Call for Papers: Special Section for SST 10(2), November 2027

Field Notes from the Scholar-Practitioners:
Methodological and Epistemological Perspectives from Small States and Territories

The world is changing at a pace that outstrips the production cycles of conventional scholarship. For communities in small (including island) states and territories -- facing sea-level rise, biodiversity loss, governance transformation, and the accelerating pressures of a climate emergency -- this gap between knowledge and action is not abstract. It is existential. And yet the scholar-practitioners who live and work within them – arguably, those best positioned to generate grounded, accountable, and contextually precise knowledge about these realities -- continue to face structural barriers to recognition within academic systems.

This special section of Small States & Territories takes its point of departure from a simple but consequential claim: that the practitioner knowledge and experiences of the citizens of small jurisdictions and of those professionally accountable to their small communities constitutes legitimate scholarly knowledge, and that the methodological and epistemological frameworks for research on an about small states and territories must expand to reflect this. The tensions are well documented -- experience dismissed unless formally cited, code-switching as cognitive labour, the extractive dynamics of outside expertise, the impossible position of critiquing communities to which one is accountable -- yet these remain largely under-theorised in the literature.

How do scholar-practitioners from small states and territories navigate the gap between what academic systems ask them to prove and what they already know? What methodological approaches -- collaborative autoethnography, narrative ethnography, action research, participatory, decolonial methodologies, and others -- best honour and transmit this knowledge? What does rigour look like when it is grounded in relational accountability rather than detachment? And what would a more epistemically just model of small state and territory research actually require of journals, institutions, and supervisors? When one's community does not fully belong to the categories that organise international research and policy frameworks, what does this mean for positionality, belonging, and the politics of knowledge claims? How do scholars navigate spaces where their jurisdiction is simultaneously visible and unrecognised?

This special issue invites contributions - including research articles, methodological reflections, and first-person scholarly commentaries - that engage with these questions from the position of experience. We are particularly interested in papers that:

• Document and theorise the lived methodological tensions of scholar-practitioner researchers in small state and small territory contexts, including in ocean governance, climate policy, environmental management, regional diplomacy, community development, cultural heritage, innovation and other aspects of life in small jurisdictions;
• Explore how collaborative, narrative, ethnographic and autoethnographic, or decolonial methods can be applied in small state and territory research in ways that position their citizens as theorists, not only as informants;
• Examine the epistemological implications of insider positionality in small, relationally dense communities — including the ethics of critique, the politics of representation, and the particular accountability of scholars who write about places to which they remain answerable;
• Examine the specific methodological and representational challenges faced by scholars from or working with territories that occupy ambiguous political status (including de facto states);
• Advance the conversation in small state and territory studies about local/global knowledge hierarchies and what it means for knowledge produced in and about these jurisdictions to travel, or to be kept in place;
• Reflect on what is lost, methodologically and epistemologically, when such local knowledge must be translated into the idioms of Northern / Western academic systems to be recognised as knowledge at all;
• Examine how scholar-practitioners from small states and territories name, process, and make epistemologically productive the grief, urgency, and moral weight that shapes their research and what academic writing looks like when it resists to bracket these dimensions.
• Reflect critically on the structural conditions of doctoral and postdoctoral research for practitioners from small states and territories, including supervision, institutional support, and the legibility of practitioner knowledge within academic evaluation frameworks;

We welcome papers to be considered for a special section of Small States & Territories – diamond open access journal – to appear in Vol. 10, No. 2, November 2027.

We welcome contributions that draw on any disciplinary tradition and engage with small state and territorial contexts from across the Baltic, South-East Asian, Pacific, Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and beyond. Papers need not resolve the tensions they describe; rigorous, honest engagement with complexity that advance inclusive small state and territory studies is itself a contribution.

To be considered for inclusion, please submit an abstract of around 250 words to the Guest Section Editor, Dr Evangelia Papoutsaki on papoutsaki@yahoo.co.uk by 30 June 2026. The abstract should include the author(s) name, institutional affiliation, the proposed title, five to six keywords, and a corresponding email address. All manuscripts will be subject to rigorous, double-blind peer review.

SST uses APA 7th edition as its house style. Further details are available at um.edu.mt/sst/guidelines

SST's publication ethics, including the use of Artificial Intelligence, are set out at um.edu.mt/sst/ethics

Important dates
Abstract submission deadline: 30 June 2026
Deadline for complete draft submission to Guest Editor: 30 October 2026
Publication (Online: Diamond Open Access): SST, Vol. 10, No. 2, November 2027

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About the journal: Launched in 2018, Small States & Territories (SST) has the Islands and Small States Institute at the University of Malta as its institutional home. All articles published in SST are rigorously peer-reviewed. SST is committed to the principles of open access publishing, as outlined in the IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation. SST is a Diamond Open Access journal, with no article processing charges or submission fees.

Call for Papers: SST 10(1), May 2027

Cold Greenland in the Hot Seat: High Stakes in the High North?

Greenland is the world’s largest non-continental island; but with a very small resident population. It is a subnational island jurisdiction with extended self-government, belonging to the Kingdom of Denmark: itself a small state. Greenland has developed its Home Rule since its implementation in 1979 and with an extension of self-government of 2009 to include some room for manoeuvre within international relations. Due to new tensions that have arisen with the 2^nd US Trump Administration, Greenland now finds itself in the middle of great power rivalry. This has led to tense discussions between the Kingdom of Denmark and the EU on the one hand and the USA on the other. Since WWII, the US has been largely seen as the protector of Greenland and an important ally.

This special issue would like to answer such questions as: How typical is Greenland as a subnational island jurisdiction? How relevant is Denmark in the Greenland equation? Is Greenland safer becoming independent, or the other way round? What lessons can other island jurisdictions take from Greenland? Are Greenland’s minerals (including rare earths) crucial to the prosperity and security of the West? What do the Indigenous Greenlanders/ Inuit think about this recent attention to their territory?

We welcome papers to be considered for a special section of Small States & Territories – diamond open access journal – to appear in Vol. 10, No. 1, May 2027.

To be eligible for consideration, please submit an abstract of around 200 words to the SST section guest editor, Dr Maria Ackrén, Ilisimatusarfik / University of Greenland by email by 15 May 2026. The abstract should include the author(s) name, institutional affiliation, the title of the proposed paper, five-six keywords, and a corresponding email address. All manuscripts will be rigorously double-blind peer-reviewed.

SST uses APA 7^th edition as its house style: More details are available online.

SST’s publication ethics, including resort to Artificial Intelligence are explained at www.um.edu.mt/sst/ethics

Important dates
Abstract submission deadline: 15 May 2026
Deadline for complete draft submission to Guest Editor: 30 September 2026
Publication (Online: Diamond Open Access): SST, Vol. 10, No. 1, May 2027

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About the journal: Launched in 2018, Small States & Territories (SST) has the Islands and Small States Institute at the University of Malta, Malta, as its institutional home. All articles published in SST are rigorously peer-reviewed. SST is committed to the principles of open access (OA) publishing, as outlined in the IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation. SST is a Diamond Open Access journal, with no processing charges or fees.