Time and Place: Oslo, Norway: 23/24.5.2024
Call for abstracts: 31.10.2023
Acceptance decision: 15.12.2023
Download as pdf: here
Nordic societies are particularly exposed to climate change. Yet over time they have cultivated a broad repertoire of responses to climatic stress. Current challenges have raised and urgent questions about the past. How did Nordic societies manage historical climate variability? What impacts did the Little Ice Age, the Medieval Climate Anomaly, and Late Antique disasters have on society? And how do we learn from these experiences?
In May 2024, the organisers invite interested researchers, communicators, and stakeholders with a broad range of backgrounds to explore these questions. This conference aims to foster cross-disciplinary cooperation across the sciences and humanities. The event reaches out to communities beyond academia, linking museum curators, policy advisors, and educators.
The conference also aims to consolidate the emerging research environment of Nordic climate history. Although a growing field, research and communication on Nordic climate history remains divided among different disciplines, communities, and national frameworks. At the same time, Nordic environments provide highly significant and sometimes unique archives of climate-society interaction, ranging from tree-rings, lake sediments and glaciers to ice-break-up dates and narrative descriptions. Nordic scholarship had been at the forefront of exploring phenomena such as ENSO or the climatic impact on the Late Medieval Crisis or the end of Norse Greenland, before disciplinary compartmentalisation limited integrative approaches (Huhtamaa / Ljungqvist 2021). The Oslo conference hopes to reinvigorate cooperation and to release the potential of learning from past climate experiences in the North.
The organisers invite contributions to the following fields:
- Case-studies of past climate-society-interactions (all periods)
- New research on palaeoclimatological data or societal archives
- Conceptual approaches to climate-society interactions
- Perceptions of climate in the past.
- Explorations of cross-disciplinarity
- Disseminating / narrating climate history (from schools and museums to policy)
- Ways of learning from past climate
The conference is directed at researchers in all career stages, including those withbackgrounds in climate science, archaeology, history, or related disciplines. We also encourage museum practitioners, climate communicators, and stakeholders with an interest in past climate to apply.
Participation is free of charge. Travel grants will be available for early career researchers. Online sessions are planned for overseas participants.
Please send your one-page summary of your presentation, a short CV, and an indication of whether you require travel support by 31 October 2023 to: dominik.collet@iakh.uio.no.
Organisers: