OTOK Podcast: Recent Episodes
Bojan Fürst | Patched Heart Productions
My guest today is Dr. Laurie Brinklow. Laurie is a poet, singer, intrepid traveler and the linchpin of the university of Prince Edward Island's Institute of Island Studies with their internationally renowned Masters of Island Studies program. We talked about her favourite subject - art and islands. Her research on Tasmania and Newfoundland looked at how islandness and islands show up in artistic works produced in those places.
Institute of Island Studies at UPEI
In this episode of OTOK you can hear my conversation with James Ellsmoor. James is the founder and managing director of Island Innovation, an organization that works with islands and islanders towards sustainable future. We talked about the role of technology in connecting islands, climate change, energy and sustainability.
As always support the show, leave a rating and tell me who I should talk to next.
Island Innovation
Off the northeast coast of Newfoundland mainland, in moving ice carried by Labrador Current sits Fogo Island with its two and a half thousand islanders. Zita Cobb is one of them.
An eight-generation Fogo islander, Zita decided to invest her capital into a different kind of venture - one that would help build her community up. Today, Shorefaast is a social enterprise that operates world renown inn on Fogo Island, Fogo Island Shop and Fogo Island Fish. Zita is a passionate advocate for arts and islands everywhere.
https://shorefast.org
COVID-19 pandemic is impacting islands around the world. Francesco Sindico is the Co-Director of the Strathclyde Centre for Environmental Law and Governance at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Together with Island Innovation he is leading a project on Islands and Covid-19 responses trying to understand what those response are, how they are similar and what is that islands can learn from each other.
If you live on a an island, consider helping Francesco and his team. You can access and fill out the survey on the project website.
Oops... A late episode of OTOK. My apologies. It's been a busy week, But, I am going to make it up to you with a fascinating conversation with Adam Grydehøj about Greenland, colonialism, how China gets to be a global bogeyman, politics of language and island independence. All of that accompanied by Adams two musical picks: Sumé's Greeenlandic classic from the 1970s Piffiit Nutaat and Josef Tarrak Petrussen's Tupilak.
Ilan Kelman is a professor of disasters and health and an island scholar based at the Institute for risk and Disaster Reduction and the Institute of Global Health at the University College London in the UK.
Ilan and I took a whirlwind tool of islands around the world looking at what makes islands and other places vulnerable to disasters and what is that we actually mean when we talk about resilience.
Disaster by Choice by Ilan Kelman
Island vulnerability website
Pam Hall is an artist, filmmaker, and scholar living and working on the island of Newfoundland whose work is deeply embedded in place. Her latest work, her gorgeous Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge embodies all of those underlying principles in work that is a celebration of people, places, and knowledge they hold. In this episode, we talk about “the plague,” islands, local knowledge and the fact that everybody is from somewhere. You can purchase Pam’s book directly from Breakwater at: http://www.breakwaterbooks.com/books/towards-an-encyclopedia-of-local-knowledge-excerpts-from-chapters-i-and-ii/
Nenad Starc is professor emeritus at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, Croatia and one of Croatia’s most prominent island scholars. We talked about islands as places of refuge in the time of COVID-19; the shortcomings of public policy that doesn’t account for island specificities; and the impacts pandemic will have on tourism industry. In this episode, on Nens’s request, you get to hear some Croatian New Island Wave music from two bands Gego i Picigin Band and Šo!Muzgoon. Enjoy!
The first full episode of Otok Podcast is a conversation with Dr. Godfrey Baldacchino, professor of sociology at the University of Malta, president of the International Small Islands Studies Association, and the outgoing UNESCO co-chair in island studies at the Institute of Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. We talked about COVID-19 pandemic, its impacts on islands and Malta, and lessons we might learn from it. All of it to the music of Freddie Portelli and HOOLI.
This is OTOK, a podcast for and about islands and islanders. Everybody else is welcome to come along, too.
http://www.otokpodcast.com