Submissions

Human–environmental nexus in the past: understanding links between demographic variability, ecology and disease.

Participants are encouraged to engage with and link across three different streams of historical social science analysis:

• the diversity of historical demographic behaviour across space and time;
• the study of historical health, disease and morbidity conditions;
• and human-environmental interactions in the past.

The demographic diversity of historical societies has been expressed in a myriad of ways, but the factors and processes that shaped that diversity remain largely unknown. However, it has been long recognized that populations respond to their ecological contexts in multiple ways, by organizing and adapting their forms of living and behaviour given the environments in which they lived. Both demographic variability, as well as the ecological factors shaping it, may, together affect how populations and individuals responded to disease risk factors, the spread of pandemics, or various other forms of epidemiological crises. Multi-layered inter-dependencies between demographic structures, environmental factors and short- and long-term exogenous shocks thus created are, however, poorly understood and remain a puzzle to be addressed by research.

With this call, we would like to invite the members of the Society to address the relationship between historical demographic structures and processes, and environmental factors, health and disease, as well as addressing the mechanisms underpinning these interactions. We encourage the use of the most appropriate data and methods for modelling cross-sectional or longitudinal data and studying individual and collective responses to the combined effects of these forces in a spatio-temporal perspective.