Floating Islands, Moving Ecologies: Ocean-based Intercultural Learning as an Archipelagic Heritage Method

Abstract

Oceans have often been treated as peripheral to learning and heritage, framed as unstable spaces separating land-based cultures and institutions. Recent work in island studies and the blue humanities has challenged this view, yet questions remain as to how learning and heritage can be methodologically examined in mobile, oceanic environments. This article explores this methodological challenge by examining ocean-based learning aboard international tall ships through an archipelagic lens. Drawing on ocean-based ethnography conducted during an international sail-training voyage, the study advances the Archipelagic Heritage Method (AHM) to analyse learning and heritage as processes unfolding within moving ecologies. The tall ship is approached as a floating island—a bounded yet permeable environment shaped by ecological forces, embodied labour and intercultural proximity. Empirical analysis shows how storytelling, ritualised labour and embodied mapping operate as situated practices through which participants orient themselves socially, ecologically and culturally at sea. The article argues that ocean-based learning cultivates forms of islandness grounded in movement, ecological attunement and relational dependence.