RHN 11/2026 | Call
Organiser: Helen Foxhall Forbes (Dipartimento degli Studi Umanistici, Università Ca' Foscari, Venezia)
8 – 10 September 2026, Venice, Italy
Deadline for Submissions: 22 February 2026
Call for Papers:
Knowledge, Resilience and the Environment in the Mediterranean, 1-1000CE
Understanding the relationships between knowledge and resilience is essential for examining complex societies and their responses to short-term events and longer-term processes of environmental change. This conference, organised by SSE1K: Science, Society and Environmental Change in the First Millennium CE (ERC Consolidator Grant 101044437), aims to address the relationships between knowledge and resilience in relation to climatic and environmental conditions in the Mediterranean in the first millennium CE, particularly focusing on how people in this period responded in different ways to environmental fluctuations and challenges.
Climatic and environmental fluctuations have been posited as factors in societal and political developments and disruption which occurred across the Mediterranean in the first millennium CE, such as the rise and fall of empires, migration, epidemics, or changes in settlement patterns. Many of the scholarly narratives relating to climatic and environmental variations in the first millennium CE have stressed collapse and catastrophe, but often the persistence and continuation of societies and communities despite significant environmental and climatic variations instead indicates resilience, and suggests that people and institutions possessed and passed on certain kinds of knowledge which was required to support resilience.
All societies have a repertoire of situational responses which can be deployed in relation to crises, events or hazards which have the potential to affect societies significantly (e.g. war, extreme weather, interannual climate variation), whether environmentally-related or not. Both the nature of that knowledge and how it is passed on can be crucial in enabling societies to prosper or survive. Some aspects of this knowledge are intellectual, and may be ‘scientific’ in that they attempt to explain the natural world and build on a scholarly written tradition of analysis and observation, for example in relation to natural events like earthquakes. Other aspects of knowledge are societal and held collectively, such as knowledge about which areas are safe from water even at times of extreme flooding.
Social and intellectual aspects of knowledge are linked in complex ways: for example, religious and emotional responses to environmental changes and challenges combine both intellectual and social knowledge and may relate to social and community resilience, or lack of it. Intellectual and social responses to climatic and environmental conditions must also be understood within frameworks of human perception and lived experience, not least because they shape and influence the human-produced evidence that survives for examining these responses.
Sometimes, however, knowledge and established resilience responses are not enough: even resilient societies have their limits. It is also important to understand the complexities and nuances of how and why resilience strategies failed, rather than simply assuming that significant climatic or environmental fluctuations or events led inevitably to collapse, decline or catastrophe. The nature of the causal dynamics in such circumstances is complex rather than simple and demands further investigation.
We invite proposals for papers and posters which address issues relating to knowledge and/or resilience in relation to the environment in the Mediterranean in the first millennium CE, and especially encourage submissions which examine social and/or intellectual responses to environmental changes. We aim to open up debate about the extent to which climatic and environmental fluctuations caused significant problems for communities and societies, in order to understand better the causal links between human activity and experience and environmental fluctuations, and to consider how to move away from simple narratives of catastrophe and collapse.
Issues for discussion might include:
- Resilience responses to long-term or short-term environmental changes, such as intellectual, scientific, religious, emotional, political, social, community or civic responses
- Scientific study of the natural environment as a dynamic system and of instances of environmental change
- Societal knowledge relating to environmental or climatic changes
- The relationship between scientific or scholarly knowledge and agricultural / environmental practice
- Agricultural knowledge in different socio-environmental contexts and conditions
- Adaptive and sustainable practices as form of knowledge supporting societal resilience and resilience responses
- The adaptation of technology and engineering in response to changing environmental conditions
- Long-term or short-term climatic or environmental changes in the Mediterranean in the first millennium CE
- Human-caused environmental changes and knowledge about / responses to them
- The use of computational modelling for understanding human-environment relationships
- Methodological approaches for interdisciplinary study of human-environment relationships
- The failure of resilience responses: the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of collapse or catastrophe
Confirmed speakers include Prof. Sabine Huebner, Prof. Kristina Sessa and Prof. Athanasios Vionis. Some bursaries may be available.
Please submit proposals for posters or 20-minute papers online at https://forms.gle/VqyEc7AUdLcSAp4K7 by 22 February 2026. In case of questions please contact Prof. Helen Foxhall Forbes.
Submission date: 22 February 2026
Notification of acceptance: 2 March 2026
Conference: 8-10 September 2026
URL for submission of abstracts: https://forms.gle/VqyEc7AUdLcSAp4K7
More information at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BiQt4hxLYrete6k92pJFHvxEUVBVLXGA/view?usp=sharing
Source: H-Soz-Kult