call for papers - Chicago conference

Winds of Change: Global Connections across Space, Time, and Nature

Introduction: The ASEH invites proposals for its 2017 annual conference, which will convene March 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. Located along the shores of Lake Michigan and the banks of the Chicago River, this gateway city linked eastern markets, western hinterlands, and commodified nature. Between 1830 and 1870, the development of ship harbors and railroads, the construction of grain elevators, stockyards, and meat packing companies, and the creation of the Chicago Board of Trade transformed a frontier outpost into the nation’s preeminent commodities marketplace. Even the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 proved transformative. Following the fire, innovations in skyscraper construction and the emergence of the Prairie School of architectural and landscape design made Chicago one of the nation’s premier built environments. Chicago celebrated its rise from the ashes with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which introduced the City Beautiful Movement to urban planning. The city also engendered a nascent environmental justice movement, when Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr established Hull House, where female reformers, such as Dr. Alice Hamilton, conducted some of the earliest studies documenting the disproportionate public health threats borne by immigrant neighborhoods. And it is home to President Barack Obama, who has endeavored to address global climate change and its threats to the environment and world political stability. Chicago thus evokes many of the interdisciplinary themes of environmental history, including increasing globalization, with all of its implications for the natural world.

The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in the emerging field of Plant Studies. The volume is the first of its kind to bring together a dynamic body of scholarship that shares a critique of long-standing human perceptions of plants as lacking autonomy, agency, consciousness, and, intelligence.

The environmental justice atlas documents and catalogues social conflict around environmental issues. Across the world communities are struggling to defend their land, air, water, forests and their livelihoods from damaging projects and extractive activities with heavy environmental and social impacts: mining, dams, tree plantations, fracking, gas flaring, incinerators, etc. As resources needed to fuel our economy move through the commodity chain from extraction, processing and disposal, at each stage environmental impacts are externalized onto the most marginalized populations. Often this all takes place far from the eyes of concerned citizens or consumers of the end-products. The EJ Atlas collects these stories of communities struggling for environmental justice from around the world. It aims to make these mobilization more visible, highlight claims and testimonies and to make the case for true corporate and state accountability for the injustices inflicted through their activities. It also attempts to serve as a virtual space for those working on EJ issues to get information, find other groups working on related issues, and increase the visibility of environmental conflicts.

A publicação deste livro decorre da continuação do projeto “Recursos Minerais e Territórios”, iniciado em 2010, patrocinado pela Secretaria de Geologia e Mineração e Transformação Mineral (SGM) do Ministério de Minas e Energia (MME), e com diversos resultados destacados. Entre eles, o livro Grandes Minas e APL´s, em que quinze estudos de caso foram apresentados, destacando-se as atividades minerais das grandes mineradoras e dos Arranjos Produtivos Locais. Agora, trata-se de um ampliado trabalho com estudos de caso de mais de cem localizações no território brasileiro de atividades minerais. Além do texto objetivo sobre cada caso, artigos sintéticos e prospectivos iniciam o livro e em cada grande região do Brasil.

In 2015 the CITCEM – Centro de Investigação Transdisciplinar Cultura, Espaço e Memória, organizes the 4th CITCEM Conference subordinated to the theme Crossing Borders: Connecting Edges of Environmental History. The Conference aims to bring together experts of environmental history, whose contributions will enable the exchange of new perspectives, discussing concepts, methodologies and processes in the field of Environmental History. The meeting program includes plenary and parallel sessions which cover a wide range of issues that are interconnected and cross the boundaries of Environmental History. Health, human development, climate change, the role of science and technology, endangered species or changes in the landscape are part of a varied palette of topics to be discussed at the conference. We also highlight in the plenary lectures the contribution of three international experts in Environmental History as Mauro Agnoletti, Rudolf Brázdil and José Augusto Pádua. With a great pleasure and on behalf of Local Organising Committee I am submitting to the scholar community this set of abstracts selected by the Scientific Committee as a way to disseminate methodological and topics orientation in the field of environmental history, that we named Reading topics on environmental History. Finally we consider that this conference is the first one organized in the context of the Portuguese Network of Environmental History – REPORT(H)A as a lasting legacy of the 2nd World Congress of Environmental History (WCEH) 2014 promising a future cooperation with the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and other similar institutions. We wish you all a great conference! Inês Amorim on behalf of Local Organising Committee