ArchiRPE 2025 : I Symposium on Archipelagic Studies

The 1st International Symposium on Archipelagic Studies ‘The Island and the Archipelagic Dimension’, to be held at the University of Madeira from the 23rd to 24th of October 2025, aims to reflect on issues of insularity and archipelagos in the conception of today's world, marked by environmental crises, new trends in human development and reinterpretations of place and its dynamics.

Thinking about islands and archipelagos, in all their trans- and inter-material dimensions, equivalences and disparities, influences the conception not only of these discontinued worlds from their continental matrix (in some cases), but also of territories which are assumed to be outside the continent, with ontic possibilities of a truly archipelagic context.

It is in this sense that we invite the academic community to some reflection, also of epistemological kind, on the operative concepts of ‘Island’, ‘Insularity’, ‘Archipelago’ and ‘Archipelagicity’, which addresses the treatment of images, practices and discourses around the dimensions of the archetypes of the notions of island and archipelago in contemporary academia, based on the following thematic axes:

- Epistemology(ies) of Islands and Archipelagos
- Islandness, Insularity and Identity: Cultural and Social Practices, Identity and Communities
- Islands, Archipelagos and Literary and Artistic Representations
- Ecology, Sustainability and Environmental Crises in Island Territories
- Politics, Economics and Geopolitics of Islands and Archipelagos
- Mobilities, Borders and Territorial (Dis)Continuity
- Digital Archipelagos and New Spatial Configurations

DEADLINE: 15 JULY 2025
Communication proposals should be sent (in word format) to [email protected], containing the following information:
1. Full name
2. Title of the paper
3. Summary of the paper (up to 200 words)
4. Brief CV of the researcher (up to 100 words), indicating institutional affiliation
5. Email and mobile phone contacts

Deadline:
Submission of paper proposals: 15 July 2025
Paper acceptance: 22 July 2025
Registration payment:
23 July to 01 September 2025 (Earlybird - 70€)
02 to 30 September (Standard Rate - 100€)
Paper submission for publication: 31 January 2026
Dissemination of the programme: from 01 October 2025.

Publication:
The manuscripts will be published in a peer-reviewed volume and/or in the Digital Encyclopaedia in Insular Studies.
Submission of manuscripts for publication: 31 January 2026.