A Shifty Island, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying About Mosquitoes and Love Partial Knowledge

This article examines knowledge produced during an interdisciplinary field trip to Persin Island, a politically charged and ecologically dynamic fluvial island on the Danube. Our collective of environmental humanities and sciences scholars came to describe Persin as shifty: an environment where spatial, temporal, and categorical boundaries never fully stabilize but are continually reconfigured by ecological processes, political projects, and human–nonhuman entanglements. Walking the island’s uneven terrain, navigating traces of its carceral past and present, and confronting multispecies encounters such as swarming mosquitoes made this instability tangible. Writing together afterward, we extended the concept of shiftiness to our own epistemic practices: partial, fragmentary, and dialogical rather than holistic or authoritative. We argue that collective, short-term fieldwork can unsettle conventional hierarchies of method and authorship, mirroring the unsettled qualities of the landscapes it studies. Embracing indeterminacy, we contend, offers a generative stance for environmental humanities research.