World History Association 2022 Conference

31st Annual Conference | Bilbao Spain

Call for Papers

Humans have a unique relationship with distance, having used culture and technology to become a global species, dramatically compress time and space, and even reach into the cosmos. Yet as we strive to conquer distance, we have also frequently sought to create it: building walls, establishing borders, and creating ideologies that impose distances all their own. Similarly, while some communities in recent decades have come to enjoy unprecedented degrees of mobility, others have found their movement sharply curtailed by economic, cultural, and political forces. Still others have been forced by inequality, climate change, and violence to undertake harrowing migrations that pit them against a variety of natural barriers and human-created distances.

Topics

The World History Association is seeking proposals for sessions and papers presenting original research and pedagogical techniques within the overarching theme of distance, mobility, and migration as well as other topics of interest to world historians. We welcome topics involving the widest possible range of geographic locales as well as those that have particular resonance for our Basque Country conference setting. These could include:

• Borders and boundaries
• Oceanic zones of encounter
• Territoriality and transnationalism in international relations
• Civil wars, global engagements
• Conflict, exile, and diaspora
• Transnational resources: fisheries, forests, minerals, & people
• Tangible and intangible circulation: commodities, manufactures, technologies, ideas, & people
• Industrialization and deindustrialization
• Teaching in a time of constant mobility and migration
• Gendered experiences of conflict and resistance
• Artistic representations of history & memory
• The role of “small people’s” languages and cultures in a globalizing age
• The history and future of cultural tourism

Proposals from the fields of anthropology, geography, political science, literature, art history and criticism, other humanities and social sciences, as well as natural or physical sciences that address global historical change are also encouraged. As always, the program committee also invites papers and panels on aspects of world history that do not directly address the conference theme.

Submission Details

For more details about this CFP and details on the various session formats, please visit the conference homepage (www.thewha.org/conferences/bilbao2022/).

To submit a proposal, complete a form via the conference homepage by November 30, 2021 to be considered for expidited review.  January 15, 2022 is the final deadline to submit a proposal.