CALL FOR PAPERS: DEADLINE 15 September 2021
This conference will be a hybrid event (see below for more details).
Poverty, or fear of poverty, is ubiquitous in global history. Local instances of want, shortage, and hunger have often been both causes and consequences of global processes. Global integration and trans-local interconnections since the premodern era underpinned the emergence of the global systems of capitalism and colonialism, which in turn have left us with structural inequality. New landscapes of poverty continue to be created by climate collapse, deepening for many the omnipresent fear of not having enough to get by. Nonetheless, our understandings of poverty’s multiple meanings have been historically shallow.
Poverty and Scarcity in Global History will interrogate the interface between poverty, scarcity, and the field of global history through three broad areas: production, power, and affect. How is poverty produced through global processes, and how are questions of resources—animal, organic, and nonorganic— tied to the production of poverty and its concomitant scarcity?
Drawing from interdisciplinary vantage points and perspectives from both the premodern and the modern era, the conference seeks to uncover the agentive roles that turn real or perceived scarcity into structural poverty. We will examine the important role that the material conditions of poverty, and socio-political fears and anxieties of poverty, have driven global history across interlocking temporal and spatial scales and how ideas about poverty and scarcity have shaped the emergence of global connections and processes.
The conference will be jointly organized by the Global History Initiative, Queen’s University, Canada, and the Poverty Research Network, University of Glasgow, Scotland. This is a virtual conference. However, attendees and participants are encouraged to attend the conference venues, either in Kingston, Ontario, or Glasgow, Scotland. We invite participants from all career stages and research areas, and topics from all periods of global history.
For the full CFP see: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/poverty/events/headline_802868_en.html
Please submit a title and abstract (max. 300 words) and a CV in PDF format. Include your full name and contact information, including institutional affiliation. The deadline for submission is September 15, 2021.
Please email your submissions to the Global History Initiative (ghiq@queensu.ca). All panelists will be required to submit a 5000-word draft of their papers by January 7, 2022, for circulation among the panelists and participants and come prepared to engage with each other’s written work.
IMAGE: Benjamin Disinger Hungry homeless man sits behind wealthy young man in San Francisco 2020