Kim de Wolff and I are launching a call for papers for a special issue in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience journal, titled “Reconfiguring Islands: Environmental Futures Beyond Containment.” We are looking for submissions that bring Feminist STS (Science Technology Studies) into engagement with critical ocean and island studies, feminist, critical and/or decolonial geography, Arctic studies, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, critical data studies, and other fields that critically engage with the island and its historical and developmental legacies. We are also looking for art, poetry, and other creative works that reconfigure (neo)colonial visions.

Deadline: 15th May 2026.

The full CFP is here online and also posted below. Please email us at reconfiguringislands@gmail.com if you have any queries or wish to discuss your submission.

We invite feminist STS interventions into planetary environmental futures through critical engagement and creative speculation with the figure of the island. Refusing to take islands as preexisting geographic facts or naturalized technoscientific constructions, this special section instigates conversations about the powerful processes and practices that bring islands into being. The island – as figure, allegory, epistemic construct, geographic type, and (neo)colonial technique – is a powerful form associated with the Anthropocene. The island embodies precarity, as landforms disappear under the forces of extreme weather and rising tides (Farbotko 2010). It embodies ongoing legacies of extractive colonialism and militarization, as slow violences inflicted on land-and-seascapes and their communities (Deloughrey 2019; Starosielski 2015). Islands themselves can be techniques of colonial power, made into bounded and distant testbeds that simultaneously produce environmental threats and knowledge about them (Deloughrey 2013; Masco 2021; Shih 2019). Today, new kinds of islands are emerging as these legacies and attempts to redirect them are projected onto designs for resilience against the effects of the planetary climate crisis (Wakefield 2021): energy islands such as Princess Elizabeth Island capturing clean power; trash islands such as Semakau Island or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch containing waste; and digital islands including the digital twin model of sinking Tuvalu reclaiming Indigenous agency. As infrastructural, biogeochemical, technological, ecological, and even unknown assemblages are being forged at transitional edges we ask: how can feminist STS help reconfigure the possibilities of environmental futures with (or without) islands? 

Thinking with islands furthers feminist challenges to the very foundations of domination by troubling elemental binaries, inherent boundedness, and containment strategies alike. Feminist STS scholars have long shown how the permeability of bodies challenges bounded subjectivities (Alaimo 2010; Chen 2023; Haraway 1985), with feminist water scholars especially mobilizing fluidities and co-saturations as sites of radical transformation (Neimanis 2017; Jue and Ruiz 2021; Simpson 2025). At the same time, by emphasizing relationships of connection, island peoples and scholars have long challenged Western visions of islands as “isolates” defined by a scarcity of land and separation from continents (Diaz 2015; Fujikane 2021; Hau’ofa 1994; Te Punga Sommerville 2012). An enduring hierarchical land/water divide subtends both the marginalization of islands as expendable periphery environments and the colonial insistence on anchoring identity to dry land (Farbotko 2010; Gugganig and Klimburg-Witjes 2021). As such, thinking with islands can strengthen intersections between feminist STS, feminist/decolonial/critical geographies, island studies and Indigenous feminisms, as land-and-water bodies unsettle the very “grounds” of the global terrain of feminist thought. 

This special section encourages feminist STS scholarship in solidarity with decolonial, postcolonial and Indigenous scholarship and practices across fields that cultivate meaningful ways of being in place. We seek work that challenges dualisms and the very nature of boundaries anew by attending to the enactment of land/water divides and associated terrestrial biases that dominate Western conceptions of space (De Wolff 2025; Elden 2013; Jue 2020). We invite articles and creative works that consider the island as a formation of contested, alternative, and emergent epistemologies, ontologies and visions. In addition to essays, we welcome art, poetry, and other creative works that reconfigure (neo)colonial visions.

Submissions might bring feminist STS into engagement with:

• Critical ocean and island studies, feminist, critical and/or decolonial geography, Arctic studies, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, critical data studies, and other fields that critically engage with the island and its historical and developmental legacies
• Islanding as an epistemic, ontological, and political process including the historical and ongoing (re)making of islands as “naturally” bounded spaces (including projects upholding boundedness/isolates like seawalls, seasteads, models, and maps)
• Islands as infrastructures of capitalism, empire, and technoscience (ie. as laboratories, testbeds, ecologies, connecting and even becoming sites of digital infrastructure and remote or offshore productivity).
• Knowing land/water borders; land/water divides as techniques of (neo)colonial power (islands, coastlines, water borders, and the outlines of land and water bodies and forms of containment more broadly)
• Island entanglements with green colonialism ie. energy islands, waste islands, nature preserves, and other “sustainability” projects that maintain the status quo of displacement, military occupation, extractivism etc.
• Pacific Islander, Caribbean, and/or Indigenous ways of knowing and being with land and water as ways of knowing and doing relations with place. For example, building on “sea of islands” (Hau’ofa 1994), “seascape epistemologies” (Ingersoll 2016) or “tidalectics” (Brathwaite 1973)
• Rethinking boundedness and borders through the fluidity of land-and-water in their many forms; borders as relationships of connection rather than separation; islands of abundance rather than scarcity
• Conceptualizing and speculating islands and environmental/Anthropocene futures in relation to the climate crisis and the changing contours of islands and land-sea connections with care,
• Trans-border waterscapes; island/continental connections; forms of oceanic, archipelagic, or aquapelagic (multispecies) flourishing
• Alternative or counter-mappings of land/water relations; island visions that refuse ‘god trick’ views from above (Haraway 1988)
• Aesthetic politics that refuse boundedness, borders of separation, and binary divides 
• We especially encourage submissions from Global South scholars and artists as part of feminist projects decolonizing knowledge and surfacing subjugated ways of knowing and being. To be considered for inclusion in this themed section, please send an abstract or proposal (300-500 words) and a short bio (max 250 words) to reconfiguringislands@gmail.com. We are happy to discuss submission formats inclusive of and beyond Catalyst’s submission types.  By: May 15, 2026

References

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily natures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzmvh.

Brathwaite, Kamau. 1973. The arrivants : A new world trilogy–rights of passage / islands / masks. London ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Chen, Mel Y. 2023. Intoxicated: Race, disability, and chemical intimacy across empire. Anima: Critical race studies otherwise. Durham: Duke University Press, https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478027447.

De Wolff, Kim. 2025. Synthetic frontiers: Ocean plastic and the persistence of trash islands. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2013. The myth of isolates: Ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear pacific. Cultural Geographies 20 (2): 167–84, https://www.jstor.org/stable/44289602.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth&nbsp. 2019. Allegories of the anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Diaz, Vincente. 2015. No island is an island. In Native studies keywords., eds. Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Andrea Smith and Michelle Raheja, 90–107. Chicago: The University of Arizona Press.

Elden, Stuart. 2013. Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power. Political Geography 34 (May): 35–51, https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.12.009.

Farbotko, Carol. 2010. Wishful sinking: Disappearing islands, climate refugees and cosmopolitan experimentation. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 51 (1) (Apr): 47–60, https://api.istex.fr/ark:/67375/WNG-1PC987WX-M/fulltext.pdf.

Fujikane, Candace. 2021. Mapping abundance for a planetary future. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gugganig, Mascha, and Nina Klimburg-Witjes. 2021. Island imaginaries: Introduction to a special section. Science as Culture 30 (3) (July 3): 321–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2021.1939294 (accessed December 4, 2023).

Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (no. 3) : 575–99, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

Haraway, Donna. 2004. A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s . In The haraway reader donna haraway., 7–45Routledge.

Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1994. Our sea of islands. The Contemporary Pacific 6 (1): 147–61, https://natlib-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?query=any,contains,991998063602837&tab=innz&search_scope=INNZ&vid=NLNZ&offset=0.

Ingersoll, Karin Amimoto. 2016. Waves of knowing. Durham: Duke University Press, https://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9780822373803.

Jue, Melody. 2020. Wild blue media. Elements. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jue, Melody, and Rafico Ruiz. 2021. Saturation. Elements. Durham: Duke University Press.

Masco, Joseph. 2021. The future of fallout, and other episodes in radioactive world-making. Durham: Duke University Press, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478012665.

Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of water. Environmental cultures. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Shih, Ashanti. 2019. The most perfect natural laboratory in the world: Making and knowing hawaii national park. History of Science 57 (4): 493–517, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0073275319848966 

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2025. Theory of water. Knopf. https://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781039010253.

Starosielski, Nicole. 2015. The Undersea Network. Sign, storage, transmission. Durham: Duke University Press, https://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9780822376224.

Te Punga Somerville, Alice. 2012. Once were pacific: Māori connections to oceania. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wakefield, Stephanie. 2021. The possibility of islands in the anthropocene. Dialogues in Human Geography 11 (3) (Nov): 443–7, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20438206211017455.