Indigenous Discovery and Exploration History—A Thematic Panel and Call for Articles

Lauren Beck Announcement
Location
United States
Subject Fields
Indigenous Studies, Latin American and Caribbean History / Studies, African History / Studies, Asian History / Studies, World History / Studies

Indigenous Discovery and Exploration History—A Thematic Panel and Call for Articles

Annual Meeting of the Society for the History of Discoveries

Milwaukee, WI, USA

22-23 September, 2017

Discovery and exploration history is composed of accounts, experiences, and knowledge collected and possessed by travelers over the millennia, all of which documents their expanding worldview. The entrenchment of European perspectives on such travel is made evident by the subject matter of articles about discovery and exploration published by leading journals in the fields of history, geography, and historical cartography. In recent years, however, non-European perspectives have been attracting the gaze of scholars.

This thematic panel seeks to deepen scholarship on non-European, non-Western accounts of discovery and exploration while focusing on how Indigenous peoples discovered and explored other parts of the globe. Indigenous peoples across the world undertook voyages of discovery and exploration that sometimes resulted in settlement and the intermingling of different peoples and cultures. Contributions to this panel will critically examine the process, experience, and outcomes of voyages undertaken by Indigenous peoples before, during, and after the European era of ‘discovery’, from circumpolar travel by peoples such as the Innu, and the arduous travels of the Inca to Europe during the Spanish colonial era, to the Indigenous inhabitants of Africa and their migration to Australia.

All of these Indigenous groups encountered new peoples and ways of living and knowing; in some cases they generated travel accounts detailing their impressions of these faraway lands and the customs of their people, as well as visual and cartographic records.

Proposals for 20-minute presentations concerning any Indigenous people and relating to any geographic context and period are invited. Papers accepted for this thematic panel will subsequently be developed into article-length manuscripts that will undergo peer review and form a thematic issue of Terrae Incognitae devoted to Indigenous perspectives on discovery and exploration. 

Please send proposals of up to 250 words to Dr. Lauren Beck (lbeck@mta.ca), editor of Terrae Incognitae, by 3 February, 2017.

 

Contact Email
lbeck@mta.ca