The Late Summer Seminar of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Department of History of Drexel University on decolonial ways of practicing history.

Decolonial Histories of Knowledge, Technology, and Environment

Every mid-September, researchers from IHC and Drexel engage materiality and nonhuman agency to collectively envision decolonial ways of practicing history. They discuss historiographic traditions, methods and archives contributing to meaningful history writing in times of climate change, pandemics, and racial capitalism reenactments.

They ask: Which temporal scales are adequate to account for histories of African plantations? Those of imperial agents (plantation owners, botanists…) and of local human resistances (maroons, guerrilla…), or of plant evolution and soil formation? What are the relevant geographies when trying to make sense of the history of fire in Portugal? The global travels of eucalyptus promoted by foresters and capitalism since the late nineteenth century, or national development policies and local longue durée practices? Building on approaches from the fields of history of science and technology and environmental history, they critically experiment with spaces, times and actants to question the politics of historiography and enlarge historical imagination.

The Late Summer Seminar starts with a public session (90 minutes) organized around a pre-circulated short text, selected for its provocative nature. This is followed by collective close(d) reading of works in progress or recent publications by the Seminar participants, elaborating on themes and topics of the public session as well as on those suggested by previously shared (short) bibliography.

To register for the public session, please contact miguelcarmo@fcsh.unl.pt

>> 📎 Download the full programme (PDF)  <<