First Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS)

Call for Papers

First Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS)
October 8-9, 2018
Academic Center for Natural Sciences, Latvian University, Riga, Latvia

The interest in interdisciplinary cooperation between humanities, arts and social sciences in the study of environment has been constantly rising all over Europe during the last 20 years. This holds also true for the three Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.

First Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS) aims to bring together environment-inspired scholars from different disciplines (anthropology, arts, ecology, folkloristics, geography, history, literature, semiotics, psychology etc), in order to:

> advance environmental topics within the humanities, arts and social sciences;

> bring together researchers from different backgrounds and discuss common themes;

> create a Baltic network of interdisciplinary studies on environment;

> discover ways of developing further cooperation in research, teaching, and outreach.

In order to map the grounds of the emerging community, the conference is open to all topics that focus on environment in humanities, arts and social sciences: food, resources, landscape, pollution, water, recycling, power plants, representation of nature, environment and social movements, human-animal studies, environmental ethics etc. Under ‘environment’ we do not mean only ‘nature’, but also built environment and cultural and industrial spaces linked to non-human nature and natural resources at large.

The conference welcomes contributions from all scholars who work on environmental humanities, arts and social sciences of the Baltic region, independently of where they live and work. We also welcome those scholars who reside in the Baltics and are interested in the field but whose work focusses on some other geographic location.

We welcome contributions in all recognised academic formats (20 min presentations; posters, roundtables) but are also open to suggestions for newer, more dynamic formats like shorter ‘provocations’ for works in progress or artistic interventions (á 5-10 mins). Please send an abstract (for classical presentations) or a short note on why you are interested in the event and a possible title for your short intervention by March 31, 2018 to Kati Lindström (kati.lindstrom@abe.kth.se)

Please spread the word about the conference to all your colleagues and friends! Whether the conference will be one or two-day event will be decided after assessing the submissions.

With kind regards,

The organising committee:

Dr. Anita Zariņa & Dr. Kristīne Abolina, University of Latvia

Dr. Kati Lindström, KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Dr. Kadri Tüür & Prof. Ulrike Plath, Tallinn University

Dr. Anda Baklāne, Latvian Library