Abstract
Linguists tell stories about language. They typically do their story telling through science. Artists also tell stories. They can tell stories about language and do so through art. In this presentation I take a creative and filmic appreciation of the language and placenaming situations on three islands in Oceania - Kangaroo Island, Norfolk Island, and Pitcairn Island - and compare it to the aesthetics and practicalities of carrying out language documentation. I relate these experiences to being a free range researcher at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies and to the nature of science-art-individual-self interfaces.

Bio
Joshua Nash is an islophilic generalist working in linguistics, ethnography, island studies, the anthropology of religion, architecture, and pilgrimage studies. He has done lots of fieldwork in distant and strange places most notably on small Pacific islands.