘remoteness’ and places considered ‘far from’ occupied a heightened position of desirability and potential refuge. A purposive sample of stories and features is presented here to capture case exemplars of how Scotland’s island space and place geographies were variously textually framed by media news across the initial lockdown and subsequent significant travel restriction phases (March 2020 to October 2020). The discussion explores how a short-view media framing of Scotland’s island spaces specifically during the COVID-19 pandemic spoke to aspects of islandness as refuge and as resilience. The paper offers a longer-view perspective whereby the complexities and complicities of media framing of Scottish rural and island spaces as resilient is considered more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• islandness
• media
• resilience
• rural
• pandemic

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge with thanks the detailed and helpful comments provided by the paper’s reviewers.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Scotland’s COVID-19 timeline of key governance milestones can be viewed here: https://spice-spotlight.scot/2022/12/16/timeline-of-coronavirus-covid-19-in-scotland/. Early-March 2020 brought the first key milestone of note for Scotland with the first positive Scottish case of COVID-19 confirmed. On 16th March 2020 there was cancellation of all mass indoor and outdoor events of 500 people or more by the UK Government, a day after the Scottish Government’s own announcement to this effect (15th March 2020). The UK Government also begins daily press briefings. 23rd March 2020 was a significant timeline moment with Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in a ‘UK wide’ televised address, stating that people should ‘only go outside’ to buy food, to exercise once a day, or to go to work if they absolutely cannot work from home and that people will face police fines for failure to comply with these new measures. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon then announces Scotland’s ‘lock down’ via her own media address to the Scottish public: ‘Let me blunt. The stringent restrictions on our normal day to day lives that I’m about to set out are difficult and they are unprecedented. They amount effectively to what has been described as a lockdown.’ COVID-19 impacts continue and by 23rd October 2020, the Scottish Government had published the five-level Strategic Framework indicating different levels of protection proposed based on different levels of transmission for the virus. This was a significant milestone in the Scottish COVID-19 timeline and response.

2 This was to consider and to deliver a set of recommendations for Government (Scotland and UK, Westminster) regarding the immediate effects of COVID-19 on tourism but also to deliver on key new tourism strategy themes around 'sustainable businesses', the 'importance of people and communities', and 'green tourism'.

3 In Japan, and the Ryukyuan archipelago for example, island as a term is expressed as shima and to speak of island is to also express territory and a community sphere of influence (Suwa, 2007). Such thinking of island as regional territory – commonality – and community identity as sustaining and integral is variously experienced and somewhat similarly articulated in Scotland. The Island (Scotland) Act (2018) informs such articulation currently and in regard of island and rural proofing futures.

4 The Island Communities Impact Assessment (ICIA) requirement of the Act provides an enhanced mechanism to hear the ‘islander voice’ for ‘when a piece of legislation, policy strategy or service will likely affect island communities in a different way than how it would affect communities on the mainland or other island communities’ (Scottish Government, 2022).

5 See Scottish Rural Action Rural & Island Economy – the recording and outputs from the vSRP Session (11th March 2021). The session was curated by Inspiralba and GrowBiz Scotland and chaired by Professor Sarah Skerratt, Director of Programmes at the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) and Scientific Director of the Scottish Consortium for Rural Research (SCRR): https://www.sra.scot/our-work/scottish-rural-parliament/vsrp-2021/rural-and-island-economy.

6 https://www.scotland.org/more-info/about-us.

7 Scotland’s rural economy is important to wider ambitions for net-zero growth and sector diversification, see more at https://www.scdi.org.uk/ruralcommission/; see also the https://www.islandsdeal.co.uk/.

8 Despite questions that might arise as to its value and its academic application, islandness is a fuzzy category of thought and understanding increasingly circulating, applied and debated. Islandness as a conceptual category to ‘think with’ is useful. It offers a term whereby island space, experience and representational forms materially and symbolically can be engaged with beyond a simple geographic idea of islands as places of land surrounded by water. Consider geographer (and creative writer) Pete Hay’s impactful discussion on the phenomenology of islands (Hay, 2006); see also Grydehøj (2017), and Pugh (2018); or Hall (2012) on the biogeography of islandness and tourism notably in the Pacific.

9 Islands in reality are nonetheless similar to and notably familiar with other non-remote geographies (i.e. the urban, city) and small islands of Scotland also experience their own ‘urbanised’ rural configurations such as the island regional ‘capitals’ of Kirkwall, Lerwick or Stornoway or small island towns such as Tobermory, Portree, Rothesay, or Bowmore.

10 The ‘island related’ stories include data extracts from Scottish national broadcasters and their digital media web platforms and also those of major UK newspaper platforms (and as appropriate their Scottish editions) (i.e. The Times/The Sunday Times; The Guardian, The Observer, and The Sun/The Scottish Sun were scoped for example), as were specifically Scottish ‘national’ newspapers The Herald, Sunday Herald, The Scotsman, The National and the Daily Record).

11 BBC ONE news and STV news are equally significant (at joint 42% survey share) for Scottish news consumers in the year 2020 (Ofcom, 2020); it should be noted that television (with key stories digitally platformed more widely) still commands considerable power in regard of how we see, hear and engage with news about, of and from Scotland.

12 This includes Scotland’s islands (as with other ‘Celtic peripheries’) represented as dislocated places (regions) apart, historically dismissed as ‘other’ yet simultaneously a space of resource, capable of reinvention and of disruptive resistance (c.f. Harvey et al., 2002).

13 A focus only on the short view is to run the bigger risk of not locating our understandings today as predicated on past learning of our success and failures for future application. It should be noted that the longer view of rural ‘othering’ is crucial in the underpinning of the continued mediatization of rural, and more especially ‘remote rural', and Scottish island places. This paper has sought to present examples from media account that speaks to both the COVID-19 context and a longer view of media framing of Scottish island spaces as 'remote'.

14 Isolation and islandness were variously storified, emphasizing the numeric discourse of COVID-19 ('lone' versus 'hoards') but this story also speaks to the personalization – he was ‘on his own’ - hooking tactics for engaging audiences (storification).

15 Lewis has spoken about the role (and interest) media played in his own story (Lindon, 2022), and a book based on his coastline walk and broader experiences is due to be published in 2023.

16 Elsewhere the story ‘spins’ towards a later rebound in June 2020 as Lewis leaves ‘the uninhabited island’ following island lockdown restrictions easing. The story is an example of how island isolation is reinforced as of exceptional (anyone living alone on an island was of potential key interest during lockdown) news value but compounded further by Lewis’s wider human-interest newsworthiness given his peripatetic living in a tent circumstances (albeit homelessness not being 'that extraordinary' for ex-services personnel) and escalated to further ‘good news’ by his charity work and a resourceful drive to ‘give back’.