Veranstaltungshinweis: Assessing the Fluvial Anthropocene

Am 2./3. Mai findet am in Leipzig eine Tagung zum Thema “Assessing the Fluvial Antrhopocene. Agency, Materiality and Culture in Eastern European Hydroscapes” statt. Die Tagung wird ausgerichtet von den beiden Leibniz-Instituten Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) und Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS).

Abstract:

The world’s waters are a powerful historical force in their own right, and their materiality puts the predominance of human agency into question. Recent historiography presents a variety of transdisciplinary paradigms like nature-culture, envirotechnical systems, or socio-natural sites. They creatively frame societal changes and anthropogenic constants through time, in rare cases even offering a longue-durée perspective that leads from antiquity to the Anthropocene. In this contested ‘age of humans’, whose agency is considered a geo-physical force, water has become ever more coveted as a commodity with conflicts ensuing over its accessibility. Here, much is still to be learned about water management in a diachronic approach that contrasts the ideas and ideals of empires, nation states and international institutions through (proto-)capitalist and socialist regimes in a world connecting.