Kinship: Islands
Community, relationality and belonging in a world of islands

Examine isolated communities as unique models of kinship, exploring how islands teach us about connection, interdependence, and collective care.

taught by Hannah Close

Module 1Islands as a metaphor

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We begin our journey exploring time, place, and interconnectedness. This module emphasises the relationship between separation and connection, inviting us to consider our place in the world and our shared existence.

Chapter 1

An Islander Adrift on a Continent With Leny Strobel

Chapter 2

Q&A With Leny Strobel

Chapter 3

All Beings are Islands With Andreas Weber

Chapter 4

Q&A With Andreas Weber

Module 2The transformative power of poetry

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In module two, we explore interconnectedness, hidden histories, and the transformative power of poetry.

Chapter 1

The Global Plantation With Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Chapter 2

Q&A With Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Chapter 3

Clear Mind Wild Heart: Finding Courage, Clarity and Kinship Through Poetry With David Whyte

Chapter 4

Q&A With David Whyte

Chapter 5

Immunosilence in a World of Hyperconnectivity With Maureen Penjueli

Module 3The celebration of difference

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They explore perception and difference: balancing sameness and difference in the brain, and a mythopoetic reflection on the shore-tide threshold and translucency as an erotic return to the natural.

Chapter 1

Islands of the Mind With Iain McGilchrist

Chapter 2

Q&A With Iain McGilchrist

Chapter 3

On Translucency With Himali Singh Soin

Chapter 4

Q&A With Himali Singh Soin

Module 4The significance of kinship

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Module four explores kinship with the more-than-human. Bathsheba Demuth traces shifting human-whale relationships, while Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq calls for unity, harmony, and youth learning to build relationships in a divided world.

Chapter 1

Of Islands and Whales With Bathsheba Demuth

Chapter 2

Q&A With Bathsheba Demuth

Chapter 3

On Kinship With Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq

Chapter 4

Q&A With Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq

Module 5Archipelagos, islands, and local cultures

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This module explores archipelagos, islands, and local cultures. Craig Santos Perez focuses on the significance of archipelagos in Pacific Islander literature, highlighting kinship, traditional knowledge, and decolonisation. David Gange examines the interconnectedness of island spaces through small family b...

Chapter 1

Poetic Archipelagos: On Writing Pacific Islander Worlds With Craig Santos Perez

Chapter 2

Q&A With Craig Santos Perez

Chapter 3

These are the Boats that Made Us With David Gange

Chapter 4

Q&A With David Gange

Module 6The interdependence of island living

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To close our journey, Alastair McIntosh reflects on the interconnectedness and interdependence of living on the island of Lewis, highlighting the value of nurturing the soul and creating positive change. Kailea Frederick emphasises the importance of bridging worlds and identities in a divided society, usin...

Chapter 1

The Basket of Community With Alastair McIntosh

Chapter 2

Q&A With Alastair McIntosh

Chapter 3

When We Translate With Kailea Frederick

Chapter 4

Q&A With Kailea Frederick

We inhabit a world of islands…Our pale blue dot; a constellation of archipelagos buoyed amidst an even greater cosmos of celestial atolls. Like the billowing ocean tides, our terraqueous isle undulates toward the sun, moon and stars, impelling the transformation of matter at each turn, our planetary tidewrack visible in the fallen leaves and glacial floes.

Despite our separations, cosmic and interpersonal, we are all intimately connected. The poet John Donne famously said ‘no man is an island’, and while the biotic world relies on the creative expression of our individuality, our own ‘islandness’, in order to manifest itself, beneath the surface we discover, like islands, that we are inextricably joined.

We are joined at the oceanic root, at the depths of the seabed, and by the salt-stippled space between us. The seas of relation that meditate our entanglements are, in the same breath, domains of impasse traversed only through building arks and yielding to the winds that carry our words and wares in sensuous exchange, or by diving courageously into the unbroken fathoms between and among us.

Rally together as crew as we explore our earthly relations and the liquescent spaces that connect us. Each module, we will navigate towards a unique island of inquiry, mapping counter-cartographies of relationship along the way. Through tentacular engagement with self, other, and the more-than-human, we'll challenge colonial and essentialist notions of relationship so that we might orient ourselves towards healthier ways of being together, ways that honor our profound entanglements with our elemental home.

We'll reflect on the thresholds, boundaries and borders that mediate our belonging, seeking to unflatten the map through 'tidalectic' perspectives that offer welcome anchorage in a world adrift.

6 Modules
25 Sessions
13 Speakers
Curated readings, resources and activities
Community discussion area

Deepen your understanding of the role of relationships in creating healthier ways of being (both individually and collectively)
Discover what kinship means in your own life & rediscover your sense of place/rootedness in the world (and self)
Expand knowledge of different ways of relating to self, human, and more-than-human beings
Re-evaluate the notion of the "other" through intersectional and "multi-perspectival" lenses
Cultivate deeper awareness of nuance, complexity, and the value of a "both/and" perspective
Gather tools and practices for deepening a multitude of relationships in your own life
Shift your perception of kinship towards more expansive, unorthodox and/or radical possibilities relevant to the issues and contexts we find ourselves entangled in today
Expand knowledge of useful terms and concepts, and be part of questioning what a new ecologically intregrous language might look like (or a language towards flourishing for all)

Faculty
Meet your teachers

testimonials
see what over 7000+ users say about advaya

Zoë Fay-Stindt

The Kinship 2023 course brought together so many international worlds into one warm, collaborative Zoom room, and the connections that resulted from those 6 weeks shifted my worldview indefinitely.

studied

Kinship: Islands

World as Archipelago

advaya’s lead curator, Hannah Close, the curator of our multi-teacher, six-week course, KINSHIP: World as Archipelago, introduces the metaphor “World as Archipelago”, and talks about the implications this framework has on our relationships in the context of this shared elemental home.

What can islands teach us?

In this winding, non-linear, continent-crossing conversation with advaya, Hannah Close discusses archipelagic thinking, what islands can teach us about belonging, identity, community, borders, thresholds and more, connection-in-separation, osmosis and globalisation, and other thoughts that went into the curation of the upcoming online course, KINSHIP: World as Archipelago.

Home as an archipelago of belonging

In this conversation with advaya, Craig Santos Perez discusses archipelagic poetics and thinking, the history and politics and culture of Guam, homemaking and homebuilding as a diasporic individual, the ocean as metaphor, and archipelagic kin-making. Craig speaks to us with and from his background as a migratory, global islander, an indigenous Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), as a poet, environmentalist, political activist, and a father.

Decolonisation as re-membering

In this conversation with advaya, Leny Strobel discusses diasporic identity formation; reconfiguring belonging in the context of empire, as a process of re-membering; how she draws from the well of liminal space; and more. Leny speaks to us with and from her personal history and experience of being a Kapampangan from Central Luzon in the Philippines, and (currently) a settler on Wappo, Pomo, and Coast Miwok lands.

Kinship beyond genealogy, lineage, inheritance and bloodlines

A reflection on one of the guiding questions to our course KINSHIP: World as Archipelago, from advaya's Head of Storytelling, Tammy Gan.

Thinking with the ocean, thinking with islands

A reflection on the themes of our course KINSHIP: World as Archipelago, from advaya's Head of Storytelling, Tammy Gan. In this reflection, she discusses the problem of globalisation and generating solidarity across difference, and considers thinking with oceans and islands as a way forward.

The basket of community

I grew up in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, in the island known as Lewis in the north, with Harris to the south, the two divided not by sea but by a mountain range. When I look back now, some aspects of our life might seem hard. We got our drinking water off the roof as there was no piped supply when I was young. There were frequent power cuts, and little choice in the shops. That was all substituted for by the wonderful richness of community life. My father was one of the island’s doctors, and most of our neighbours worked the land, fished the sea, or were weavers of the famous fabric, Harris Tweed. I realise, now, that each of us was held in the basket of the community. You weren’t just your family, you were the village. You were taught how to be the village, the older folks weaving the weft to the warp of each child’s emergent life. In an island, you have to be interdependent, especially in those days, but it’s still the case. You learn to look out for one another. We didn’t just go fishing, or bring the peat (used for fuel) in for ourselves. We did these things for and with one another. Loneliness was much less when you could wander in and out of one other’s homes, the doors mostly unlocked. It’s true, religious life was a heavy scene. But as I’ve gotten older, and as the heaviness has loosened in the community, I’ve come to appreciate the spirituality of it all. Such is the kind of experience about which I can share a little and which shapes my books – especially Soil and Soul (on the campaign for land reform), Poacher’s Pilgrimage (about ecology, mythology and spirituality on a 12-day walk through the island) and Riders on the Storm (my latest book, with the subtitle, The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being). World as archipelago? Well, just as natural ecology recognises the value of ‘ecological islands’ to give non-human life a chance, so we can perhaps create islands, metaphorically if not literally, in our lives, to give the life of the soul a chance. I see no other way to change the world.

Thinking and kinning with islands

"There have been loads of different metaphors used to try and describe the inherent unity of human civilisation across the planet. And they've all been quite well-meaning, but they haven't quite covered various different bases that I think are really important to cover, when it comes to looking at the ways in which we are interconnected. So the "world is archipelago" metaphor, for me at least, is a way of seeing our interconnected nature in a different, more complex and more nuanced way, than other metaphors might allow us to see."

On translucency

‘On Translucency’ is a mythopoetic memo about the space between the shore and the tide, the translucent shallow, visible and invisible, dense and sheer. It departs from Glissant’s right to opacity, which offers a transcultural world in which difference exists and is celebrated without a need to totally comprehend, or reduce the other. Translucency imagines the life of those in places where frosted windows keep the heat of the sun out, soften the detailed edges of bodies, yet holds on to the relational, lets the light through, does not shut out the other. Translucency argues for a kind of not-knowing that allows for the private world of thought and gregarious world of friendship, as island to archipelago. It is filtered through the translucent lenses of air, ice, skin, oil and film. Translucency is the right to illegibility and the desire for interpretation both. Translucency is an erotic way back into our new-natural.

Melting the heart in the ice of man

In this session, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, whose family belongs to the traditional healers from Kalaallit Nunaat, Greenland, shares a message about the necessary kinship between us all, the melting of the ice in the world due to the climate crisis and how that needs to happen in our hearts instead. He shares wisdom and tells stories passed down from his family, and reminds us about why kinship is so key, in an archipelagic world.

Decolonisation as re-membering

Home as an archipelago of belonging

Of islands and whales

In the waters along the Bering Strait, bowhead whales have been known to three kinds of hunters over the past two centuries: Indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. Each imagined different normative relationships with whales, tied to visions of time, history, and the future—and oriented around visions of deep human connection, or fundamental human separation from ecological context. Are human beings part of an archipelago of life that includes whales, or an island apart? This talk looks to oral histories, logbooks, and personal experiences to see how such ideas shaped interactions between people and whales, and what we can discern of whales' own answers—and what both mean for living on a flourishing planet today.

We are islands who remake themselves

In a surprising turn of events, our opening session for the course, KINSHIP: World as Archipelago, this week was graced by the fantastic Andreas Weber, who you may recognise from advaya's other course, Ecology of Love. Here are some bits of Andreas drawing links between erotic ecology, biology, and islandness, archipelagic thinking.

The global plantation

My talk will be drawn from current work I am doing on the global plantation in the British Empire. Like the ship that carried people between spaces of empire, the plantation is also a space that moved, that moves, and connects people and places across multiple oceans. It is also a framework, a way of organizing relations, whose inheritances live with us still. Both enclosed yet mobile, plantations were spaces of entanglement and extraction, where forms of kinship and alienation existed simultaneously. This seminar will focus on the visual cultures of the plantation, historically and in the work of contemporary artists, the interaction and entanglements that existed within and between plantation spaces, and the different kinds of mobilities and movements that sustained its formation.

These are the boats that made us

From the Caribbean Basin or Mauritius to Venice or South Connemara, island spaces have been woven together not by the big ships of commerce and diplomacy, but by little family boats that have often rested in shallow noosts along the shore. Uniquely adapted to local land- and sea-scapes, as well as to philosophies or life and stores of story, these diverse small craft reveal immense possibilities for ways of being beyond the growth-based economics and urban values of our present. This talk uses four distinctive rowed and paddled boats, and the localised island cultures they made possible, to explore the range of options for rejecting the values of growth-based economics that coastal pasts provide us with. It asks, too, how the practice of building boats and of travelling, today, the inter-island searoads used by past communities, can be sources of knowledge to rival books and archives.

Finding courage, clarity and kinship through poetry

At the core of poetry is the act of catching up with ourselves. Speaking out, we make conscious what until now has been hidden inside us and so join the world in conversation again. Courageous speech enables us to unfreeze our lives, to move on emboldened for the next step, to be a part of flowing forces that a moment before seemed frightening to our formerly static sense of self. Through the robust vulnerabilities of poetry, we become a self more equal to the world – more present, ready for right action and with an edge of generous wildness that our social world finds hard to entrap.

Poetic archipelagos

In this talk, Dr. Craig Santos Perez will discuss the metaphors of archipelagos and islands in Pacific Islander literature and culture. He will highlight what these metaphors teach us about kinship, genealogy, traditional environmental knowledge, indigeneity, and decolonization. Lastly, he will perform selections of his own poetry that addresses the theme of ‘world as archipelago’.

An islander adrift on a continent

The mapmakers say that the world is made up of Islands and Continents. Today’s islands were, once upon a time, connected to larger land masses. The geologic movement of continental shelves and climate changes over millions of years speak to me today of a sense of Time that wants to interrupt my modern mind. As an Islander adrift on a continent called Turtle Island, I am slowly awakening and wanting to be liberated from the conditioning of a Modernity that demands that Time be controlled and parceled into pieces and be in sync with machines and rhythms that refuse to stay grounded and rooted in Place. Many indigenous peoples who know in their bones what it means to be rooted in Place are now, like me, also adrift in the “elsewhere”. We are diasporic. We are scattered. I come from 7000+ islands known as the Philippine archipelago that were once connected to the Sunda and Wallacea shelf until the rise and fall of sea levels over geologic Time created our islands. We were severed from our Austronesian kin; today we speak over a thousand languages that are all related but almost unintelligible to us. Western Colonization and empire-building came to our shores 500 years ago and after the genocide, after the stealing of lands, peoples, spices, gold, and silver; after the scattering of the pieces of ourselves, we are again hearing the call to return Home. Home is not a metaphor. Home is a Place. Home is an Archipelago. But can Home also be a Memory? A Vision of an Indigenous Future we would all want to live in? Can we live in Kapwa* Time where the past, present, and future live in our long bodies? *This Filipino concept refers to “You and I are One. In Kapwa there is no Other.”

Immunosilence in a world of hyperconnectivity

In 2021, after 5 years of expedition on floating labs in Kiribati’s largest protected area the Phoenix Islands, 3,000 meters below the ocean surface, scientists discover a novel microbe. A microbe so foreign to humans that our immune cells can’t register they exist. The bacteria triggered no response from our innate immune system: an immuno-silence! The discovery excited the scientific world as it dispelled the long-held belief of universal immunity, that our cells can recognise any foreign bacteria they interact with. Across the world in another kind of lab, a market in Wuhan, believed to be the epicentre of Covid, scientists are trying to understand how the virus jumped to people from live animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale market on two occasions in 2019. How this tiny virus, naked to the human eye, spread through the air we breathe and within two years touched every corner of the globe, wreaking havoc as it passed from breath to breath, until, in many cases, there was no breath left. What does a novel bacteria and a virus have to teach us humans about our notions of the other: foreigner, of the alien, notions of universal connectedness and kinship? Join me as we take a deep dive into the world of viruses and bacteria to see what lessons they hold in store for humanity.

Islands of the mind

In this talk I will very briefly relate my long engagement with the question of hemisphere differences in the brain; and show how this draws attention to the necessity of a balance between sameness and difference in our perception of all that is. The left hemisphere tends to lump similar phenomena into categories, while the right hemisphere preserves the unique nature of the actually occurring instance. Interestingly one of the most fertile turns of civilisation in the West was that which occurred around the year 650 BC in Greece and led to a sudden eruption of human flourishing in the arts and the sciences equally: it was based on a civilisation that was coming into being in distinct but nonetheless connected centres, on islands around the sea of the Mediterranean, enacting a fertile cross-miscegenation that depended on simultaneous distinction and connexion, difference and yet sameness. Other societies, such as the Egyptian and Babylonian, had been monolithic in their structure, and their wisdoms were prescribed. Greece was in relation to this a breath of fresh air: a new encounter with experience, as little as possible limited by inherited wisdoms, yet liberated by them into a new synthesis. The idea of the archipelago – units that are independent, yet interconnected – runs, and must run, deep in the Western psyche. I interpret this in terms of what we understand of the two hemispheres of the human brain.

Kinship: IslandsCommunity, relationality and belonging in a world of islands

Module 1Islands as a metaphor

An Islander Adrift on a Continent With Leny Strobel

Q&A With Leny Strobel

All Beings are Islands With Andreas Weber

Q&A With Andreas Weber

Module 2The transformative power of poetry

The Global Plantation With Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Q&A With Anna Arabindan-Kesson

Clear Mind Wild Heart: Finding Courage, Clarity and Kinship Through Poetry With David Whyte

Q&A With David Whyte

Immunosilence in a World of Hyperconnectivity With Maureen Penjueli

Module 3The celebration of difference

Islands of the Mind With Iain McGilchrist

Q&A With Iain McGilchrist

On Translucency With Himali Singh Soin

Q&A With Himali Singh Soin

Module 4The significance of kinship

Of Islands and Whales With Bathsheba Demuth

Q&A With Bathsheba Demuth

On Kinship With Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq

Q&A With Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq

Module 5Archipelagos, islands, and local cultures

Poetic Archipelagos: On Writing Pacific Islander Worlds With Craig Santos Perez

Q&A With Craig Santos Perez

These are the Boats that Made Us With David Gange

Q&A With David Gange

Module 6The interdependence of island living

The Basket of Community With Alastair McIntosh

Q&A With Alastair McIntosh

When We Translate With Kailea Frederick

Q&A With Kailea Frederick

FacultyMeet your teachers

testimonialssee what over 7000+ users say about advaya

World as Archipelago

What can islands teach us?

Home as an archipelago of belonging

Decolonisation as re-membering

Kinship beyond genealogy, lineage, inheritance and bloodlines

Thinking with the ocean, thinking with islands

The basket of community

Thinking and kinning with islands

On translucency

Melting the heart in the ice of man

Decolonisation as re-membering

Home as an archipelago of belonging

Of islands and whales

We are islands who remake themselves

The global plantation

These are the boats that made us

Finding courage, clarity and kinship through poetry

Poetic archipelagos

An islander adrift on a continent

Immunosilence in a world of hyperconnectivity

Islands of the mind

Kinship: Islands
Community, relationality and belonging in a world of islands

Faculty
Meet your teachers

testimonials
see what over 7000+ users say about advaya