Call for Papers
Counting (multi)species – is the future behind us? (Re)reading archives and environmental methodologies
Porto | 4–6 December 2025
For more information and abstract submission see https://wp.letras.up.pt/reportha
The 6th Meeting of the REPORT(H)A network will take place in the city of Porto from 4 to 6 December 2025, marking a decade of the Portuguese Environmental History Network and meetings dedicated to Environmental History. Under the theme “Counting (multi)species – is the future behind us? (Re)reading archives and environmental methodologies,” the meeting proposes a broad reflection on the ways of constructing historical knowledge about nature and its multiple forms of life, simultaneously interrogating the past and futures.
This meeting invites critical reflection on the ways archives are constituted, organised, and used as central instruments in the production of environmental knowledge. It aims to map how diverse sources — written, material, visual, natural — have been mobilised, reinterpreted, or silenced in constructing historical narratives about species, environments, and ecosystems. The objective is to analyse the criteria that determine the selection or rejection of certain sources, as well as the processes of data extraction, treatment, and representation, highlighting how these decisions influence what can be narrated or omitted. By addressing the counting of multispecies, it also questions the very methodology of quantification, classification, and interpretation of environmental history.
Thus, a renewed reading of archives is proposed, including their metadata when available, reflecting on what is recorded and what remains silent, what is preserved, forgotten, or erased. In this context, it is essential to understand the methodological choices that guide researchers’ work: why are some sources privileged, and others discarded? What pathways allow access to multispecies narratives, at deep temporal scales, and to distinct modes of influence and interaction among organisms and natural elements within the ecological system?
With this proposal, the meeting aims to stimulate debate on the ways of doing Environmental History, articulating micro and macro scales, interdisciplinary approaches, and sensibilities that allow questioning the very construction of the archive — what has been kept, what has been lost, and what is possible to (re)interpret.
Researchers from diverse scientific fields and at different career stages are invited to submit proposals for presentations or posters that contribute to reflection on:
- Archives for Environmental History: Which documentary collections? Which information producers? Which types of sources?
- Going beyond the document: rereading sources and proposing new methodological approaches;
- Analyze and rethink the role of communities in the production and preservation of environmental knowledge;
- Material and immaterial traces of environmental relationships;
- Strategies for reading and analysing “silent sources”;
- Multispecies reading methodologies;
- Representation and circulation of ecological data (e.g., databases, repositories, etc.);
- Comparative or intertwined environmental histories;
- Production of historical knowledge and possible environmental futures.
While the focus is on the theme of this 6th Meeting, proposals on other relevant topics within Environmental History are also welcome.
Key dates:
Conference dates: 4–6 December 2025
Submission deadline: 15 September 2025
Notification of acceptance: 31 October 2025
Preliminary programme release: November 2025
