Call for Individual Papers
Update: The CfP has been extended until the 2nd of February.
2025 ISCH Conference:
‘Human/Nature – Entanglements in Cultural History’
16–19 June 2025, Rovaniemi, Finland (On Site only)
Cultural history has mainly studied humans: their actions, experiences, and ways of thinking. Yet the past is not shaped by only human actions and thoughts. Human beings inevitably interact with the nature surrounding them, which further means that history has not been shaped by human agency alone, but by the actions of various living and non-living beings. Some research has already been conducted in the field of cultural history within environmental history, as well as multispecies and/or more-than-human history, exploring, for instance, the historical relationships between humans and animals, plants, or landscapes.
Another relevant topic of discussion in this field is the relationship between historical research and emerging epistemological and ontological approaches questioning human-centered understandings of “culture”, ”community,” or “agency.” These approaches challenge traditional assumptions that emphasize the dominance of human agency. These openings raise intriguing philosophical questions which urge us as historians to reassess our theoretical and methodological assumptions concerning e.g. culture, temporality, and working with the sources. Furthermore, these questions are crucial when considering current environmental challenges, such as the biodiversity loss threatening the planet.
The ISCH 2025 conference thus invites individual papers exploring human-nature entanglements from diverse angles.
You can direct your abstract proposal to a panel you wish to attend, or suggest an abstract related to a topic (see list of panels and topics below).
Max. 300 words abstract proposals are to be submitted via Submission Form by 15th of January at the latest.
You can find more information about the open panels in the Conference website.
Your paper may focus on empirical case studies and/or theoretical, methodological, and (onto-)epistemological discussions. Historians and contextually oriented scholars working on any period or location are encouraged to explore the following panels and topics:
Open Panels:
1. What Microhistory offers Cultural History – where the Human meets the Other
2. Nature Bewitched: Approaching Nature in Context of Early Modern Witchcraft
3. Cultural Entanglements of Humans, Space, and Nature in the Cases of Early Modern Urban Heating and Cooling Practices
4. Bodies, Texts and Contexts
5. Nature, justice and equality: ontological and epistemical pluralism, contradictions and legal landscapes
6. Negotiating human relationships with the animal world in early modern Europe
7. Towards a New Natural History: Rewriting the Narratives of Doom and Progress
8. Biomedicalization and cultural meanings of death and dying
9. Ecocritical Perspectives on Audiovisual Media Production
10. Sacred Forests: Religious Perspectives on Human-Nature Relationships Across Time
11. Water-society relations in the European Arctic
12. Nature and cityscape: encounters and entanglements
13. The Agency of Nature and its Environments: Decentering the Human in Artistic and Cultural Production
14. Talking about human-nature interaction in education historiography: using oral testimonies to establish cultural connections
15. Multi-being-entanglements and the Fluidity of Wild and Domestic in the Arctic
Topics:
1. Human-nature interaction as part of cultural history
2. Representations of human-nature entanglements
3. Cultural history of environments (including built environments and bodies as environments)
4. Multispecies history (e.g., animals, plants, microbial & non-living beings)
5. Cultural history in relation to non-anthropocentric theories (e.g. posthumanism)
6. Multidisciplinary approaches and openings
7. Methods and theories of cultural history
8. New approaches to cultural history
9. History of cultural history
In addition, the closed panels are listed in the Submission form. If you are participating in a closed panel, please remember to add your abstract /title of your contribution to that panel.
The participants of the Conference are required to be members of ISCH (The International Society for Cultural History).
Important dates:
Call for individual papers: 2 December 2024 – 2 February 2025
Notification of acceptance for papers by 17 February 2025
Registration starts: 3 February 2025
Early bird registration: 3 February – 31 March 2025
Latecomers: 1 April – 31 May 2025
Anna-Leena Perämäki
Jasmin Lukkari