Globality, mondialité… Globality does not homogenize culture. It produces a difference from which new things can emerge. Globality equips us to combat globalization, which… standardizes and dilutes. Globalization reduces communities to a single model, attacking them from the top down, diminishing them. So we need a sense of a world community, of globality, or we cannot combat globalization. (Glissant and Obrist 22-23)

The idea of flows takes from the Fluid States notion of ‘fluxes, density and currents’ of the world ocean, where the archipelagos of the world are connected by the waters, to instantiate both movement and change— movement within and among islands, interactions, and exchanges among the peoples, societies, and cultures in their particularities on those islands, economic exchange, trade and commerce, and so on, and the changes that result from these movements.

We have to accept that our world changes radically and perpetually, and that it changes with us and in us, and that we have an obligation to perceive, to intuit, to sense this change. That’s how we reach utopia. (Glissant and Obrist 69)

Elsewhere in Archipelago Conversations, Glissant says, ‘Our utopia is accepting the idea of change…’ (67)

Thus, the concept of ‘archipelagic flows’ emerges as a vital framework for reimagining world-making in our current global context – a world fractured by conflict, systemic violence, and unprecedented threats to human and non-human life on a planetary scale. Drawing on the metaphor of island archipelagos, this approach addresses a crucial question: How can distinct communities maintain their autonomy while fostering necessary interconnections in the face of ecocide, deepening inequalities, and widespread impoverishment? Karen Barad’s notion of existing “together apart” offers a productive lens for understanding how we might cultivate flourishing conditions across differences. This framework bridges insights from performance studies and critical island studies, suggesting new methodologies for survival and coexistence that transcend simple binaries of isolation versus connection. Like islands in an archipelago, communities can maintain their distinctive characteristics while participating in larger networks of mutual support and exchange, creating resilient systems capable of addressing contemporary challenges while preserving cultural and ecological diversity.

• Waves of populism and contemporary politics
• Archipelagic affects
• Invisible geographies
• Feminist and queer philosophies and archipelagic thinking
• Tourism and leisure as archipelagic flows
• Cartographies of archipelagic movement
• Maritime wandering practices
• Non-human formations and flows
• Sonic environments of archipelagos
• Storms, disasters, and climate change
• Performance ecologies
• Archipelagic fandom and celebrity cultures
• Flows of popular entertainment
• Digital islands, virtual archipelagos

Submission Eligibility Notice

Submissions of proposals are open only to current members of Performance Studies international (PSi) and members or affiliates of the CIS and UKI communities.

• If you are a PSi member, please log in with your account to access the submission portal.
• If you are not yet a PSi member, register for membership here and come back to this page to access the submission portal.

• If you are a member or affiliate of the CIS or UKI communities, please send your proposal to this email address: secretariat.psi.cis2026@uki.ac.id

Submit proposals of 150-300 words with a title and abstract and your institutional affiliation (if any) on or before 15 January 2026. Expect Acceptance Letters by 30 December 2025.

References:

Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Parallax, vol. 20, no. 3, 2014, pp. 168-87, https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. 

Glissant, Edouard and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The Archipelago Conversations. Translated by Emma Ramadan, Isolarii, 2021.

Rae, Paul. “Archipelagic Performance: Scenes from Maritime Southeast Asia.” Theatre Journal, vol. 71, no. 4, 2019, pp. 455-73, https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2019.0094.

FURTHER READING

Performance Studies scholars, notably Sean Metzger (UCLA) who was PSi President in 2016-2020, have long worked on the intersections of the field with island studies, locating their work in the constellation of islands, nissology, critical insularity, the archipelagic, and other related concepts not only to think about individual islands, but also to think with and through them.

We offer the following reference list that may be useful in thinking about your contributions to the conference. These are transnational in scope, in which islands or oceanic movements relevant to archipelagoes are theorized beyond national frameworks and traditional area studies rubrics (such as the Caribbean on its own). Five of them are situated to different degrees in theatre and performance studies and the other 15 works more generally might help folks consider islands and archipelagic thought.

Adrián, Francisco J. Hérnandez, Michaeline Crichlow, and Sean Metzger. “Islands, Images, Imaginaries.” Third Text, vol. 28, no. 4-5, 2014. (The special journal issue includes the editors’ co-authored introduction as well as essays by TAPS folks like Fan-Ting Cheng, Eng-Beng Lim, Gwyneth Shanks.)

Looser, Diana. Moving Islands: Contemporary Performance and the Global Pacific. University of Michigan Press, 2021.

Metzger, Sean. The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization. Indiana University Press, 2020.

Wickstrom, Maurya. “Wet Ontology, Moby Dick, and the Oceanic in Performance.” Theatre Journal, vol. 71, no. 4, 2019, pp. 475-91. (Other than Paul Rae’s article, this one is from Theatre Journal’s special issue on “water”.)

On Island Studies, more generally:

Baldacchino, Godfrey, ed. A World of Islands: An Island Studies Reader. Institute of Island Studies, 2007.

Bentley, Jerry H., Renate Bridenthal, and Karen Wigen, eds. Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges. 1st ed., University of Hawaii Press, 2007.

Brathwaite, Kamau. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy: Rights of Passage; Islands; Masks. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Campomanes, Oscar V. “The Turn to the Archipelagic-Oceanic in Recent Critical Island Studies in Southeast Asia.” Kritika Kultura, vol. 40, no. 2023, pp. 429-41, doi: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152x.1487.

Crichlow, Michaeline A. and Patricia Northover. Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation. Duke University Press, 2009.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Pbk. ed., University of Hawai’i Press, 2010.

Edmond, Rod and Vanessa Smith. Islands in History and Representation. 1st ed., Routledge, 2003.

Glissant, Édouard and Martin Munro. A New Region of the World. Liverpool University Press, 2023.

Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” We Are the Ocean: Selected Works, University of Hawaii, 2008.

Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” Lagoonscapes, The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, vol. 3, no. 2, [1994] 2023, pp. 197-208, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.30687/LGSP/2785-2709/2023/02/002.

Hay, Peter. “A Phenomenology of Islands.” Island Studies Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006, pp. 19-42, doi: https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.186.

McCusker, Maeve and Anthony Soares. Islanded Identities: Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity. Rodopi, 2011. Cross/Cultures, vol. 139.

Metzger, Sean. The Chinese Atlantic: Seascapes and the Theatricality of Globalization. Indiana University Press, 2020.

Nolan, Peter. “Imperial Archipelagos: China, Western Colonialism and the Law of the Sea.” New Left Review, vol. 80, no. March/April, 2013.

Roberts, Brian Russell and Michelle Ann Stephens. Archipelagic American Studies. Duke University Press, 2017.

Stephens, Michelle Ann. “What Is an Island? Caribbean Studies and the Contemporary Visual Artist.” Small Axe, vol. 17, no. 2 (41), 2013, pp. 8-26, doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2323292.

Stratford, Elaine, Godfrey Baldacchino, and Elizabeth McMahon. Rethinking Island Methodologies. Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.

Performance Studies international (PSi) (www.psi-web.org) is a premier professional association of academics, artists, and activists working in the field of performance, a dynamic field of encounters where scholarly and artistic research are engaged with a wide variety of topics and strongly rooted in the interaction between theory and practice. The research and practice conducted under the umbrella term ‘performance’ is interdisciplinary and not only grounded in one particular methodology or tradition.

Since its foundation in 1997 and its first conference in 1995, PSi has been an avenue for interdisiciplinary exchange, communication, and collaboration in the field of Performance Studies. PSi represents this field and stimulates its development by initiating conferences and other events, by means of awards and bursaries, by facilitating the circulation of information and knowledge, through working groups dedicated to important issues in the field of performance research, by means of an archive and oral history project, and with a network and a lexicon aimed towards the further development of performance research and education in a global context. PSi’s ambition to be international is given in the very name of our organization, while at the same time the small ‘i’ used in the spelling of ‘international’ expresses awareness of the complexity of what it means to be international – that internationalization is not only a matter of the cultural phenomena that are the subject of study, nor of the world-wide expansion of one particular research paradigm, but rather of diversification. Being international involves an understanding of Performance Studies as a multiplicity of approaches that can be traced back to different practices in different sites of research.

PSi individual members are based in six continents: Asia, Africa, North and South America, the United Kingdom and Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. Current Institutional Members are Stanford University’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies (USA), De La Salle University (Philippines), Arizona State University’s Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (USA), Texas A&M University’s School of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts (USA), Shanghai Theatre Academy (China), and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London (UK).

President: Jazmin Llana, De La Salle University

Vice President (and Conference Liaison Officer): Serap Erincin, Arizona State University

The Critical Island Studies (CIS) (https://criticalislandstudies.com) is an academic network dedicated to challenging prevailing modes of knowledge production centered around the Northern Hemisphere. It is a consortium of universities that aims to explore the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of emerging knowledge paradigms, and the theoretical, methodological, and artistic interdisciplinary perspectives in understanding concepts and categories such as “islandic,” “archipelagic,” or “islandscapes,” and other related terms particularly in Southeast Asian and Asia-Pacific literary, cultural, and trans-disciplinary studies.

Consortium members are Ateneo de Manila University (Manila), University of Santo Tomas (Manila), Konkuk University (Seoul), Universitas Sanata Dharma (Yogyakarta), Universitas Kristen Indonesia (Jakarta), Universitas Indonesia (Jakarta), University of the Philippines Diliman (Manila), Kyung Hee University (Seoul), De la Salle University (Manila), National Taiwan Normal University (Taipei), Universitas Gajah Mada (Yogyakarta, Universitas Kristen Maranatha (Bandung) and Universitas Udayana (Bali), University of San Carlos (Cebu), and University of Macau (Macau).

The inaugural conference was held in 2019 in the Philippines. The consortium has since met twice every year, for the annual conference and a colloquium: the first is a bigger gathering open to non-consortium participants and the second is a more intimate discussion among the consortium’s core representatives.

Convenors:     Ma. Luisa Torres-Reyes, University of Santo Tomas

Vincenz Serrano, Ateneo de Manila University

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Kyung Hee University

Universitas Kristen Indonesia (Christian University of Indonesia) is a private university established in 1953 as a Christian faith-based institution of higher learning. First offering programs in language, philosophy, and economics, it has since expanded its faculties to include law, medicine, social and political sciences, and engineering, and is committed to providing undergraduate and postgraduate education supported by international standard facilities and technologies. Its main campus is in Central Jakarta. UKI is a member of the Critical Island Studies Consortium.

Conference Directors:

Ied Veda Sitepu, S.S., M.A., Vice Rector for Student Affairs and Cooperation

Susanne A.H. Sitohang, S.S., M.A., Dean, Fakultas Sastra dan Bahasa

For inquiries, write to: info@psi-web.org