Conecta. Desde 1995

Guest editors: Alexandra Bacalu & Dragoș Manea   The rising popularity and speedy proliferation of social media in the 2010s and 2020s has resulted in the revival of a large-scale cultural interest in self-care and self-help —now reconceptualized as digital practices of self-improvement and virtual means of performing individual authenticity, in the context of increasingly blurred boundaries between the public and the private. This concern with caring for the self and preserving mental health has only peaked during moments of political crisis and social unrest, with the 2016 and 2024 elections of Donald Trump, the 2020 global pandemic, and the recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East being repeatedly referenced in popular discussions around the—highly debatable—therapeutic need for occasional political disengagement. The birth of the sociological study of therapeutic culture(s) in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the recognition of America as a particularly intriguing...

A conference taking place on 20 November 2026 at the Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, SW1Y 5AG, London 9.30am – 5.00pm   Deadline for submissions: Friday 26 June 2026     2026 sees the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough FRS, perhaps the greatest exponent of natural history through television. His work is part of a long tradition of communicating often-complex ideas to a wider public. Scientists have used a variety of media to make a case for science: most traditionally in printed works, but also through anecdotes, lectures, demonstrations, exhibitions, press articles, radio and television. Today, our scientists may create websites or take to social media to gain a wider audience for their work, or to explain the work of many others. But who have been the most successful communicators and why? What narrative techniques made them effective? In an era of good and bad influencers, distortion or rejection of science, fake news, and information overload, what can...

Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science will receive proposals for articles that seek to reflect Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Modern Science from the 16th through the 18th Centuries for the issue of June 2027. Full details regarding the scope, submission guidelines, and deadlines are available on the journal’s website. Call for Papers - Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Modern Science from the 16th through the 18th Centuries | Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science We would greatly appreciate it if you could share this call with colleagues and potential contributors who may be interested in the topic.

Special issue coordinated by Pierre Petit, Alain Delattre, and Xavier Luffin Talismans are attested in the most diverse societies, spanning every epoque from prehistory to the present day, where they are being reinvented in the context of advanced capitalism and the digital world (Jackson 2022; McBain 2024). However, Japanese omamori are neither the hirizi of the Arab-Swahili world, nor the magical gems of Greco-Roman antiquity, nor the Saint Benedict ‘exorcist’ medals: the historical trajectories and cultural contexts of talismans are culturally specific. In the search for an Urreligion, many authors over the past two centuries have ignored these trajectories and contexts, adopting a generic approach to the topic (Lévy-Bruhl 1925, Marquès-Rivière 1938). By contrast, this special issue of Civilisations seeks to highlight approaches rooted in ethnographic and historical contexts, engaging reflexively in broader analytic considerations by comparing societies and periods. Talismans – or...

The Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University will host the 18th annual Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine (JAS-Med) on September 25th and 26th, 2026, in Baltimore, MD. Originally founded in 2002 with a mission of fostering a collegial intellectual community amongst graduate students and providing an engaging forum for graduate research, JAS-Med is proudly student-led and student-organized. We welcome interest and participation from graduate students pursuing research in the history of medicine and related fields, including anthropology, sociology, public health, bioethics, law, gender and sexuality studies, political science, as well as ethnicity, race, and migration studies.   We invite all interested graduate students — Master’s, PhD, and MD/PhD — to submit an abstract by June 1st, 2026 . Abstracts should be no more than 250 words and should clearly state the purpose, thesis, and principal findings of the paper to be presented. JAS-Med...