Agricultural History Society, 2022 Annual Meeting - Greening the Field(s)
The Agricultural History Society is pleased to issue a call for submissions for its 2022 Annual Meeting in beautiful Stavanger, Norway. This is the society’s first meeting in Europe.
This year’s conference aims to explore what it might mean to ‘green’ agriculture and agricultural history. We seek to explore production and impacts from farm to fork, recognising the emergence of synergies in the content and practices of environmental history and agricultural history, especially when assessing ethical and popular responses to production and products, policy debates on the potential of green transitions in future farming, and the societal impacts of changing land uses. The theme captures questions linked to sustainable food production in periods of environmental and climate change, crisis, and attempts to create and live new agricultures. It also captures the significance today of exploring past transitions, the connectivity between old and new agricultures, energy transitions, and the ghostly acres implicated in food production and cultivation. Within these things we might see the complexities of human experiences of change in the face of new farming systems, intersecting with issues of social justice, labour and migration, ‘race’, gender, (dis)ability, or the impacts on rural communities of new policies and practices such as rewilding. And, as we continue to live with Covid-19, what of the dynamic interrelationships between human and other animal populations, ‘wild’ and farmed, revealed historically as we seek food and extract value from cleared land? The committee seeks papers that explore experiences of change in the past, but also continuities in the practices of rural, indigenous, farm family, mobile, settled, colonized and colonizing, and enslaved populations seeking sustenance from old and new agricultures, landscapes and animal populations.
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
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Environmental impacts of livestock production, from animal feed to waste production.
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The history of the development of new foods/foodways – like hydroponics and new proteins (such as Quorn®, plant-based, soya, insect).
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Health/Disease – interactions of humans and other animals, the welfare impacts of endemic disease, medical veterinary histories, ‘hygiene’, impacts from treatments (such as Anti-Microbial Resistance).
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Agricultural/’Wild’ species and spaces – proximities of human and ‘wild’ animal populations when land is cleared for agricultural use, the concept of ‘one health’, disease reservoirs & histories of disease (Spanish flu, swine flu, bird flu, tuberculosis, etc.).
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Social histories of the people who live and work with livestock in extensive and intensive systems – such as transhumance, pastoral systems, and herding.
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The socio-economic changes falling out of shifts between livestock and arable, agri-tech, and new sustainable systems.
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Environmental edges – the species that have co-evolved with farm animals’ grazing, the edges of arable, hedges, the wildflowers of grazed ‘wastelands’.
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Climate impacts on agriculture – such as seasons, droughts, erasure, extreme weather events, and histories of modelling data and weather.
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Political/policy histories – including legal limits on farming management, pesticide controls, animal transport, and disease controls.
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Sustainable agricultural practices, both intensive and extensive, from backyard animals and prairies to community allotments and estates.
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Products and byproducts – such as flour, oil, the fruit in the produce aisles, meat, dairy, eggs, leather, wool, bones, feathers, and tallow.
Reflecting the Society’s inclusive tradition, we especially encourage contributions from emerging scholars and researchers covering understudied geographical regions or time periods. We also welcome significant contributions that do not directly address the conference theme.
Deadline for submissions is Saturday November 6, 2021.