About the Series
From Sea to Sky: Archipelagic Thinking, Desert/Island Poetics, and Island Systems brought together scholars, scientists, artists, and writers to explore the interconnectedness of deserts and islands through the framework of archipelagic thinking. Across a series of hybrid panels, participants examined how environments that appear geographically distant are linked through ecology, migration, memory, colonial histories, biodiversity, climate futures, and cultural imagination.
This Spring 2026 initiative fostered interdisciplinary dialogue across environmental humanities, ecology, literature, anthropology, policy, and creative practice. Conversations moved from the biodiversity of the Sky Islands and riparian habitats of the Desert Southwest to fisheries and marine conservation, colonial histories in Haiti and the Thar Desert, Arctic futures, and poetic and figurative understandings of islandness. Reflections on Indigenous ecological knowledge, migrant narratives across borderlands, and coastal and island cultures in places such as Kerala further expanded these conversations, foregrounding how local ecological knowledge and lived relationships to water and land shape cultural identity and environmental understanding. Together, the sessions highlighted how questions of scale, mobility, displacement, reciprocity, and environmental change shape both human and nonhuman worlds.
The speakers brought a wide range of disciplinary approaches to these conversations. Ecologists and environmental scientists foregrounded the importance of biodiversity, habitat connectivity, climate futures, and conservation practices, while also demonstrating how ecological systems are shaped by scale and mobility. Discussions of fisheries, bycatch, Arctic futures, and the Sky Islands expanded understandings of archipelagos beyond oceans alone, showing how both deserts and islands can function as interconnected ecological systems. These perspectives emphasized the importance of collaboration between scientific research, local communities, and environmental policy.
Historians, borderlands scholars, artists, and literary critics contributed perspectives on migration, memory, colonialism, and cultural identity across desert and island spaces. Presentations explored how poetry, storytelling, and visual culture reveal hidden connections between landscapes and communities, while also challenging colonial perceptions of deserts and islands as isolated or marginal spaces. Discussions of migrant narratives, Indigenous ecological knowledge, submerged islands, postwar island identities, and figurative islandness demonstrated how literature and art can illuminate emotional, political, and ecological dimensions of place that are often overlooked in scientific discourse.
By placing scientific, humanistic, and arts-based perspectives in conversation, From Sea to Sky emphasized the value of interdisciplinary collaboration in understanding interconnected ecosystems and cultural landscapes. The series invited participants to rethink islands and deserts not as isolated spaces, but as relational environments that illuminate pathways for developing more just and sustainable planetary futures.
