This is a panel CFP for the 2025 Biennial Conference: Collective Atmospheres, to be held July 8-11, 2025, at the University of Maryland.

This panel seeks to build a collective atmosphere for island and desert studies, a space where desert(/)islands can share the same critical air. Islands have historically had the lure as paradisal spaces, and this has led to their often complicated and complex colonial histories. Meanwhile, global desert environments have frequently been represented as vast, unpeopled wastelands; such depictions risk perpetuating Indigenous …