History and Climate change: What have we learnt?

A Rescue! History day workshop at Birmingham and Midland Institute, 9 Margaret St, Birmingham B3 3BS on 21^st June 2014

Call for Papers

We invite 20-25 minute contributions from scholars, activists, policy-makers and members of the public to explore two related questions. First, to think about how climate concern is forcing us to rethink our under standings of history, often in quite radical ways. Second, how history and historians should inform our understandings of climate change and actively contribute to changing society to ensure an ecologically wholesome future.

We are particularly keen to explore how our historical understanding and rhetoric around climate change have changed in the last five years and how they might need to change in the future.

Questions we hope that papers will address include:

• How might history become ‘activist history’ in an era of ecological emergency?
• Whether historical rhetorics of ‘crisis’ and ‘apocalypse’ are productive or counter-productive?
• History and scale: the roles of local and global narratives in an era ecological emergency
• What might be learnt about social transformation from radical social movements such as Occupy?
• Can activist historians learn from the Transition Town movement?
• Is there an unexamined gender aspect to climate change? Why do climate debates so often seem to be dominated by men?
• Are religious understandings a necessary and neglected aspect of environmental discourse?
• How can local history and local historians contribute to local sustainability? (e.g. how can oral histories contribute to local energy descent models?)