Tag: periodization

Negotiating and Communicating Evidence: Lessons from the Anthropocene Debate

~ Fabienne Will

Skepticism and debate are always welcome and are critically important to the advancement of science. . . . Skepticism that fails to account for evidence is no virtue.

The executive director of the American Meteorological Society, Keith Seitter, made this distinction about skepticism in his letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Department of Energy, Rick Perry, on June 21, 2017.[1] In that letter, he bemoaned the secretary’s rejection of empirically based knowledge about climate change. At the same time, he underlined the importance of related research and of taking the resulting evidence seriously.

Continue reading “Negotiating and Communicating Evidence: Lessons from the Anthropocene Debate” →

CfP: Chronologics: Periodisation in a Global Context

~ Editors

Via George Khalil (Transregionale Studien) and Harald Rosenbach (Max Weber Stiftung) comes a call for papers for a conference on periodization.

Epochal divisions and terminologies such as “antiquity,” “baroque,” the “classical age,” the “renaissance,” or “postmodernity,” the “long 19th,” or “short 20th” centuries are more than mere tools used pragmatically to arrange school curricula or museum collections. Terminologies like these carry particular imaginations and meanings for the discursive construction of nations and communities. The aim of this conference is to uncover some of the dynamics behind particular cultural and historical uses of periodization schemes as concepts for ordering the past.

Conference: Berlin, December 7–9, 2017
Application deadline: April 30, 2017
Call for papers

Call link updated June 22, 2017