Islands symposium

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This Symposium explored island narratives of kinship and place, understood as and resonate with multiple manifestations of heritage such as (but not confined to) ecological, socio-cultural, and gendered knowledges, and to which we drew artistic and other forms of (environmental) humanities responses. It was held online (hosted by UHI) and in person, at Ceolas on South Uist.

Keynote speakers were Professor Roxane Permar and Dr. Siún Carden (UHI). Speakers from across The Highlands and Islands and mainland Scotland were joined by artists and academics from USA, Canada, India, Australia, England and Japan. A publication of collected essays from the Symposium is currently in development.

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The Symposium grew out of an extended arts research project that Laura has been developing as part of a British Academy Small Research Grant – initially working under the umbrella of Wet Ontologies, a 2-year exploration of living with the weather as a lens through which to understand kinship.

Historical and cultural geographers have contributed to work in historical climatology and environmental history. Endfield has pointed out that ‘climate is “nested in places” through local weather’. Weather contributes to the culture of a particular place, framing and informing lifestyles, activities, practices, traditions and languages there. It influences the way humans experience, remember, commemorate, celebrate and form identities in place. In turn, the generation and consumption of weather knowledge by individuals and communities happens in particular localities. Places, Endfield argues, ‘become “known” and knowable by and through their weather; they are made distinctive from one another as specific “weather places.”’ (Naylor et al, 2022).

Kin is understood here as the late anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018) framed it – as ‘a world of interwoven, intergenerational, more-than-human connectivity that both sustains and obligates, calling out for care and responsibility. Kinship is reciprocal, situated, tying human beings to other kinds of animals and plants, vulnerable and creative bodies all, and to the wider seasons and patterns of Earth and the cosmos. The question that she returned to relentlessly – is how we are to keep faith with such a world in the midst of ongoing processes of colonization and extinction, of ecocide and genocide.” (Eds Thom van Dooren, Matthew Chrulew 2022).