From Sea to Sky

From Sea to Sky is a series of Spring 2026 hybrid panels that seeks to build a collective atmosphere for island and desert studies, a space where desert(/)islands can share the same critical air. 

Drawing on the framework of "archipelagic thinking," a concept first discussed by Édouard Glissant (Poétique de la Relation 1990), which foregrounds the relationality of sites and ideas that may appear discrete.   Archipelagic thinking suggests that islands or deserts may be discrete, or may be bound by shared currents of history, ecology, and imagination.  

Speakers in the series will invite an examination of how seemingly separate terrains or ideas might be understood in concert. Archipelagos, from Taiwan to Hawai’i to the “sky islands” of the desert American Southwest, have historically carried the allure of paradisiacal spaces, and this aspect of their "islandness" has led to their often complicated and complex ecological, colonial, and contemporary histories. Or, desert environments have been represented as vast, unpeopled wastelands that perpetuate Indigenous erasure and environmental harm. 

In this series, established faculty, early career faculty, graduate scholars, scientists, artists, writers, and poets will draw on insights from island and desert studies while examining related fields to explore what we can learn when we entertain not only discrete entities but archipelagos of relations in both local and global places. 

Each of our hybrid and in-person panels is sponsored and organized by Humanities for the Environment (HFE), College of Integrative Arts and Sciences (CISA), School of Applied Sciences and Arts (SASA), Desert Humanities Initiative, and the Flagship Hub of UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.

Find out more here.