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Aiming to raise a host of questions rather than provide the answers, the 4th Counter-Image unpacks the earth not as theme but rather as onto-episteme.

 

Counter-Image International Conference 2026

How to speak with(in) the earth? Situated knowledges, unnaming methods, and visions of the threshold

 

The question “How to speak with(in) the earth?” is not a metaphor but a political, ontological, and epistemic imperative in the face of ecological collapse, the exhaustion of anthropocentric frameworks, and the representational models of the colonial-capitalist regime and its paradigm of territorial expansion and occupation—the plantation, whose logic of extraction, objectification, and extinction persists (Le Petitcorps et al. 2023; Bastos 2020; Thomas 2019; Haraway 2015; Tsing 2015; McKittrick 2013; Mirzoeff 2011; Stoler 2008, 2016; Hartman 2007). The Posts—postcolonialism, postmodernism, posthumanism—we insist on using to make sense of a world yet to be overcome are being replaced by the prefix Geo (Pratt 2025, 2022; Coelho & Ponce de Léon 2025; Krieger 2022; Ray 2019, 2026; Latour 2018; Povinelli 2016). The “advent of the Geo,” Mary Louise Pratt (2025) points out, marks a shift in scale (from the global to the planetary), imaginary (from the political to the ecological), and temporality (from historical time to deep time—the geological). This shift implies questioning what we take for granted and adopting alternative ways of thinking and producing knowledge that Gabriela Milone and Franca Maccioni, in “The Land of Language, the Language of the Earth” (2025), have described as “geo-logy” (the language of the earth) and “geo-graphy” (the writing of the earth). This also entails “speaking with the earth” rather than “about the earth” and in terms of “similarity” rather than “difference”—a “work of imagination” and “experimentation.” Emphasising subjectivation rather than objectification (Kopenawa 2010); prioritising fusion rather than occupation (Krenak 2022).

“How to speak with(in) the earth” is therefore inseparable from the question of how the earth has been constituted as object, resource, and image—a point addressed by Ursula K. Le Guin in She Unnames Them (1985). This short story explores the colonial impulse to name and identify, creating artificial boundaries, while at the same time urging us to find ways to speak with other creatures. Speaking “with” or “as” rather than “about” the earth signals an epistemological shift, requiring a rethinking of its naming, mediation, and representation. What if the earth were not the referent of discourse but its condition? What if the possibility of speaking with/as the earth opened a space between the individual and the multiple, between situated territory and planetary totality? This dialectic is methodological: a practice of “unnaming”—of eroding the semantics of objectification, extractivism, and extinction. If the earth has been mapped, renamed, and fenced in (and private property created), it is also resistance, cosmoperception, and ritual.

The 4th Counter-Image unpacks the earth not as theme but rather as onto-episteme. It focuses on situated knowledges rooted in territories, bodies, and relations that thrive within the cracks of colonialism and capital, rather than the universal, logocentric language that separates subject from object. It challenges the anthropocentric semantics of positivist science and its fictitious objectivity to instead promote unnaming methods that suspend colonial taxonomies, while enabling the soil, the fossil, the animal, the plant, the stone, the tree, the river, the mountain, the lichen, and the fungus to reveal their unique and interconnected existences. It rejects the pseudo scientific “view from nowhere,” favouring visions from the threshold—those shaped from our grandmothers’ porches or at dusk/dawn in dialectical, incandescent images of impossible syntheses.

 

Keynote speakers:
Gabriela Milone and Franca Maccioni (Universidade Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina)
Felipe Milanez (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil)

 

 

Call for papers

 

Aiming to raise a host of questions rather than provide the answers, the 4th Counter-Image asks: what does it mean to think with/as the earth rather than about it? Is it possible to translate the language of the earth, animals, plants, and minerals? Is “unnaming” a philosophical-aesthetic method? How the visions from the threshold suspend extractive regimes of representation? What kind of artistic practices resist, reconfigure, or disrupt colonial regimes over the land? How to foster forms of belonging, care, and reparation towards a post-extractivist world? Anchored in Portugal’s Southern region of the Algarve, but broadening its connections to other territories, we invite researchers, artists, activists, and essayists to submit proposals engaging with the following thematic axes::

1. Situated Knowledges
How and what does the earth remember? This thread welcomes works grounded in relational compositions and geo-subjectivities that challenge the “view from nowhere,” as well as uncertainty, failure, and contradiction, encouraging the connection between research and lived experience.

• “Terricidio” (Millán 2024) and buen vivir
• Artisanal epistemologies (Farago et al. 2025) and epistemologies of the South
• Decolonial, anti-extractivist, ecofeminist, queer, and trans ecologies
• “Exilic ecologies” (Marder 2023)
• Indigenous and Afro-diasporic cosmopolitics
• The baldio and the quilombo/quilombismo (B. Nascimento 1977, A. Nascimento 1980)
• “Insurgent Archivings” (Biehl 2022) and counter-cartographies
• Environmental struggles, their mourning, and multispecies justice
• Critique of Linnaean taxonomies and biopolitics
• Environmental histories, landscape politics, and “pyropolitics” (Marder 2020)

 

2. Unnaming Methods
If the act of naming is colonizing, how can unnaming promote relationality? This thread welcomes works on geo-semantics and methodological and pedagogical experiments that challenge extractivist and speciesist perspectives.

• Unnaming as a philosophical-aesthetic method
• Poetics of silence and deep listening
• Walking as method and “seeing with the whole body” (Cusicanqui 2015)
• Animal, mineral, and “fossil ontologies” (Castro 2023)
• Geo-aesthetics (Coelho & Ponce de Léon 2025; Krieger 2022; Ray 2019), including volcanic and so-called weed aesthetics
• “Liquid alliances” and aesthetics (Mendes & Garcia-Antón 2026)
• Narratives of relationality and multispecies methods
• “Contracolonizar” (Nêgo Bispo 2015)
• Art as a laboratory of thought (rather than representation)
• Animist cinema and anti-extractivist and anti-speciesist visual assemblages

 

3. Visions from the Threshold
How to inhabit the threshold and move between worlds? This thread welcomes forms that transcend the dualistic principles of the Plantationocene/Capitalocene–the geo-choreographies that broaden affinities and alliances.

• Epistemologies of the threshold
• “Dark ecology” (Morton 2016), deep time, and submerged temporalities
• Grassroots ecology
• Non-human agency and the redistribution of the sensible
• “Ruins of the Plantationocene/Capitalocene” (Tsing 2015).
• “Interstitial zones” (Gomez-Barris 2017) and riverside and seaside knowledges
• Dialectical images (Benjamin 1940) and “image-skins” (Kopenawa 2010)
• “Ch’ixi” visions (Cusicanqui 2015)
• “Affective alliances” (Krenak 2022)
• “Florestania” (Krenak 2022) and “struggling with the forest” (Milanez 2024

 

Important dates:

25 May | Proposal submission
30 June | Notification of acceptance
18-20 November | Conference

Submission formats:

1. Papers (theoretical or empirical research): 300-word abstract
2. Artistic interventions (performances, poetry readings): 300-word description
3. Discussion circles, workshops, listening walks, affective cartographies: 300-word description

Abstracts (in English, Portuguese or Spanish) should be submitted along with a short bio (100 words) to: counterimageconference@fcsh.unl.pt

 

>> Download the call for papers (PDF) <<

 

 

Organising Committee

 

Inês Beleza Barreiros (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH / CIAC — University of Algarve)
Liliana Coutinho (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Maria do Carmo Piçarra (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Salomé Lopes Coelho (ICON — Utrecht University / ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Sílvia Leiria Viegas (CIAC — University of Algarve)
Teresa Castro (IRCAV — Sorbonne Nouvelle / ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Teresa Mendes Flores (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)

 

 

Scientific Committee

 

Ana Lúcia Marsillac (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
Bruno Mendes da Silva (CIAC, University of Algarve)
Cristiana Bastos (Instituto de Ciências Sociais)
Filippo Di Tomasi (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Iacã Macerata (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina)
Isabel Stein (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Leila Lehnen (Brown University)
Luís Trindade (IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Margarida Brito Alves (IHA — NOVA FCSH)
Margarida Mendes (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
María Gloria Robalino (Washington University St. Louis)
Maria Teresa Cruz (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Marita Sturken (New York University)
Maura Castanheira Grimaldi (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Mirian Nogueira Tavares (CIAC — University of Algarve)
Patrícia Martins Marcos (University of Oklahoma)
Patrícia Martinho Ferreira (Brown University)
Paulo Nuno Vicente (ICNOVA — NOVA FCSH)
Rui Gomes Coelho (Durham University)
Susanne Knittel (ICON — Utrecht University)

 

 

 

 

 

Tenth edition of the congress, which aims to provide a forum for debate, sharing and critical discussion on local history as a field of historical study.

 

X Congresso de História Local

História local hoje: escalas, territórios, arquivos, comunidades e governação

 

 

O X Congresso de História Local constitui um marco relevante no percurso de uma iniciativa que, ao longo de mais de dez anos, se afirmou como espaço de referência para o debate historiográfico em torno da história local. Reunindo investigadores/as de diferentes gerações, filiações institucionais e áreas de especialidade, este encontro tem dado expressão à vitalidade de um campo em permanente renovação, como o demonstram as dezenas de comunicações apresentadas nas edições anteriores, a pluralidade de temas abordados e a diversidade de perspetivas metodológicas e epistemológicas mobilizadas. A sua continuidade, bem como o envolvimento de diferentes instituições organizadoras e de comissões científicas de reconhecida qualidade, confirmam a consolidação de uma comunidade de investigação atenta aos desafios conceptuais, documentais e públicos da história local.

A história local vive hoje um momento de renovação historiográfica particularmente estimulante. O estudo do local afirma-se como um observatório privilegiado para compreender processos históricos amplos, articular escalas de análise, testar interpretações consolidadas e aprofundar o conhecimento sobre fenómenos sociais, políticos, económicos, culturais e ambientais tal como se inscrevem em territórios, instituições e experiências situadas. Nesta perspectiva, a história local ganha especial relevância enquanto campo capaz de pôr em relação o micro, o regional, o nacional, o imperial e o global, contribuindo para uma historiografia mais densa, mais relacional e mais atenta à pluralidade dos contextos.

Neste quadro, a história local dialoga de forma cada vez mais intensa com a micro-história, a história regional, a história urbana e rural, a história ambiental, a história pública, a história oral, os estudos do património, as humanidades digitais e as abordagens comparativas e conectadas. O estudo de comunidades, paisagens, redes, poderes, arquivos, bibliotecas, memórias, conflitos, práticas de governação e usos públicos do passado permite compreender o local como lugar de densidade analítica, mediação social e produção crítica de conhecimento.

Este processo convida igualmente a repensar os suportes e as infraestruturas da investigação. Arquivos, bibliotecas, centros de documentação, colecções locais, repositórios digitais e redes locais de memória e conhecimento assumem um papel crescente na preservação, organização, mediação e democratização do saber histórico. A expansão da história oral, da participação comunitária, dos arquivos comunitários, da cartografia digital e das humanidades espaciais tem, por seu turno, vindo a alargar os métodos, os públicos e os modos de circulação da história local.

O X Congresso de História Local, a realizar no Porto, entre 24 e 26 de Novembro de 2026, na Biblioteca Municipal Almeida Garrett, pretende acompanhar e estimular esta renovação.

 

 

 

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Chamada para comunicações

 

Dando continuidade às edições anteriores, o congresso propõe-se como espaço de debate, partilha e problematização em torno da história local enquanto campo historiográfico, prática de investigação e forma de mediação entre conhecimento académico, comunidades e território. Acolherá, por isso, contributos de natureza empírica, teórica e metodológica, bem como propostas que promovam o diálogo entre investigação histórica, ensino, história oral, arquivos, bibliotecas, património e participação pública.

A edição de 2026 reveste-se ainda de particular significado por coincidir com os 50 anos das primeiras eleições autárquicas democráticas. Esta efeméride convida a revisitar o poder local em democracia, a formação e consolidação das autarquias, o papel dos municípios e das freguesias, os processos de participação e representação, as transformações da administração local e as mudanças ocorridas nos territórios ao longo de meio século. Ao mesmo tempo, oferece uma oportunidade para analisar, à escala local, os modos concretos de construção da democracia, os seus ritmos, tensões, assimetrias e legados.

Convidam-se, assim, historiadores/as, investigadores/as, professores/as, estudantes, profissionais de arquivos, bibliotecas e património, bem como demais estudiosos/as, a submeter propostas de comunicação no amplo domínio da história local. Serão particularmente bem-vindas propostas que contribuam para aprofundar o lugar da história local na historiografia contemporânea, os seus instrumentos conceptuais, os seus desafios metodológicos e as suas articulações com outras escalas, campos e práticas de investigação.

• Teoria, historiografia, epistemologia e metodologias da história local
• História local entre o micro, o regional, o nacional, o imperial e o global
• Circulações, redes, conexões e abordagens comparativas, conectadas ou translocais
• Território, paisagem, ambiente, recursos e transformações socio-ecológicas
• História rural, urbana e regional em perspetiva renovada
• Municípios, freguesias, poder local, administração e governação territorial
• 50 anos das eleições autárquicas democráticas: participação, representação, cidadania e transformação local
• Comunidades, identidades, pertenças, memória e património
• História oral, testemunho, memória e conhecimento situado
• Arquivos, bibliotecas, centros de documentação, coleções locais e redes territoriais de conhecimento
• História pública, mediação cultural, participação comunitária e usos públicos do passado local
• Elites, sociabilidades, instituições, associativismo e trajetórias locais
• Trabalho, economia, mobilidades, infraestruturas, desigualdades e conflito social
• Violência política, resistência, repressão e democratização à escala local
• Perspetivas decoloniais, histórias situadas e crítica das narrativas hegemónicas
• Ferramentas digitais, cartografia histórica, SIG, bases de dados e humanidades espaciais

 

O congresso acolherá com particular interesse propostas que articulem investigação histórica rigorosa com reflexão conceptual, inovação metodológica e atenção às formas contemporâneas de preservação, circulação e uso do conhecimento histórico.

Serão igualmente valorizadas comunicações que explorem o potencial da história local para compreender problemas mais vastos, produzir conhecimento socialmente relevante e reforçar a ligação entre investigação, território e cidadania.

Painel para jovens investigadores: à semelhança das edições anteriores, o congresso pretende também incentivar a participação de estudantes em início de percurso académico, promovendo a sua integração em contextos de discussão científica exigentes e formativos.

 

Envio de propostas

Todas as propostas deverão ser submetidas através do formulário disponível 🔗neste link. até 31 de Julho de 2026.

 

Inscrições

A inscrição no congresso é individual e gratuita e deverá ser feita através do formulário disponível 🔗neste link até ao dia 23 de Novembro de 2026.

 

Calendarização

Submissão de propostas: até 31 de Julho de 2026
Notificação de aceitação de propostas: 20 de Setembro de 2026
Divulgação do Programa: 20 de Setembro de 2026
Prazo para inscrições: até 23 de Novembro de 2026
Congresso: 24 a 26 de Novembro de 2026

 

Contacto: congressohistorialocal@gmail.com

 

 

Comissão Organizadora

 

Catarina Pimentel Neto (CEF — NOVA FCSH)
Catarina Veiga dos Santos (CEF — NOVA FCSH)
Diogo Ferreira (CEF — NOVA FCSH)
Eunice Relvas (CEF — NOVA FCSH / GEO-CML)
Guilherme Sequeira (CEF — NOVA FCSH)
Inês José ( IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST / CEF — NOVA FCSH)
João Francisco Pereira (CEF — NOVA FCSH / CEHR-UCP)
João Pedro Santos (IHC – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST)
Liliana Caldeira (CEF — NOVA FCSH)
Maria Fernanda Rollo (CEF — NOVA FCSH)
Maria Miguel Fresco (CEF — NOVA FCSH)
Mariana Reis de Castro (IHC – NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST / CEF — NOVA FCSH)
Pedro Serra (CEF — NOVA FCSH)

 

 

 

 

The aim of the fourth Karl Marx Congress is to analyse the crisis of neoliberal capitalism (1980s – first quarter of the 21st century).

 

 

4th Karl Marx Congress

The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism and Necropolitics

 

 

The 4th Karl Marx Congress will take place on 22 and 23 January 2027 at NOVA FCSH (Av. de Berna campus, Lisbon, Portugal), organised by the following institutions: Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra; CULTRA — Association of Political Economy; Institute of Contemporary History (IHC), NOVA University Lisbon; Institute of Sociology, University of Porto; STEXEU project — The Constitutional Road to Dictatorship (ERC Grant 101163723).

The aim of the congress is to analyse the crisis of neoliberal capitalism (1980s – first quarter of the 21st century) from a dual perspective: that of historical analysis and that of theoretical debate of the crisis in its various dimensions, along with the study of related experiences of social, political, or cultural activism.

To this end, the congress will be organised around plenary sessions (keynote speeches) and the following seven thematic sections:

• Section I: The economic and financial crisis of neoliberal capitalism (nature and characteristics of the crisis of late capitalism; rates of profit and accumulation; centre and periphery; technological revolution and technocracies; financialisation; cryptocurrencies; the privatisation offensive; old and new forms of surplus value extraction and related issues)
• Section II: Politics, hyperpolitics and necropolitics (crisis of legitimacy/representativeness of liberal systems; the capitulation of liberalism; the decline of the two-party system between social democracy and liberal and conservative forces; the neo-fascist threat and its characteristics in the current era; the radicalisation of the traditional right; Trumpism and related phenomena; struggles and impasses of the emancipatory left)
• Section III: Social transformations and struggles (structural and behavioural changes within the working classes, segmentation, precarisation, unionisation; the new balance of power in the world of work: the 2025–26 labour reform in Portugal within the international context of the counter-reform of labour rights; migrant labour; migration, the international division of labour and racialised regimes of accumulation; fear and insecurity among the middle and marginalised classes; processes of pauperisation; changes within the ruling classes, technoligarchy; the new role of algorithmic manipulation and social media; heteronormativity and queer Marxism; experiences of struggle in the workplace, housing, healthcare, education, etc.).
• Section IV: Late capitalism, ecological and environmental disaster, and ecosocialism (the environmental policies of capitalism; the ecological and environmental crisis and its evolution; growth and degrowth, the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, extractivism; experiences of environmental activism in its various forms and expressions)
• Section V: Feminisms, emancipation and social reproduction (patriarchy and the situation of women in society, politics and the culture of late capitalism; reproductive labour and struggles surrounding social reproduction; LGBTQIA+ rights and discrimination, overexploitation, violence, male power: coexistence, impunity, political conquests, the current situation; neo-fascism, male chauvinism, anti-feminism; feminist struggles; the emancipatory left and the feminist movement; the various currents and expressions of contemporary feminisms).
• Section VI: Culture and cultural counter-revolution (the role of cultural counter-revolution in the emergence of the new neo-fascist far right; the various dimensions of conservative and fascist cultural revisionism: in history, memory, politics, social discourse, ideology; the new role of democratic and mass culture in the transformative understanding of present realities).
• Section VII: Imperialism, war and genocide (new and old forms of imperialism; wars of aggression and imperial rivalry: Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran; the collapse of multilateralism and international law; the unpunished return of gunboat diplomacy and the law of the jungle; Trumpism and Latin America: Cuba, Venezuela and similar cases; the arms race; the threat of World War III; the struggles against imperial necropolitics).

 

 

Call for papers

 

 

Proposals for papers for the congress will only be considered by the Scientific Committee under the following conditions:

a) Their content must fall within the thematic scope of the seven sections of the congress;
b) They must take the form of abstracts – in Portuguese or English – of no more than 2,000 characters, including a very brief identifying note and the authors’ short bio;
c) They must be submitted using this online form.

All proposals for papers must be received by 30 June 2026.

Proposals will be assessed by the congress’ Scientific Committee and proposers will be notified of the outcome by 30 September 2026. FCSH’s room capacity may limit the number of paper proposals that can be accepted.

The 4th Karl Marx Congress is open to the public and admission is free.

 

 

Organising Committee

 

Arturo Zoffmann Rodriguez, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
Fernando Rosas, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST / CULTRA
Giulia Strippoli, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
Jonas Van Vossole, CES — University of Coimbra
José Soeiro, Instituto de Sociologia — FLUP
Luís Trindade, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
Manuel Loff, FLUP / IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
Mariana Mortágua, DINÂMIA’CET — Iscte

 

 

Scientific Committee

Adriana Valobra, UNLP
Alexis Cukier, UPoitiers
Alexandre Abreu, ISEG
Ana Alves da Silva, APEP
Ana Sofia Ferreira, IS-UP
André Vianna Matos, Fiocruz
Ankica Čakardić, UZagreb
António Pedro Pita, CES/UC
Aurélie Andry, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
Bernardo Ferro, IEF/UC
Carme Molinero, UAB
Carla Luciana Silva, UNIOESTE
Carlos Zacarias de Sena Júnior, UFBA
Cátia Guimarães, Fiocruz
Cecília Honório, CULTRA
Emanuele Leonardo, UBologna
Fernando Bessa Ribeiro, CICS.NOVA
Fernando Oliveira Baptista, ISA/UL
Francisco Louçã, ISEG/UL
Geo Britto, ETP-RJ
George Souvlis, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
Gilberto Calil, UNIOESTE
Hernán Camarero, UBA-CEHTI
Inês Barbosa, IS-UP
Javier Tébar, UB
Joana Dias Pereira, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
João Leonardo Medeiros, UFF
João Mineiro, CRIA/ISCTE
João Rodrigues, FE/UC
João Teixeira Lopes, IS-UP
Lígia Ferro, IS-UP
Manuel Carlos Silva, CICS/UMinho
Marcela Uchoa, IEF/UC
Marcelo Badaró Mattos, UFF
Mariana Mortágua, ISCTE
Miguel Cardina, CES/UC
Olivier Neveux, ENS Lyon
Paula Godinho, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
Pere Ysàs, UAB
Ricardo Noronha, IHC — NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST
Sílvia Correia, IS-UP
Simone Tulumello, APEP

 

 

>> Download the call for papers (PDF) <<