Conecta.

This thematic issue explores the complex realities that arise from the ocean-climate nexus and its governance-oriented challenges and opportunities. Ocean and climate governance continue to be intricate and compelling issues that set barriers to the sustainable use of oceans and their potential contribution to the fight against climate change and vice versa. There is a growing need to understand how different and divergent actors (states, non-state actors, international organizations, corporations, courts, regimes, etc.) will approach the use of oceans during the era of the ever-growing effects of climate change. Ocean, for this thematic issue, is perceived in its broadest meaning. It covers issues concerning oceans per se and other maritime activities that can contribute to the sustainability of the seas (such as sustainable coastal areas, sustainable marine tourism, port governance, etc.). Accordingly, climate change governance covers a broad array of actions that actors may undertak...

The struggle to decolonize was and continues to be intimately linked to questions and practices of education, teaching, and consciousness-raising. While scholars have generatively traced how colonialism relied on grammars and hierarchies of knowledge production and dissemination, in this workshop we ask: How did decolonization – as a response and reckoning with colonialism and its forms of knowledges – hinge on (re)figuring new forms of knowing and subjecthood? Did the institutionalization of new knowledge practices linked to decolonization in academic and non-academic contexts innovate or reproduce old pathways and thereby create neocolonial legacies? Indeed, while many anti-colonial movements’ true emancipation associated new material and legal freedoms with the liberation of the mind and the formation of a new cadres in newly independent states at the time of decolonization, decolonizing efforts have sometimes ended up privileging modes of education and knowing that reinforced trans...

50th Annual Meeting of the Social Sciences History Association The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois – November 20th-23rd, 2025 Submission Deadline: March 1st, 2025 Complexity and its Consequences “History is indeed little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind” or so wrote Edward Gibbon some two centuries ago. Over time we have come to interpret this tendency less as the result of individual errors and more as a result of large-scale historical processes that depend on emergent and structural forces outside of the direct control of any one individual. Previous eras may have thought of these effects through the lens of tragedy, fate, or paradox. In the present, we might consider at least some subset as the result of the complexity of social organization. Complexity makes exact predictions difficult, but progress has been made in understanding and identifying, and even analyzing and modeling emergent phenomenon, interdependence in systems, network pro...

4S Open Panel 239: Network Imaginaries: Past, Present, and Future Decades after the introduction of the consumer internet, society now anticipates profound transformations in computing and networking driven by innovations like artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, the internet-of-things (IoT), robotics, data mining, and cloud computing. As these developments promise—or threaten—to reshape public and private networks and technologies, it is vital to investigate the network imaginaries that motivate, constrain, and enable their development, adoption, regulation, and exploitation. Network imaginaries have long been central to modernity, from their origins in symbolic practices like weaving to their influence on technical and organizational thought. In fact, as Pierre Musso (2003) has argued, the concept of the network is foundational to our collective imaginations, even shaping both the philosophies and social sciences that critique them. Information and communication technologies, in...

European Culture and Technology Lab+: Research and Innovation Conference Knowledge in the Age of Digital Re-/Production: Responsible Epistemologies? June 4th - 5th 2025 Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. Hochschule Darmstadt, Schöfferstraße 3, 64295 Darmstadt The Conference on “Knowledge in the Age of Digital Re-/Production” hosted by the European University of Technology and organized by the European Culture and Technology Laboratory ‘ECT Lab+’ and its MSCA SE project EpiSTEAM aims to bring together experts from the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Technology, and other fields, exploring (non-)positivist ways of enquiry and knowing. Our encounter with the world is increasingly digitised. After the advent of digital technologies in science and business and after already having become “personal” (PCs), the networked computer finally entered most people’s intimate sphere as the smartphone more than 15 years ago. We organise our lives and keep in contact with our loved ones t...

Ancient weather perspectives. Perceptions, representations and realities (400-700). A transdisciplinary and international conference. Nijmegen (the Netherlands), June 2026 Organisers: dr Roald Dijkstra & dr Joop van Waarden Weather conditions are traditionally one of the most popular topics of everyday conversation in the Netherlands, but due to the continuing flux of alarming reports on climate change, we may now be even more sensitive to the huge impact weather has on us. This impact certainly was as significant for people living in ancient times as it is today. This conference focuses on the relationship between the actual impact of weather and its representation in literary and visual sources in the period of long late antiquity. Still too often, antique weather conditions are taken for granted and the weather in (late) antiquity is not a particularly frequent topic in academic discourse, although things certainly have changed in recent years (Antiquité Tardive 29, 2002, Leveau...