Fourth Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences, BALTEHUMS IV: Worlds in Relation

 We are pleased to announce that the Fourth Baltic Conference on the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences, BALTEHUMS IV: Worlds in Relation, will take place in Riga, Latvia, on 1-3 December 2026, hosted by the University of Latvia and the Baltic Studies Centre. The call for contributions is now open!

This year’s theme, Worlds in Relation, invites us to think with the Baltic Sea region as a landscape of transitions and intertwined histories and to explore how changing relations between humans, nonhumans, and environments are narrated, negotiated and tended across time. We welcome contributions from environmental humanities, social sciences, and related fields, including work on environmental histories and memories; seasonal rhythms and winter histories; water cultures and hydrosocial perspectives; climate change and biodiversity loss; human-animal relations and multispecies commons; everyday environmental practices and ecological knowledges; infrastructures and interventions in land and water; environmental philosophy and ethics of care; and artistic, literary, and sensory engagements with more‑than‑human worlds.

Abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted via the online platform by 15 June 2026. The conference will be held on‑site in Riga, at the House of Science of the University of Latvia, and in keeping with BALTEHUMS tradition, there is no conference fee.  Further details, including submission links, can be found on the conference website: https://eztf.lu.lv/baltehums-iv/ 

We are currently finalising the keynote programme and other event details, including opportunities for more informal exchanges during the conference days and will share updates with you over the coming months. 

We would be very grateful if you could circulate this call through your networks and encourage colleagues, students and collaborators who work on the Baltic region (broadly understood) to submit proposals.

With warm greetings,

Anita Zariņa

Kati Lindström

on behalf of the BALTEHUMS IV organising committees

Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum ABHPS Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

 Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum

ABHPS Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 2025)

OA: https://www.bahps.org/acta-baltica/abhps-13-1/

Articles

Ave Mets. What Does 'φ-Scientificity' Mean? III. Material quantities.

Juho Lindholm. Cybernetic epistemology and skepticism.

Miguel López-Astorga. The White Horse Paradox and Inheritance Logic.

Agita Lūse, Anna Elizabete Griķe. ‶An intelligent cog in a machine″? Latvian ethnologist Ziedonis Ligers (1917-2001) on a French mission.

Gulnara T. Oruzbaeva. The historical aspects of the formation of material culture among the ancient Kyrgyz.

Svitlana Nyzhnyk. Academician Oleksiy Sozinov's school of geneticists and breeders.

Ihor Annienkov, Nataliia Annienkova. Development of electrical engineering research at Kharkiv Electromechanical Plant in the framework of the implementation of the Soviet Big Fleet Program (1936-1941).

Halyna Zvonkova, Halyna Doronina. Marine research at leading academic institutions in Crimea: a historical essay.

Review

Lyubov Sukhoterina, Svetlana Kolot. Psychological research by Ukrainian scholars in exile in Prague (1920s-1930s).

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Silke Pasewalck , Rūta Eidukevičienė , Antje Johanning-Radžienė und Martin Klöker (ed.): Baltische Bildungsgeschichte(n). De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2022. Open access

Silke Pasewalck , Rūta Eidukevičienė , Antje Johanning-Radžienė und Martin Klöker (ed.): Baltische Bildungsgeschichte(n). De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2022. ISBN: 9783110998672

Open access: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110987133/html?lang=de#contents .

ÜBER DIESES BUCH

Für die baltischen Länder ist Bildung ein Schlüsselthema, das ihre Geschichte und ihr Selbstverständnis sowohl im Hinblick auf die Fremdbestimmung als auch auf die eigene Staatenbildung betrifft. Im Zuge von Handelskontakten, Christianisierung, Ordenskriegen und Rechtsimport gerieten die autochthonen Völkerschaften des baltischen Raums unter kulturelle, sprachliche und politische Einflüsse unterschiedlichen Gewichts. Sie waren dadurch zum Teil gewaltvollen Formierungsprozessen ausgesetzt. Im vorliegenden Band wird das Baltikum in Geschichte und Gegenwart aus der Perspektive eines weit gefassten Bildungsbegriffs untersucht. Die Beiträge stammen aus der Feder von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern aus Estland, Lettland, Litauen und Deutschland, insbesondere der Germanistik, aber auch der Geschichte, Bildungsgeschichte, Rechtsgeschichte, Slavistik und Komparatistik. Der Band zeigt wesentliche Aspekte der baltischen Bildungsgeschichte und ihrer Narrationen an beispielhaften Analysen und Fallstudien für alle drei baltischen Länder auf.

AUTORENINFORMATION

Silke Pasewalck, BKGE; Rūta Eidukevičienė, Vytautas Magnus Universität Kaunas, Litauen; Antje Johanning-Radžienė, Herder-Institut in Marburg; Martin Klöker, Under und Tuglas Literaturzentrum der Estnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Tallinn.

Catherine Gibson: Geographies of Nationhood: Cartography, Science, and Society in the Russian Imperial Baltic. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press 2022. ISBN: 9780192844323

 

Offers a new and refined explanation of the history of ethnographic cartography

Traces the geographical imagination of national territories in the Baltic

Provides the first social history of mapmaking in imperial Russia focusing on non-elites and provincial map production

Uses extensive multi-archival research and features over fifty maps

Geographies of Nationhood examines the meteoric rise of ethnographic mapmaking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a form of visual and material culture that gave expression to territorialised visions of nationhood. In the Russian Empire's Baltic provinces, the development of ethnographic cartography, as part of the broader field of statistical data visualisation, progressively became a tool that lent legitimacy and an experiential dimension to nationalist arguments, as well as a wide range of alternative spatial configurations that rendered the inhabitants of the Baltic as part of local, imperial, and global geographies. Catherine Gibson argues that map production and the spread of cartographic literacy as a mass phenomenon in Baltic society transformed how people made sense of linguistic, ethnic, and religious similarities and differences by imbuing them with an alleged scientific objectivity that was later used to determine the political structuring of the Baltic region and beyond. Geographies of Nationhood treads new ground by expanding the focus beyond elites to include a diverse range of mapmakers, such as local bureaucrats, commercial enterprises, clergymen, family members, teachers, and landowners. It shifts the focus from imperial learned and military institutions to examine the proliferation of mapmaking across diverse sites in the Empire, including the provincial administration, local learned societies, private homes, and schools. Understanding ethnographic maps in the social context of their production, circulation, consumption, and reception is crucial for assessing their impact as powerful shapers of popular geographical conceptions of nationhood, state-building, and border-drawing.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Networks of Cartographic Influence, Patronage, and Reception

2. Provincial Map Production and the Rise of Cartographic Entrepreneurship

3. The Baltic Question in Cartographic Imagination

4. Mapping Latvians in Local and Global Perspectives

5. Post-War Ethnic Boundary Mapping from Above and Below

Epilogue: Afterlives of Maps

Catherine Gibson, Research Fellow, School of Theology & Religious Studies, University of Tartu

Catherine Gibson is a historian of modern Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire. She is currently a Research Fellow in the School of Theology & Religious Studies at the University of Tartu. She received her PhD from the European University Institute in 2019. She is co-editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Borders, and Identities and her research has appeared in the journals Past & Present, Journal of Social History, Journal of History Geography, and Nationalities Papers.

East Central Europe Volume 47 (2020): Issue 2-3 (Nov 2020): Thematic Issue: Staged Otherness. Ethnographic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe, 1850–1939 edited by Dagnosław Demski, Dominika Czarnecka and Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska

 

URL: https://brill.com/view/journals/eceu/47/2-3/eceu.47.issue-2-3.xml

Table of Contents

Contextualizing Ethnographic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe; Authors: Dominika Czarnecka and Dagnosław Demski, pp. 163–172

Relocating the “Human Zoo”: Exotic Displays, Metropolitan Identity, and Ethnographic Knowledge in Late Nineteenth-Century Budapest; Author: László Kontler, pp.173–201

Spaces of Modernity: Ethnic Shows in Poznań, 1879–1914; Author: Dagnosław Demski, pp. 202–232

“The Samoans Are Here!”: Samoan Ethnic Shows, 1895–1911; Author: Hilke Thode-Arora, pp. 233–260

Others among Others: Latvians’ View of Members of Ethnographic Shows; Author: Ilze Boldāne-Zeļenkova, pp. 261–284

Black Female Bodies and the “White” View: The Dahomey Amazon Shows in Poland at the End of the Nineteenth Century; Author: Dominika Czarnecka, pp. 285–312

Buffalo Bill and Patriotism: Criticism of the Wild West Show in the Polish-Language Press in Austrian Galicia in 1906; Author: Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska, pp. 313–333

The Modernity of Interwar Turkey through the Eyes of Yugoslav Travelers (1923–1939); Author: Anđelko Vlašić, pp. 335–359

Debate on Europe since 1989 by Philipp Ther, pp. 361–394

On Diana Mishkova; pp. 395–409

Contents; pp. 411–413

Call for Papers: Early Modern Natural Law around the Baltic Sea: Teaching and Use. Tartu, Estonia. 02.09.2021 - 04.09.2021. Deadline 10.01.2021

The Network on Natural Law 1625–1850 in collaboration with the University of Tartu and the Research Centre for Early-Modern Natural Law invite papers for the international conference Early Modern Natural Law around the Baltic Sea: Teaching and Use (2-4 September 2021). The aim of the conference is to take a comparative look at the teaching and use of natural law around the Baltic Sea in the early modern period.

EARLY MODERN NATURAL LAW AROUND THE BALTIC SEA: TEACHING AND USE

The aim of the conference is to take a comparative look at the teaching and use of natural law around the Baltic Sea in the early modern period. The region was at that time dominated by two Protestant monarchies, Sweden and Denmark-Norway, which also exercised control over a number of territories on the eastern and southern coasts of the Sea. With its strong links to German and Dutch academic culture, the region stood at the forefront of the formation of natural law as an academic discipline: in Uppsala, natural law was taught on the basis of Grotius as early as in 1655, and Samuel Pufendorf published his most influential works as a professor at the University of Lund in the 1670s. In the Danish Knights’ Academy in Sorø Grotius and Selden were taught between the 1630s and 50s, Pufendorf, Thomasius et al. at the similar academy in Copenhagen and at the University from 1690 onwards. Ius naturae et gentium was also taught at the University of Kiel (Schleswig-Holstein, in union with Denmark) from its foundation in 1665, and it also proliferated in the Swedish provincial universities of Dorpat (Livonia), Åbo (Finland) and Greifswald (Pomerania). As in other European countries, the use of natural law in the region was not restricted to academic teaching and theoretical discussion but became also an intellectual resource for conceptualizing and legitimating political developments, and informing legal, political and social reforms.

Rather than focusing on close textual analysis of particular theoretical works, we invite papers that look at the uses of natural law in these academic and pragmatic contexts. In particular, we would welcome contributions that explore:

- Factors that influenced the introduction (or disappearance) of natural law as a dominant academic discipline, language or culture, and its position in relation to other traditions, in specific national or regional contexts

- The reception and adaptation of both well- and less-known natural law authors and works (Grotius, Pufendorf, Thomasius, Wolff, Rachel, Burlamaqui, etc.) in the academic environment, either at a particular university, or comparatively in a broader national or regional context

- The theoretical foci of natural law lectures, disputations, textbooks, etc., and their relationship with various pragmatic contexts of the period

- The practical and polemical use of natural law in the efforts of legitimation outside academia, both domestically and internationally (e.g., the questions of absolutism, political, social and religious reform and “improvement”, colonialism, serfdom, protection of individual rights, etc).

The papers will be selected with a view to the publication of a collective volume in the Brill series “Early Modern Natural Law: Studies & Sources”.

Please send the presentation proposals (up to 250 words) by 10 January 2021 to Pärtel Piirimäe (partel.piirimae@ut.ee). Authors will be notified of acceptance or non-acceptance by 10 February 2021.

The conference is organized by the Chair in Intellectual History, University of Tartu (Prof. Pärtel Piirimäe), in conjunction with the international research project “Natural Law 1625-1850” (Halle/Erfurt, directors Knud Haakonssen, Frank Grunert and Diethelm Klippel).

Silke Pasewalck and Matthias Weber (eds.) Bildungspraktiken der Aufklärung / Education practices of the Enlightenment. Thematic issue of Journal for the Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 1 (2020). (OPEN ACCESS)

  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671827 / URL:  https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/JKGE-B

Inhalt

Silke Pasewalck/Matthias Weber

Einleitung 1

Marc Banditt

Die Dichotomie der Expansion: Der Aufstieg Russlands und Danzigs Rolle als ein Knotenpunkt der Gelehrsamkeit im 18. Jahrhundert - 9

Liisa-Helena Lumberg

The World on Your Pencil Tip: Baltic German Artists’ Travel Materials as Mediators of Knowledge in the Context of Travelling in the Enlightenment - 29

Julija Boguna

Nützt es dem Volke, übersetzt zu werden? Oder: Was Translation über die (livländische) Aufklärung verraten kann - 51

Agnieszka Pufelska

Die schwer erkämpfte Befreiung aus der Unmündigkeit Bildungswege von Frauen im 18. Jahrhundert - 73

Katarzyna Chlewicka

Schwieriger Kulturtransfer: Lorenz Christoph Mizler de Kolofs Bemühungen um die Etablierung gelehrter Zeitschriften in Polen am Beispiel der Warschauer Bibliothek (1753–55) - 93

Anna Mikołajewska

Presse als Medium des gelehrten Gedankenaustausches in der Frühaufklärung: Die Zeitschriftenprojekte des Georg Peter Schultz in Thorn - 113

Ivo Cerman

Die Erziehungskunst nach Karl Heinrich Seibt: Zur Pädagogik der Aufklärung in Prag - 135

Armin Langer

Educating the Jews to Become Germans: Naftali Herz Homberg’s ‘Civilizing Mission’ to the Jewish Community of Galicia - 157

Benedikt Stimmer

‚Zivilisierung‘ durch Sprache? Die Verbreitung des Deutschen im Rahmen der habsburgischen Schulpolitik in Galizien 1772–1790 - 179

Harald Heppner/Sabine Jesner

Aufklärung mittels ‚Aufklärung‘ Die Rolle des habsburgischen Militärs im Donau-Karpatenraum im 18. Jahrhundert - 197

János Ugrai

A Prehistory to the Success of Modernization: Differences between Denominations in the Shaping of Hungarian Public Education during the Enlightenment Period - 213

Call for Papers “Academic Authority and the Politics of Science and History in Eastern Europe,” March 20-21, 2020 (GWZO Leipzig, Germany)

The scholar is dead – long live the scholar? Over the last couple of decades, the epistemological tectonics of contemporary societies have experienced massive changes – and so has the subject of our workshop, the scholar. Within a highly diverse environment, scholarship has become destabilised as an epistemic authority, due to socio-political processes, economic pressure, internal conflicts, new media techniques etc.

The workshop aims to investigate the historical changes and challenges of (academic) scholarship’s role as the paramount producer of knowledge. Concentrating on (the public perception of) STS scholars, historians, sociologists and philosophers of science, as well as their non-academic counterparts, we aim to analyse concepts of scientific self-reflection and their historical trajectory in Eastern and Central Europe from the 1970s (starting with the Helsinki Declaration) via the transformations of 1989 and the ‘science wars’ of the 1990s up to the alleged rising of the ‘post-truth era’ today. Looking at the immanent or perceived boundaries between different rationalities, between science, politics, and the public, we will map changes in the political configuration of knowledge production by discussing if, when and how these boundaries shifted, were strengthened, weakened or removed and how this affected the epistemic figure of the scholar. We will look at epistemological dynamics between universalism and particularism, the fragmentation of epistemic authority, and the tribalisation of truth, and want to discuss whether they can be regarded as an effect of

…political transformations, processes of re-nationalization, conservative and religious turns,

…a shift in media technologies and the unsettling of classic information media,

…social diversification and the consequent emergence of specific group attitudes towards globalization or modernization.

We will, however, ask as well, whether the observable loss of scholarship’s authority has to be regarded as a new phenomenon, or whether this diagnosis itself follows a narrative of decay? Did scholars in Eastern Europe possess an epistemological hegemony at all and if so – how can it be characterized? Can we consider the present state as a slightly more splintered version of conflicts well known from the Cold War and the ‘science wars’, or do we have to take into account a vast variety of different former epistemological camps in the East? What is the relationship between ‘traditional’ modes of propaganda or disinformation and postmodern relativist philosophies? Do politicized epistemologies have to be regarded as a new phenomenon, informed by these philosophies and generated by the emergence of new technical media?

Tackling these issues, we hope to shed light not only on some crucial developments in the Central and Eastern European history of science and humanities itself, but on some of the most pressing and far-reaching questions about the contemporary status of academia.

Papers should address one of the three areas:

(1.) epistemology as a factor of system stabilization and the belief in the objective and trustworthy scientific persona, whose diagnoses and prognoses are of paramount importance for the society / the state, as epitomized in the Science of Science scholar up to 1989;

(2.) the unbalancing of professional/academic and lay/dissident epistemologies, the post-soviet transformation of the figure of the scholar, and the rewriting of its history in the history of science during the 1990s;

(3.) the increasing emergence and approval of non-academic producers of knowledge, and the related transformation of scholarly self-conception and master narratives in the field of history (of science and humanities) from the 1990s until today, when the academic scholar has lost more and more ground as a figure of trust.

The workshop continues a series of events held at Erfurt (2017, 2018), Moscow (2018), and St. Petersburg (2019) in the context of the research initiative (East) European Epistemologies. The upcoming meeting will be organised at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig by

Friedrich Cain (Max Weber Kolleg / University of Erfurt)

Dietlind Hüchtker (GWZO)

Bernhard Kleeberg (Max Weber Kolleg / University of Erfurt)

Karin Reichenbach (University of Leipzig), and

Jan Surman (IGITI, Higher School of Economics Moscow).

Travelling costs and accommodation will be covered in accordance with the travel regulations of Saxony. Please, direct proposals (<500 words) for papers (~ 20 min) and a short cv to dietlind.huechtker@leibniz-gwzo.deby December 13, 2019. We especially welcome proposals by PhD students.