WORLD HISTORY ASSOCIATION 2021 CONFERENCE: HEALTH, GLOBALLY
What are the metrics and meanings that describe health: for individuals, communities, institutions, governments, economies, cultures, ecosystems, epistemologies, or philosophies? The WHA invites teachers, scholars, and activists to reflect broadly on the many possible meanings of health, to both include and transcend bodily and biomedical applications of the term in order to consider the health of our world and the history of our planet that brings us to a online conference July 5–11, 2021. Sessions will not run continuously, and will be scheduled so that some live content is optimal in a variety of time zones.
Our world has radically altered since the WHA’s canceled conference in 2020. The urgency of global public health crises, economic hardship, famine and food insecurity, political instability, ongoing violence, and environmental disasters demand immediate attention and invite measured analysis over long time horizons—a move along temporal scales at which world historians excel.
The conference organizers invite WHA members and friends to consider this year’s theme of Health, Globally to be capacious enough include presentations on last year’s insufficiently explored theme of Sustainability + Preservation. Individual papers and panels accepted for the 2020 conference are welcome to roll their presentations over to 2021. To request a paper or panel roll-over, please email info@thewha.org by January 25, 2021.
The fully online structure of this year’s conference opens up a variety of formats. The program committee encourages you to collaborate with your colleagues to develop live and pre-recorded sessions, which might include (but are not limited to): book roundtables that address a collection of related scholarship; author Q & As, ideally with multiple authors; workshops in which participants actively engage with relevant materials; e-posters; Baobab-style panels, live or prerecorded; and live discussions based on pre-circulated materials, either written or recorded.
As always, the program committee invites papers and panels on aspects of world history that do not directly address the conference theme.
To propose a paper, panel, roundtable, workshop, or other session, please submit your proposal by February 1, 2021 via the links below.