Over six hundred million people live on the world’s 43 island nation-states and on hundreds of sub-national island jurisdictions. The ‘island-continent’ of Australia comprises over 12,000 islands, islets and rocky outcrops, while the island-State of Tasmania is an archipelago of 334 islands.
Islands have distinct geographies and their peoples have varied cultural identities. These particular landforms, and the seascapes that surround them, seem especially hard-wired into Western conceptions of self, place, and planet. Islands are also at the frontline of major environmental and social changes.
In this unit, we study a range of issues that have affected or are likely to affect island places and people—among those issues are climate change, heritage management, tourism, economic development, environmental challenges, and governance.
A major research project enables you to focus on an area of study about island geographies that interests you and that project may vary according to hemisphere, ocean, island group, jurisdiction, or challenges faced.
A three-day field trip enables you to take insights from the cases studied in the class and see whether, how, and to what extent they are present on Bruny Island. The trip also provides crucial training in field techniques in human geography; and is informed by different kinds of field work and analysis.
The unit offers varied opportunities to develop high-level skills in comparative and case study methods that draw on the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and prepares you to consider island life and island futures in ways that are of long-term relevance in relation to islands and other places.
This unit is available in a number of undergraduate degree programs, and students are drawn from the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The unit is indebted to insights from island studies and human geography, and the approach is qualitative and critical.