Abstract
The Working Group for Czech and Slovak Environmental History in cooperation with Charles University in Prague and the Czech Academy of Sciences and with the support of European Society for Environmental History are pleased to announce a four-day graduate summer school in environmental history which will take place in Prague in late August 2016. Parasites and diseases are an important and often overlooked part of ecosystems which influences our lives and landscapes in unexpected ways.
We wish to explore their role as actors of history, as objects of cultural and moral evaluation, and as unexpected agents in human interactions with the environment. The topic's position at an intersection of disciplines like environmental and medical history, biology, or ecology offers an excellent opportunity for exploring the possibilities and limitations of interdisciplinary research.
Issues that we wish to focus on during the workshop include, but are not limited to: historical understanding of the origins of diseases and changes in medical theories over time; why are pests pests? ascribing cultural value to organisms; role of the environment in the transmission and perception of diseases; parasites, pests, and conservation: how cultural perceptions shape our conservation efforts; diseases and environmental justice