Island Studies, as it has developed over the last 3-4 decades, has been primarily addressed to research and theorisation concerning inhabited, formerly inhabited and/or inhabitable islands. There are several types of terrestrial formations that have fallen outside its evolving purview, including sandbanks, reefs and rocks. The latter have not so much been formally excluded as eschewed, in parallel with international legal definitions of islands and of their differences from other geomorphological forms. The United Nations 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), in particular, carefully seeks to distinguish rocks from islands. But there is something of a paradox here in that various types of rocks have proved significant environmental, socio-economic and/or cultural assets to nations that include them (or seek recognition of their claims for their inclusion) within their maritime borders. This article attempts to highlight aspects of rocks relevant to Island Studies, and to human societies more generally, with regard to two forms, pinnacles and sea stacks, drawing on examples from the Faroe Islands, the (English) Channel Islands and Balls Pyramid in the southwestern Pacific. In doing so, it elaborates their socio-cultural and environmental significance to the regional and national societies whose borders they fall within and, thereby, identifies their validity as objects of analysis within Island Studies and within geography more broadly.

This article investigates how railways, as infrastructure, fabricate and articulate an island’s identity (its ‘islandness’), from the perspective of a case study of Hainan Island in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The development of the railway on Hainan is predominantly contextualised in terms of two distinct historical construction phases: the first stage is a brief colonial period under Japanese rule (1939–1945) in which railway development was undertaken for resource exploitation supporting colonial expansion and war supply; the second stage is the present-day development of a circular high-speed train network as part of the construction of the Hainan Free Trade Port (2023–2025). In the latter case, Hainan’s transportation infrastructure is more than a symbol of the modernisation of the island, it also affirms the image of the island as a type of tropical paradise for outsiders and mainland Chinese, aligning with the national vision of the island as an embodiment of extra-statecraft. This dominant narrative of Hainan, rooted in infrastructure, reinforces a tourist-centric identity and facilitates capital circulation. I argue that the complexity of Hainan’s islandness, grounded in railways as transportation infrastructure, reveals a counter-utopian perspective and resistance to colonial legacies, particularly from the perspective of intra-island circulation and its multifaceted cultural dimensions. This research not only spotlights underexplored realities of Hainan’s railway development but also sheds light on an emerging conceptual framework — the railway as means of circulation and narration — for understanding Hainan’s speculative infrastructure development and infrastructural promises for the future.

Workers’ and union representatives' assessments of the future of the MOSE mobile barrier project in Venice, Italy, position the Italian state as a bureaucratic entity unwilling to respond to the shared needs of workers and the lagoon. Skilled workers and union leaders were interviewed in early 2024 to map power relations around the flood defense infrastructure during its first years of operations. Their responses outline two growing contradictions within the state ‘safeguarding’ mandate. First, essential roles on the MOSE project are becoming more precarious without guaranteed future employment. Second, high water event protocols are appearing more short-sighted as sea-level rise threatens to disrupt lagoon stability. Workers hope that the government resolves both contradictions through creation of the long-delayed Authority for the Lagoon. They also express visions for a future economy that revalourises maintenance work and provides clear guidelines for future interventions. This aspirational framing of coastal adaptation work aligns with calls for good climate jobs across the world, suggesting that a just transition for the lagoon workscape requires equity-oriented leadership to make social and ecological spaces endure.

In three vignettes of boat-dwelling on the canals and rivers of England and Wales, authors from across disciplines find common themes of the emergent precarity of life afloat, desires for freedom that, for many, motivate a life on the water; and the importance of boat-dwelling as offering an escape from, and an alternative to, economic crises and inequities. The example of an ‘Eco-Mooring Zone’ in central London prompts a discussion of anxieties around urban clean air regulation perceived as a threat to a ‘way of life’. A second vignette interrogates the off-grid characteristics of London boating and explores how some citizens respond to disillusionment with mainstream life – and experiment with alternative values and lifestyles centered on dignity, solidarity, freedom, and responsible consumption – through boating. A final vignette takes on the under-explored topic of ‘stable’ mooring spaces. The cul-de-sac nature of marinas with relatively static boats is discussed and applied to the example of two marinas in Alvechurch, Worcestershire. Taken together, these examples advance ongoing academic debates around the social and political relevance of boat dwelling on the inland waterways of England and Wales. The heterogeneity of perspectives and themes in this article reflects the broader diversity of boaters as a political group, allowing for reflections on the contemporary canalscape as a complex, dynamic, contested and occasionally chaotic stage for action, with significant implications for housing and mobility.

Shima (ISSN: 1834-6057) is a double blind, peer-refereed open-access journal published by Shima Publishing (Australia). Shima is SCOPUS indexed has been registered with the Directory of Open Access Journals since 2007.

In July and August of 2022, the Odra/Oder River, much of which flows through Silesia in southwest Poland, experienced a massive environmental disaster. Within the context of this devasting event, this text explores the Odra River and Silesia as “haunted landscapes” (Tsing et al., 2017). Considering the ghostly traces that tell the river’s regional histories, a “hauntological approach,” posits that landscapes are processes of layering and sedimentation, of ever unfolding meanings (Derrida, 1994; Roberts, 2013). This inquiry examines the catastrophe and reactions in Poland and Germany, situating the incident in the river’s longer material-socio-cultural history, including narratives about the region. Particular attention is given to Osoba Odra, an initiative formed as a reaction to the 2022 environmental disaster and massive fish die-off that the river experienced through industrial contamination and climate change and exacerbated by a lack of response from the Polish government. Positing the question “Is a river a person?” the Osoba Odra initiative is part of an expanding movement among legal scholars, Indigenous communities, and environmental NGOs that rivers be recognised as legal persons, granting them increased rights to protection (O’Donnell, 2018).

This article explores cross-cultural approaches to river stories and riverine well-being, centring Indigenous and transdisciplinary perspectives. Originating in Aotearoa New Zealand, the ‘Let the River Speak’ project interweaves ancestral Māori philosophies, arts, and Earth sciences to engage with rivers as living communities of water, land, plants, animals, and people. The research highlights the Waimatā River in Te Tairāwhiti as a site of cultural and environmental convergence, employing mātauranga Māori (ancestral knowledge), ecological insights, and creative practices to transcend nature/culture and theory/practice divides. Presented in Udine, Italy, the project reflected on global connections between waterways and their communities, including the Tagliamento River and Venice’s lagoon. Drawing on art, storytelling, and science, the article emphasises the necessity of collective, more-than-human approaches to river stewardship amidst escalating environmental challenges. It argues for the inclusion of diverse knowledge systems to foster adaptive, sustainable relationships with waterways and their ecosystems.

Tang Fu-jui’s Port of Lies is a Taiwanese crime fiction that critiques the complex network of political and corporate interests undergirding Taiwan’s fishing industry and the industry’s historical exploitation of Indigenous and migrant fishers. Using Philip Hayward’s concept of the aquapelago, this essay reads industrial fishing represented in the novel not simply as a mode of production, but as a more-than-human aquapelago that sustains itself by creating and maintaining specific social and human-nature relations. The essay first reviews Tang’s representation of the major forms of violence in industrial fishing under the conceptual framework of hydrocolonialism to provide a historical context. With an aquapelagic reading, it then highlights the moments in the novel in which industrial fishing sustains itself by reproducing specific subjectivity, social relation, and human-nature relation. The essay concludes with a reflection on ways to decolonise human’s fishing activities.

The outward representation of the Orkney archipelago, around 10 miles off the north coast of Scotland, is mainly predicated on scenic imagery, of standing stones and other archaeological settlements, sea cliffs and wild seas, fishing boats in harbour townscapes, expansive beaches with turquoise waters, all playing a prominent role in projecting a sense of ‘islandness’. Yet, this representation lacks cultural depth, using landscape as a setting based on objectified and disengaged tropes, of the ancient past, remote or wild places, or insular communities. In contrast, Orkney based artists working with film allow us to emerge into a sense of place charged by cultural, experiential and ecological qualities. In their work we see tired tropes of landscape replaced with creatively charged expressions of the island as a relational place. Across this study, the evaluation of these artists’ films is framed through a set of relational qualities, the island as a situated, imagined, sensed, ambient and resourceful place, ultimately being a constructed place where filmmaking and island life merge.

This article discusses the Indian film Ram Setu (2022) against the backdrop of 21st century public discourses, geological debates, legal proceedings and the general surge of politics revolving around the eponymous tombolo – Ram Setu/Adam’s Bridge (understood by geologists as a stretch of 103 patchy reefs or shallow shoals connecting India’s Rameswaram Island with Sri Lanka’s Mannar Island). It is important to question the locus standi of not only the filmmakers but also the film’s widespread critics. The bulk of the criticism against the film converged around the notion that the filmmakers had attempted to pander to growing Hindutva-oriented sentiments in India. What is more concerning, however, is that both the filmmakers and the film’s critics have remained silent on the tombolo’s aquapelagicity. While the film’s emphasis on archaeology as a methodology of reconstructing the tombolo’s past signals delusions of grandeur, the continued absence of a voice to highlight its geological history is equally disingenuous. Seen through the critical lenses of Island Studies, the film Ram Setu is seen to obscure holistic perspectives of the sacred aquapelago of Rameswaram Island, Dhanushkodi, Thalaimannar and Mannar Island and its entanglements with questions of Tamil fisher’s livelihoods and environmental heritages of the Sethusamudram region.