(Mis)navigating Island Topoi: The Island as Site of Speculation, Invention, and Experimentation

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Islands have played complex and distinctive roles in the history of western thought. Defined by their conditions of isolation, they have been repeatedly thought of as places of encounter with otherness. Islands of this sort are not intentionally found, but discovered through misnavigation (Utopia) or shipwreck (Prospero's island). Historically the island emerges as the site of speculation, invention, and experimentation, and from this arise specific island topoi. This PhD by Design explores these topoi through a sequence of works that critically engage with their cultural and material histories, from Swift's Laputa to Kafka's Penal Colony to Bikini Atoll, and beyond. There is a longstanding tradition of islands as loci of imagination, inquiry and critique from Homer's Odyssey (3000 years ago), Cristoforo Buondelmonti's Isolario (1418), Thomas Moore's Utopia (1516), William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611), Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) to Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony (1919). While these seminal works demonstrate the pull of islands and their recurrence in literature, they also forecast the emergence of islands as topoi of modernity; spaces of alterity and investigation. Whether they are utopian territories, sites of colonial discourse, or the allegorical critique of an existing political environment, we understand that isolation is the condition of all islands. All share characteristics and constraints imposed by their insularity, and therefore provide a 'closed' environment suitable for testing and knowledge development. The corpus of island scholarship is an expanding field of theoretical and conceptual inquiry that connects the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities. In Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Shapin and Schaffer draw connections between the history of science and the history of political thought. Their text becomes a test site - to demonstrate the validity of experimental research and the intersection of different knowledge systems. Islands, like the petri dish, provide 'safe' enclosures to cultivate isolated cells of thought; from Darwin's evolutionary studies on the Galapagos islands to the Baker nuclear test on Bikini Atoll. The PhD by Design will be moved by islands as sites of phenomena that enable a destructive reality, through an interdisciplinary and synthetic mode of work. Drawing across disciplines and thematic definitions the PhD by Design will identify and explore different types of island conditions, asking: in what ways has the figure or idea of the island supported forms of literary, artistic and scientific speculation, and how have these interacted? What distinct topoi (generic forms of island narratives or stories) can be identified and how do they historically transform? In what ways have island topoi been solicited in socio-political and environmental contestations and struggles? What is the future of island-thinking? This research will examine how creative practice works in relation to these histories; in what ways can the speculative powers of island-thinking be folded back into creative practice work and made effective through material and media? In what ways can the work most powerfully engage us experientially and meaningfully?