Call for Papers: Second Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS II)

October 1-2, 2020
Kaunas University of Technology, Faculty of Social sciences, Arts and Humanities
Civil Society and Sustainability Research group
Kaunas, Lithuania

The interest in interdisciplinary cooperation between humanities, arts and social sciences in the study of environment has been constantly rising all over Europe. This holds also true for the Baltic region where the First Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences (BALTEHUMS) brought together close to 100 scholars in Riga, Latvia, in 2018, resulting in a vivid exchange of ideas, new contacts and collaborations.

The time has come for the second BALTEHUMS conference. BALTEHUMS II will be an equally wide and inclusive event. It aims to bring together environment-inspired scholars from different disciplines (anthropology, arts, ecology, folkloristics, geography, history, literature, semiotics, sociology, 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.

BALTEHUMS II does not put limits to the topics or disciplines of the proposals. We call for presentations, sessions and interventions that focus on environment in humanities, arts and social sciences at large, including topics such as food, resources, landscape, pollution, water, recycling, climate change, power plants, representation of nature, environment and social movements, human-animal interaction, 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 and artistic interventions. For academic posters, presentations and sessions, please submit a 300-word abstract. For experimental sessions and artistic interventions, please send a bio note specifying your reasons for joining the BALTEHUMS, the title of your intervention and a max 300-words summary. Submissions should be sent to baltehums@gmail.com by January 31, 2020. Please indicate full names, affiliations and E-mails of all authors.

Please spread the word about the conference to all your colleagues and friends!

With kind regards,
The organising committee