REMOTE: Rethinking Remoteness, Isolation, and Peripherality
This multidisciplinary conference critically examines the purported drawbacks and potential benefits to remoteness, isolation, and peripherality.
Remoteness, isolation, and peripherality have become lenses through which certain territories and communities are valued and assessed. These concepts have come to be regarded as markers of vulnerability, marginality, and lack of modernity.
Yet all three concepts are fundamentally relational, presume centre-
What do remoteness, isolation, and peripherality mean in practice? Who decides whether a place or a people in remote, isolated, or peripheral, and how do these determinations affect life in places that have acquired the label? Being labelled in this manner can sometimes give a community access to aid and support, but it can also pigeonhole a community into acting out its remoteness, can hinder efforts at embracing one’s own centrality. For Indigenous communities and minority nationalities located on or beyond the edge of a majority culture, an uncomfortable tension can develop between preserving local cultures and lifestyles on the one hand and performing in accordance with metropolitan and neocolonial expectations on the other. From China’s Great Western Development Strategy to Australian development efforts in Melanesia to attempts within Western liberal democracies to decentralise public administration by relocating government bodies out to ‘the provinces’, initiatives to address the disadvantages and inequalities resulting from peripherality and remoteness often mean increased political and economic dependence on a distant centre of power.