Call for papers: Cartographies of Crises

Call for papers: Cartographies of Crises: Mapping Conflict, Disaster, and Uncertainty (19th–21st Centuries)

The international workshop Cartographies of Crises: Mapping Conflict, Disaster, and Uncertainty (19th–21st Centuries) organised by the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague, Czechia) and the University of Erfurt, Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection (Gotha, Germany) will take place on 26th–27th November 2026 at the Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection (CG2 - Pagenhaus, Schlossplatz 1, Gotha).

Call for Papers (https://www.hiu.cas.cz/user_uploads/badatelum_i_verejnosti/udalosti/2026_11_26_27_workshop_cartographies_of_crises/cfp_cartographies_of_crises_workshop_2026.pdf)

Thematic mapping has played a crucial role in visualising, interpreting, and communicating physical and socio-economic phenomena. This has been particularly true in times of crises, when maps have been used to represent wars, forced migrations, epidemics, environmental disasters, social upheavals, political conflicts, and anticipatedthreat scenarios. In such contexts, maps have served not only as instruments of documentation but also as analytical tools, persuasive arguments, and means of intervention.

This workshop focuses on the cartographies of crises from the 19th to the 21st century and seeks to advance research on the thematic mapping of crises. Contributions are invited that engage with a broad range of cartographic practices, from individual and hand-drawn maps to official state mapping, thematic atlases, recent digital mapping projects, and approaches associated with Historical GIS and Digital Humanities.

Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which maps represent experiences of uncertainty, disruption, displacement, and shifting identities, as well as to the role of cartography in shaping public perceptions of crises and historical memory. Proposals are welcome that explore how actors across the political and social spectrum have used cartography in response to different forms of crisis – from state and institutional mapping efforts to grassroots and counter-mapping practices – and how these maps both reflected

and shaped individual and collective understandings of phenomena such as war, displacement, epidemics, and environmental disasters.

The workshop seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on this specific category of cartographic sources and to encourage comparative perspectives across different historical periods and world regions. Contributions focusing on non-Western actors and cartographic traditions are particularly welcome. The study of how crises have been mapped and visualised offers new insights into both individual and collective responses to situations of threat and uncertainty, as well as into the role of maps in shaping processes of governance, intervention, and social transformation. The topic is particularly relevant today, as the study of historical crisis mapping deepens our understanding of the visual languages through which contemporary crises are represented, interpreted, and governed.

Contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes are invited:

Maps as analytical tools and instruments of power and governance: crisis management, political argumentation, propaganda, real-time mapping during ongoing crises and disasters, and the role of state and institutional actors;

Visual languages and cartographic conventions: standardisation, symbols, techniques of representation;

Counter-mapping and grassroots practices: non-institutional actors, communities, and individuals as producers of crisis cartographies; maps as tools of resistance, negotiation, and contestation;

Methodological and comparative perspectives: Historical GIS, Digital Humanities, digital mapping projects, transnational approaches, and studies of non-Western cartographic traditions.

The deadline for submitting abstracts (300 words) and a short CV is 10 September 2026. Authors will be notified of the acceptance or rejection of their proposals by 20 September 2026. Each participant will have 20 minutes for their presentation, followed by discussion.

Please submit your proposal using the online form available at: https://forms.gle/Sg1kyeNoSyH5Rukv7

There is no registration fee. To facilitate international participation, the organisers will cover accommodation costs for all accepted speakers. Travel expenses will be covered either partially or in full, depending on available funding.

Organisers:

Jitka Močičková (Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences): mocickova@hiu.cas.cz

Dominic Keyssner (University of Erfurt): dominic.keyssner@uni-erfurt.de

The workshop is organised with the support of the Strategy AV21 research programme Identities in the World of Wars and Crises (Czech Academy of Sciences, 2026) and the University of Erfurt.

Witold Jan Chmielewski: Łukasz Kurdybacha w Palestynie [Łukasz Kurdybacha in Palestine].

 Witold Jan Chmielewski: Łukasz Kurdybacha w Palestynie [Łukasz Kurdybacha in Palestine]. Aspra/Instytut Historii Nauki im. L. & A. Birkenmajerów Polskiej Akademii Nauk 2025. ISBN 9788382093728

Monografia stanowi pogłębione studium działalności Łukasza Kurdybachy na uchodźstwie w Palestynie w okresie II wojny światowej. Autor, Witold Chmielewski, rekonstruuje jego wielowymiarowe zaangażowanie w organizację polskiego szkolnictwa uchodźczego, proces wydawniczy podręczników i kanonicznych dzieł literatury polskiej oraz publicystykę poświęconą problemom wychowania i kształtowania postaw obywatelskich.

Publikacja ukazuje Kurdybachę jako jedną z kluczowych postaci polskiej myśli pedagogicznej na emigracji, podkreślając jego rolę w podtrzymywaniu edukacji, kultury i tożsamości narodowej w warunkach wojennego uchodźstwa.

Książka adresowana jest do badaczy historii wychowania, dziejów emigracji oraz wszystkich zainteresowanych intelektualnym dziedzictwem polskiej edukacji XX wieku.

Sylwia Borowska-Kazimiruk: Modernizacje widzenia. Władysław Heinrich, Wacław Berent a drogi rozwoju polskiej psychologii doświadczalnej [The Modernizations of Perception. Wacław Berent, Władysław Heinrich and the Paths of Development of Polish Experimental Psychology].

 Sylwia Borowska-Kazimiruk: Modernizacje widzenia. Władysław Heinrich, Wacław Berent a drogi rozwoju polskiej psychologii doświadczalnej [The Modernizations of Perception. Wacław Berent, Władysław Heinrich and the Paths of Development of Polish Experimental Psychology]. Warszawa: WUW 2026. ISSN:

978-83-235-7136-0

OA: https://wuw.pl/data/include/cms//Modernizacje_widzenia_Borowska_Kazimiruk_Sylwia_2026.pdf

Praca ma charakter interdyscyplinarny, łącząc perspektywy historii literatury, psychologii, filozofii i nauki. Autorka podejmuje próbę rekonstrukcji kulturowego modelu „widzenia” obecnego w polskiej literaturze modernistycznej, zakorzenionego w psychologii eksperymentalnej i filozofii empiriokrytycznej. Centralnym przedmiotem analizy jest powieść Ozimina autorstwa Wacława Berenta, interpretowana na tle rozwoju psychologii eksperymentalnej zapoczątkowanej przez Wilhelma Wundta. Ważnym kontekstem jest także działalność Władysława Heinricha, który rozwijał te idee na gruncie polskim.

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The Modernizations of Perception. Wacław Berent, Władysław Heinrich and the Paths of Development of Polish Experimental Psychology

The work is interdisciplinary in nature, combining perspectives from the history of literature, psychology, philosophy and science. The author attempts to reconstruct the cultural model of “perception” present in Polish modernist literature, rooted in experimental psychology and empiriocritical philosophy. The central subject of the analysis is the novel Ozimina by Wacław Berent, interpreted against the background of the development of experimental psychology initiated by Wilhelm Wundt. An important context is also the activity of Władysław Heinrich, who developed these ideas in Poland.

Keywords: experimental psychology, Polish modernism, symbolism, modernizations of perception, personal perception.

NEW JOURNAL: East of the Elbe Environment and Society in Central and Eastern Europe

 East of the Elbe

Environment and Society in Central and Eastern Europe

A Subscribe-to-Open Journal – New in 2027

More: https://www.whpress.co.uk/EE.html

Watch This Space

More information will become available in in Summer 2026. Submissions are planned to open in Autumn 2026. First Issue: 2027.

Journal Scope

East of the Elbe is a new peer-reviewed, open access forum for the environmental history of: • East-Central Europe (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary) • Central Europe (Austria, relevant regions of Germany) • Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Russia, western Russia) • Southeastern/Balkan Europe (Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, North Macedonia, and other former Yugoslav republics) • The Baltic region (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania). Comparative studies engaging multiple regions or connecting CEE to broader European/global environmental histories will also be welcomed.

Priority topics

Forest and water histories; river engineering and infrastructure • Histories of pollution, toxicity, environmental health, and discard studies • Waste management and consumption regimes • Environmentalism and environmental movements (grassroots and state-sponsored) • State socialism and environmental governance; centralised planning and ecological consequences • Technopolitics of nature; technological modernisation and environmental transformation • Agricultural and rural environmental change; collectivisation and land use • Industrial development, mining, and environmental impact • Urban environmental history, infrastructure, and ecosystems • Biodiversity, conservation, protected areas, and species histories • Environmental thought, ideology, and scientific knowledge production • Post-socialist environmental transitions and legacies • Gender and consumption history; everyday environmentalism • Comparative regional and transnational environmental history • Long-term socio-ecological dynamics and ecological footprint analysis.

Temporal scope

All historical periods are welcome, from medieval to contemporary, with particular emphasis on the 18th–21st centuries and especially the socialist period (1945–1991) and its legacies.

The journal will publish both double blind peer reviewed papers and invited material. Special Issue proposals are welcome and should be directed to the Editors.

Subscribe to Open

East of the Elbe is conceived as open access. For 2027, we are seeking to cover the journal's production costs without charging author fees through a Subscribe-to-Open offer combined with support from institutional founding sponsors, whose substantial contributions will be publicly recognised. Please contact James or Sarah at The White Horse Press to discuss these opportunities.

If our preferred funding model does not prove financially sustainable for the journal, APCs might apply after the launch period; in the event that APCs are introduced later, a waiver scheme will be available.

Values and Principles

The journal will embed principles of inclusion and diversity, manifested in the editorial board, peer review policies and the goal of achieving sustainable Open access without fees to either readers or contributors. The White Horse Press is committed to the fair treatment of all authors, editors and reviewers, and particularly concerned to support Early Career Researchers. Our goal is to forge lasting relationships, based on mutual respect. East of the Elbe adheres to the publication standards and ethics shared by all White Horse Press publications. The submission process will request multi-authored papers to attach a statement of how the work was divided between the authors and how the order of authors has been decided. It is important to foster communication between academic communities in different regions and working in different languages. The journal will welcome contributions first published in languages other than English and WHP will offer support in honing the English.

EDITORIAL TEAM

Founding Editors:

Stephen Brain   Mississippi State University

Viktor Pál  University of Ostrava

Enquiries:

Please send any enquiries to the publisher, The White Horse Press. Editorial contact information will be provided once the journal is fully operational.

CFP: Unionize the Science: Agency and Infrastructures of Knowledge in Eurasia, 20th–21st Centuries

 Unionize the Science: Agency and Infrastructures of Knowledge in Eurasia, 20th–21st Centuries

International Conference

Yerevan, Armenia | 5–7 November, 2026

The Yerevan Center for International Education (YCIE) is delighted to announce the international conference “Unionize the Science: Agency and Infrastructures of Knowledge in Eurasia, 20th–21st Centuries.” The conference is funded and organized as part of the YCIE Co-Funded Conferences program and will be held in Yerevan, Armenia, November 5–7, 2026.

The conference explores the social agency of science in socialist and post-socialist contexts, with particular attention to the institutional, material, and spatial infrastructures that shaped the production, circulation, and contestation of knowledge. Rather than approaching the history of knowledge through narratives of grand achievement or through images of scientists operating beyond bureaucratic and political structures, this event foregrounds science as a domain of action embedded in broader relations between state, society, economy, and culture.

We welcome proposals from historians of science, STS scholars, historians of late socialism, sociologists, anthropologists of knowledge, and researchers from related fields. The conference aims to create an interdisciplinary forum for examining how scientific knowledge was produced, institutionalised, circulated, and redefined across Eurasian contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Yerevan offers an especially compelling setting for this discussion. In the late Soviet period, the Armenian SSR was a major scientific hub, and today Yerevan remains a site where scientific institutions, infrastructures, and memories continue to be reinterpreted and publicly contested.

We particularly encourage proposals addressing themes such as:

Geographies of knowledge: technopoles, clusters, and scientific cities;

Research infrastructures and the materiality of science;

Big science projects and their publics, including nuclear and space programmes, cybernetics, and computer networks.

Innovations, from grassroots initiatives to state regulation;

Knowledge and technology transfers across socialist and post-socialist worlds;

Scientific Institutes and Universities as third spaces;

Science and technology heritage in Central Eurasia;

Political economy of knowledge production;

Cultural representations of science;

Science and technology heritage in Central Eurasia;

Big science projects and their publics, including nuclear and space programmes, cybernetics, and computer networks.

Funding and Organization 

The conference is funded by the Yerevan Center for International Education (YCIE). 

Organizing Committee: Dr. Mikhail Piskunov, Dr. Timofey Rakov, and Dr. Alexander Fokin.

Submission Guidelines

All materials must be submitted in English.

All submissions must be made online via the electronic form; email submissions will not be accepted.

Deadline: August 2, 2026

Notification of acceptance: By September 2, 2026

To apply, please submit the following via the electronic form below:

Your paper abstract (maximum 1,500 characters, including spaces)

Your CV in PDF format

Working language: English

Format: In-person event only

Travel and Accommodation

Travel and accommodation costs are the responsibility of participants.

YCIE will provide a limited number of accommodation grants for the duration of the conference upon request. Please note that only one hotel room can be provided per co-authored paper. Accommodation decisions will be communicated along with the conference selection results.

There is no registration fee.

For any inquiries, please contact: timofey.rakov@gmail.com

CFP: Mineral Expertise: The Rules of Knowing Earthly Matter in the Early Modern World

 CFP: Mineral Expertise: The Rules of Knowing Earthly Matter in the Early Modern World - Bologna (Italy), 04.02.2027 - 06.02.2027, Deadline: 10.07.2026

Minerals have been extracted as resources, traded as commodities, ingested as medicine, and examined for knowledge across the early modern world. Their lifecycle was structured by mineral expertise rooted in tradition and trained bodies – a bezoar pulverised by a town apothecary, ore assayed by a company metallurgist, gemstones authenticated by a court jeweller. Minerals were key to medicine, metallurgy, alchemy and magic and thus a site to negotiate and legitimate forms of knowledge. Precisely because so much was at stake – both the value of objects and the reputation of people – mineral expertise was subject to scrutiny by peers and official regulation.

A central concern of the workshop is to critically assess the concept of expertise. Before the emergence of modern credentialing and professional licensing, claims to mineral knowledge were fluid and contested. We therefore approach expertise as a context-dependent process of negotiation and legitimation. It emerged when actors combined specialised skills with claims to generalisable knowledge and obtained some form of formal acknowledgment for it. Yet we are interested not only in those who have come to be recognised as experts, but in the broader topography of knowledge within which such recognition was negotiated. Which empirical practices cut across distinctions of status, and which ones did not? How did expertise relate to shared knowledge (common knowledge, the period eye, a well-indexed archive)? What distinguished experts from experienced state officials, skilled artisans, or shrewd market-goers? What were the rules of knowing earthly matter in the early modern world?

This workshop aims to compare mineral expertise from different angles. We are interested in contributions from historians of science, technology and medicine, economic historians, archaeologists and archaeometallurgists working on the period between c.1450 and c.1850 CE. By using minerals as a boundary object both of historical actors and historians who study them, we aim for a richer account of how early modern people engaged the mineral world. We aim for a history of mineral expertise that is attentive to local practices and alert to the broader structures of knowledge/power and value-making in which these practices were embedded.

The workshop will take place on 4-6 February, 2027 at the University of Bologna. We aim to discuss approximately 12 pre-circulated article-length papers (6.000–8.000 words) over two days. Decisions regarding the publication of the papers in a special issue will be made after the workshop. We welcome creative contributions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions:

What was mineral knowledge?

- What distinguished expertise in minerals from other kinds of earth-related knowledge (e.g. that of a farmer) and expertise in other materials (e.g. plant matter)? How were historical distinctions asserted, contested, and institutionalised?

- How was expertise valorised and employed in sites of labour — the mine, the home,the office, the laboratory, the museum? How did artisanal or vernacular knowledge validate or contradict expertise?

- How was expertise valorised and employed in imperial expansion and long-distance trade? How did different traditions of mineral knowledge interact or clash, adapt or become marginalised in contexts of empire and colonisation?

- When did specialist knowledge matter decisively? When did social networks, local experience, or consensus prove equally or more powerful?

How was mineral knowledge regulated?

- How did legal and bureaucratic frameworks — testing sites, law courts, guilds, tax regimes — shape the conditions under which expertise was recognised and gain public authority?

- What role did archives, records, and formal procedures play in transforming knowledge into expertise, or expertise into public information? What do administrative sources reveal — and conceal — about the range of actors involved in the making of mineral expertise?

- How were conflicts over mineral expertise adjudicated, and what do such disputes reveal about competing epistemologies and claims to authority?

- Which moral values were invoked in policies seeking to regulate medical, commercial, and occupational practice (e.g. peace, cosmic order, the common good, thrift, charity, godliness, justice)? Whom did experts claim to serve – and whom did they actually serve – when they worked in the ambiance of the state?

We welcome papers from all parts of the world and approaches that engage with cross-cultural encounters and wide-ranging knowledge exchange, as well as those that drill deep into a specific place and time. Since early modern categories were fluid and diverse, we are interested in both objects recognized as “minerals” today and more expansive understandings or boundary cases.

The workshop is co-organized by Monica Azzolini, Sebastian Felten and Sarah Seinitzer, as a collaboration between the SCARCE project (ERC StG, Grant number 101076422) and the Department of Philosophy (History of Science) at the University of Bologna. Potential contributors should send an abstract of no more than 250 words and a 200 word bio to scarce.geschichte@univie.ac.at by 10 July 2026. Limited funding is available to cover travel and accommodation in Bologna. Please indicate if you have other funding sources to cover your travel expenses.

Maria Silina, Soviet Museums Between the Two World Wars: Art History on Display

 Maria Silina, Soviet Museums Between the Two World Wars: Art History on Display (Routledge, 2026)

https://www.routledge.com/Soviet-Museums-Between-the-Two-World-Wars-Art-History-on-Display/Silina/p/book/9781041031222

The book critically analyzes the evolution of museology and art history during a period recognized as a crisis point for museums, characterized by the ascent of the modernist museum and the decline of previous museum representation forms such as universal collections and period rooms. Building on the concept of museums as agents of cultural diplomacy and soft power, the book considers museums as spaces where negotiations, often unsuccessful occur among various stakeholders: museum practitioners, authorities, private collectors, auction houses, and the public. The challenge of handling millions of nationalized objects since the 1917 Revolution posed a particularly complex issue for Socialist museums, necessitating accumulation, distribution, and display. It also proposes a historical account of the establishment of Soviet art departments in the mid-1930s, serving as showcases for Socialist realism. This composition was subsequently replicated across the country and throughout the Communist bloc.