The concept of smallness depends on what is included and excluded. If only land area is included, islands may indeed be perceived as small (Dean et al., 59).
— Dean, A., Green, D. & Nunn, P. D. (2017). Too much sail for a small craft? Donor requirements, scale, and capacity discourses in Kiribati. En: Stratford. E. (Ed.). Islands geographies: essays and conversations, 54-77. New York: Routledge.
Islands and archipelagos are powerful, recurring, and vexing to the spatial imaginary: highly unique, idiosyncratic, disparate and yet revealing, offering spatial form, pattern, and logics that are everywhere reproduced (Mountz, 2015: 638).
— Mountz, A. (2015). Political geography II: islands and archipelagos. Progress in Human Geography 39(5), 636-646.
Islandness is a sense that is absorbed into the bones of islanders through the obstinate and tenacious hold that island communities exert on their native-born as well as on their converts, who experience it as an instantaneous recognition. Islandness thus is an important metacultural phenomenon that helps maintain island communities in spite of daunting economic pressures to abandon them (Conkling, 2007: 200).
— Conkling, P. (2007). On islanders and islandness. The Geographical Review 97(2), 191-201.
Álvaro Román