St Magnus Conference

Call for Papers

The Committee invites abstracts of no more than 100 words for papers and posters. All proposals should be emailed to CNS@uhi.ac.uk by December 1, 2017. Conference registration will open on December 1, 2017, please see our website for this and all other information.

The theme of the conference is Alternative Fact and Actual Fiction: Constructing the Social Narrative. This idea has been formulated in response to recent political and societal developments, in which training in the Humanities and Social Sciences is seen to be of little value. In the face of growing racism, xenophobia, climate change denial and misrepresentation of the past, it is important to show how expertise in past societies is relevant today. This conference has two overall strands: 

1) To examine how learned knowledge has been used – and can be used – in societal debate from the Middle Ages onwards . The two sessions currently in place for this strand are: Nationalism and Scholarship and Identities in the Past and the Present. 2) How humans in the past have dealt with catastrophes that seem to threaten their very existence. The two sessions currently in place for this strand are: The End of the World 1: The Humanities and Natural Science and The End of the World 2: Writing the Narrative. If possible, speakers included in both strands should use a few minutes of their allotted time to reflect on how their research is relevant to today’s society and social context.