Chair:

Nina Vieira, CHAM-NOVA FCSH

Carla Vieira, CHAM-NOVA FCSH

Catarina Simões, CHAM-NOVA FCSH

 The interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies is bringing forth a growing scholarly interest in the subject of human-animal relationships across the humanities and social sciences at large. Animal-centred approaches argue for the vital role of nonhuman animals in people’s individual and collective lives, acknowledging historical entanglements of mutual dependency between human and nonhuman actors.

This panel aims to discuss how animal movement shaped human practices and ways of life throughout different historical periods, and in diverse cultural and geographical contexts. In one hand, debating the importance of the ecological movement of animals, i.e. their natural activity and mobility in shaping people subsistence, settlement and wealth, animal management practices, transhumance, or animal domestication; on the other hand, highlighting the impact of the forced movement of animals, namely their displacement, circulation and involvement in regional and global trade networks.

We encourage the submission from scholars at different career levels, from history and archaeology, but also literature and the arts, in the following topics, or others that fall within the scope of this panel:

• energy generated by the movement of animals;
• animal-human historical migrations;
• animal transport and transport through animals;
• diasporic thinking applied to animals;
• circulation of preserved species, animal body parts and by-products;
• spatial analysis and digital humanities.

Keywords: Animal History; Animal Studies; Multispecies Entanglements; Migration; Diaspora

New doctoral thesis: Vulnerabilidade e resiliência nas comunidades costeiras do Noroeste de Portugal (final do século XVI - meados do século XIX)

Ana Isabel Alves Lopes

Available at: https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/168666

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 6^th 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