Written by Yi-Yu Lai.
Image credit: NATSA.
I still remember when I first moved to Hawaiʻi for my PhD program, my classmates were surprised to learn that I could not swim. “You’re from an island. How can you not know how to swim?” they asked. In that moment, I realised that even though we live on an island in Taiwan, we rarely pause to think about what it means to live with islandness. And I am probably not alone. When Mei-Huan Chen, a geographer studying water infrastructure on Kinmen, invited me to join a roundtable at the 2025 North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) conference, I noticed that while all of the presenters on the panel were researching islands in or beyond Taiwan, we did not always explicitly frame our work in terms of islandness.
As our roundtable chair, Po-Yi Hung, pointed out, certain themes appear frequently in Island Studies, but do scholars actually engage them through the lens of the island itself? This concern echoed a question raised by one of our presenters, Kai-Yang Huang, as we were forming the roundtable. Simply put, our panel brought together three case studies on Kinmen (Mei-Huan Chen), Matsu (Kai-Yang Huang), and Penghu (Jo-Tzu Huang), alongside Palau-Taiwan relations (Cheng-Cheng Li) and Lanyu-Batanes connections (Yi-Yu Lai). With these latter transnational perspectives, Kai-Yang worried that the conversation might be reduced to geopolitical concerns. Indeed, such worries have intensified as Taiwan has become a political spotlight amid superpower tensions. How the islands themselves and the voices that emerge from them can be heard remains a pressing challenge. It was against this backdrop of geopolitical concerns that our discussion turned toward the theoretical and methodological stakes of Island Studies.
From this starting point, our discussion circled on what “Island Studies” might mean, how Taiwan Studies can both inform and be reshaped by it, and how the two might be bridged in practice. We did not aim to settle these questions once and for all. Instead, the conversations showed how each island we discussed complicates what it means to think with islands. We noted that Island Studies is not simply “studying an island,” but asking how islandness, scale, and relations matter.
For instance, Kinmen’s infrastructural challenges, as Mei-Huan argued, expose the limits of land-based governance frameworks that are often taken for granted, while Kai-Yang’s work on Matsu highlights how identities are shaped less by Oceania’s horizontal island networks than by vertical ties to the Chinese mainland due to its location. Cheng-Cheng’s direct participation in the Alingano Maisu to Taiwan project, initiated by the Micronesian Voyaging Society, further shows how contemporary communities, through their engagement with history and its ruptures, are renewing inter-island relationships by revitalising traditional non-motorised navigation. These cases reveal how islands are not peripheral units but relational nodes, shaped by asymmetrical ties to larger powers and by renewed efforts to seek/revitalise connections across the sea.
Other presentations widened the discussion, showing that islands are shaped not only through governance and identity politics, but also through ecological and historical entanglements. Jo-Tzu’s study of sea urchins and tourism in Penghu illustrated how islandness is shaped through multispecies relations, complicating the boundaries of Island Studies with ecological perspectives. My own research, revisiting colonial ethnographies, traced how Spanish pressures in the Batanes archipelago prompted some unconverted Ivatans to seek refuge on Lanyu, impacting how Indigeneities were subsequently seen and defined in those two locations. Read together, these cases highlight how both ecological actors and historical forces potentially generate forms of island connectivity that exceed national frameworks. From multispecies relations in Penghu to Indigenous mobilities between Lanyu and Batanes, the island (chain) itself becomes a key to understanding how identities, connections, and more-than-human relations emerge beyond the limits of national frameworks.
Thinking outward from Taiwan highlights questions of sovereignty, democracy, and geopolitics; thinking inward from the islands encourages us to reimagine Taiwan as an archipelago rather than a singular “main island.” The cases from our roundtable illustrated both perspectives. On the one hand, transnational examples complicate Taiwan’s geopolitical positioning: Cheng-Cheng’s research on Palau-Taiwan relations demonstrates how small island states reposition Taiwan within Pacific networks. He also conveyed the intensity through their own participation in a voyaging journey between Palau and Taiwan, which involved individuals from diverse backgrounds working together on a small outrigger under uncertain conditions. My examination, from colonial ethnographies to contemporary reconnections between Lanyu and Batanes, traced moments of resonance, shared cultural themes, and affinities, but also exposed underlying asymmetries and episodes of mutual misunderstandings. It means that a truly archipelagic Taiwan Studies with such transnational perspectives must confront these asymmetries and frictions and resist romanticising island-to-island relations as inherently horizontal or harmonious.
On the other hand, cases grounded in Taiwan’s offshore islands remind us that Taiwan is already internally archipelagic. Through Kinmen, Mei-Huan shows that islands are governed not only by land-based dynamics but also by their thresholds of capacity, which entangle them with places elsewhere. Jo-Tzu reflected on how the dominant narratives of Taiwan’s postwar development, an example of the East Asian developmental state, can be further complicated when thinking from the perspective of coastal fisheries and islands. At the same time, Kai-Yang’s study of Matsu reveals identities shaped not only by Taiwan’s democratisation but also by its layered histories of militarisation and cross-strait entanglement. These cases demonstrate that Island Studies contributes to Taiwan Studies by reconceptualising Taiwan as an archipelagic, plural, and more-than-human formation. This mutual reframing also raises methodological questions: how can we, as researchers, bridge these fields in practice?
If Taiwan Studies and Island Studies are to be mutually generative, the challenge is not only conceptual but also methodological. How, in practice, can we study islands in ways that do justice both to their particularities and to their wider connections? Our roundtable raised several approaches, such as multi-sited ethnography attentive to questions of scale and asymmetry. In addition, methodology must grapple with language, culture, and translation, while more-than-human perspectives further enrich the analysis. Such practices re-centre islands not as bounded units but as dynamic nodes of connection, disjuncture, and possibility.
When my classmates in Hawaiʻi asked how I could come from an island without knowing how to swim, I began to realise how rarely we in Taiwan pause to reflect on our own islandness. The discussions in this roundtable confirm that islandness is never a simple matter of geography, but a lens that unsettles and enriches both Island Studies and Taiwan Studies. By posing questions about concepts, contributions, and methods, we have not sought final answers but opened spaces for rethinking. Island Studies can no longer remain marginal to Taiwan Studies, just as Taiwan Studies gains new life when reframed through archipelagic and oceanic terms. To take islands seriously is to acknowledge uneven encounters, ecological limits, and more-than-human entanglements while resisting the temptation to romanticise island-to-island relations as naturally harmonious. In this regard, reflecting on islandness is not only an academic exercise but also a political and ethical commitment: to listen more closely to the voices of islands, to recognise the asymmetries that shape them, and to imagine Taiwan as part of a wider archipelagic world still in the making.
Born and raised in Taiwan, Yi-Yu Lai has been studying Indigenous activisms and the cross-border relationships between Indigenous Taiwanese and the Indigenous peoples in the Philippines since 2014. His works centre on Indigenous politics, political violence, and conflict resolutions. Lai is particularly interested in how political violence and activism affect Indigenous peoples’ ways of life and their interactions with the larger society. He finished his BA in Anthropology at the National Taiwan University, where he also completed his MA in Anthropology. At present, Lai is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. You can reach him at yiyulai@hawaii.edu.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘NATSA: Toward an Otherwise in Taiwan and Beyond‘.
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