RHN 175/2024 | Call, EURHO
Organisers: Simona Boscani Leoni (University of Lausanne, Switzerland) and Giulia Beltrametti (University of Roma Tre, Italy)
Session at Rural History 2025, 9–12 September 2025, Coimbra, Portugal
Deadline for Submissions: 20 January 2025
Call for Papers:
The making of naturalistic and technical-environmental knowledge. A long-term perspective across different chronologies, geographic areas, and disciplinary approaches
Session S49 at Rural History 2025
How is naturalistic knowledge constructed - historically? How do scientists, technicians, administrators, experts, and travelers approach the environment and its resources? How does naturalistic savant knowledge stand in dialogue with local knowledge and practices? This session, which hosts five papers devoted to different research experiences in different European geographic areas, with different long-term chronologies, attempts to trace, at least in part, some of the lines along which this knowledge has been historically constructed.
From the Swiss Alps to the Apennines and the Italian coastline, to the Slovenian Karst, the session will discuss paths of scientific construction of environmental knowledge and use of its resources read in the light of dialogue with local and empirical knowledge of places, practices, and techniques.
The attempt is to identify the lines of continuity and discontinuity that lead, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, to the definition of a scientific approach to nature that, with its well-formulated categories, risks not fully grasping the complexity, including anthropological complexity, of environmental knowledge and practices. Additional papers wishing to contribute to this reflection from different chronologies, geographical areas, and disciplinary approaches are welcome.
Proposals should be submitted here: https://ruralhistory2025.org/call-for-papers/ until 20 January 2025. For further details please contact the organisers at giulia.beltrametti@uniroma3.it and simona.boscanileoni@unil.ch.