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Acti02


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Critique or action, history or activism? Exploring the role of environmental history in the environmental crisis 
Convenors:
Sabine Höhler (KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm)
Christina Wessely (Leuphana University Lüneburg)
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Formats:
Roundtable
Streams:
Navigating Conflict, Governance, and Activism
Location:
Linnanmaa Campus, L7
Sessions:
Wednesday 21 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki

Short Abstract:

As the environmental crisis widens, time for historical reflection seems to have become short. The roundtable seeks to reflect the difficult position of our discipline(s) between critique and action by working for a radically historical concept of the environment.

Long Abstract:

Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource exhaustion, deforestation, plastic pollution – as the environmental crisis widens, time for historical reflection seems to have become short. Historians are challenged to enlarge the scope and scale of their activities beyond understanding past and present phenomena towards more future-oriented approaches; action, it seems, has taken the place of analysis. Is this observation at all appropriate? Are historians possibly even complicit in creating a new environmental urgency that defers historical examination to an afterthought?

Our roundtable starts from this provocation to reflect the difficult position of our discipline(s) amidst a global environmental crisis. In this situation, can we as environmental historians refrain from taking ecological problems and their envisioned solutions for given? Can we formulate theoretical and methodical positions that mediate between critique and action? Is there a way for us as environmental historians to historicize the ecological crisis while simultaneously fostering green transitions? And is such a dual task desirable at all?

Such questions on the scope and function of history in the Anthropocene are currently widely and controversially discussed. By working for a radically historical concept of the environment that can be understood both as a critical and a future-oriented contribution to the environmental issues of our time, our roundtable conversation aims to contribute to the debate with a focus on the theory and subject(s) of history as well as the meaning and role of history.

Accepted contributions:

Session 1 Wednesday 21 August, 2024, -
Roundtable Video visible to paid-up delegates