Islands exist in both space and time. Many islands are associated with the preservation of ancient traditions, yet they may simultaneously be associated with social, technical, and cultural innovation. Islands may be perceived as places where one can still access the past or as places for imagining the future. Islands can be seen as resisting the external world or conduits for incoming currents of matter, energy, and thought.

Islands are often accorded exceptional spatial and temporal values. Climate change, habitat change, and other forms of environmental disruption have heightened impacts in many island spaces. Such spatiotemporal intensification can take many forms. Islands can nurture both distinctive and powerfully inventive cultural and artistic production, including innovation along traditional lines. Island heritage and its continual formations and reformulations of past island lives can inspire new solutions to both emergent and persistent challenges. Unique island biocultural systems can strengthen resilience to natural and anthropogenic hazards while also underlining the uncertainties of island identities in an era that seems to demand constant innovations of sociotechnical systems and processes. Tourism, which has become a major industry for so many islands, increasingly competes for time, space, and other resources with alternative island livelihoods.

In many cultures, islands are connected with religion and the sacred, and they continue to be key sites for mythmaking. New technologies—in energy, in transport, in communication, and (in the case of AI) in information production itself—offer spectacular opportunities for islands even as they challenge existing island lifeways. The explosion and implosion of island space-time in our globalised yet increasingly fragmented world require new visions for how islands are, how islands were, and how islands ought to be. The role of islands in preserving global biocultural diversity further emphasises the importance of understanding both human and non-human lives at the intersection of land and water.

These and other issues must all be addressed by formal and informal governance, politics, and policymaking. There are strong differences in the strategies, mechanisms, and practicalities of governing and managing a small individual island, a large island, a vast archipelago. a near-shore island, an oceanic island, a river delta island, a sparsely populated island, a dense island city, a tropical island, an arctic island, a subnational island jurisdiction, and/or an independent island state. The geographical concepts of ‘island’ and ‘archipelago’ furthermore vary across cultures, time, and space, influenced by sociotechnical imaginaries, political systems, and changing cosmologies.

The 20th Islands of the World Conference, held in Shinan County, South Korea explores these issues and more across the full range of islands and archipelagos. This multidisciplinary conference is open to academic, policy, and artistic approaches to the conference theme as well as to other aspects of islands, archipelagos, and islandness.