From Sea to Sky: Archipelagic Thinking in Deserts/Islands – Exploring conceptual frameworks that connect island and desert geographies through transdisciplinary perspectives

This panel extends the core aims of From Sea to Sky by bringing together humanistic, scientific, and creative approaches to explore how desert and island systems are interconnected through scale, narrative, and lived experience. Grounded in archipelagic thinking, it examines how environments that appear discrete are shaped by overlapping ecological, cultural, and political forces. Presentations move across the Sky Islands of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, migrant narratives that explore desert landscapes shaped by border enforcement, and literary perspectives on the Madrean Archipelago. A focus on islandness in the Anthropocene highlights how human activity disproportionately impacts island spaces, while attention to scale challenges what constitutes an “island” across species and human perception. Work on island futures further extends these questions to global environmental, economic, and policy systems. Together, these perspectives reveal how ecology, migration, literature, and climate futures intersect across deserts and islands, inviting new ways of understanding their deep interconnections.