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Contribution long abstract:

The first six years of my academic life I trained and worked primarily as a historian. However, I eventually decided that the discipline did not allow me the direct, activistic engagement I wanted to. In order to feel like I could be useful, and contribute to finding ways to mitigate the climate crisis, I traded the past with the present. And now, after a new Master's degree in environmental science, I am starting a PhD in Polar Science, working on currently active research projects in the Arctic.

In my contribution I would like to explain and discuss some of the reasons for my switch, and provocatively question the potential and feasibility of activist historiography for the discipline as whole. Although my contribution can be therefore somewhat provocative, I wish to stress that it is however not meant to disqualify the idea to write activist histories. Especially since, paradoxically, some of the main motivations for my own switch have been Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's Merchants of Doubt, or John McNeill and Peter Engelke's The Great Acceleration.