Deadline: August 15, 2026
Parallel Memories: People, Place and Environments in the Baltic States
Online, 30-31 October 2026
This year marks forty years since the late-twentieth century independence movements across Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia began to “crystallize around concern over environment” (Misiunas and Taagepera 1993). Indeed, the intertwinement of nature, nation and memories of interwar statehood was a notable source of mass mobilisation throughout the late 1980s. More recently, a new momentum around the study of environment and society, ecological memories, nuclear cultural heritage, emptying places, and land redistribution has been gathering momentum within research on or with the connection to the Baltic states (Rindzevičiūtė 2021; Dzenovska 2023; Annus 2025; Martínez 2026). Building on this, the fourth annual BASEES Study Group on the Baltic States workshop seeks to explore the power of memory in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania through the lens of place and environment (Martinez 2026; Annus 2025; Schwartz 2006).
In the Baltic States, memories form around natural and human-made environments. From medieval “castlescapes”, rural “emptiness”, Soviet-era “authoritarian landscapes” to present-day centennial landscapes, the existing research into these mnemonic environments highlights their ability to act as a unifier, yet also represent diverse, competing, parallel, and interconnecting ways of interpreting space (e.g. Banerjea et al. 2019; Printsmann et al. 2019; Rožėnė 2025). Neither is this relationship static or unidirectional. As climate change, swamp drainage, land redistributions, and regime change have transformed localities and environments, so too have people’s relationships with the world around them (e.g. Moore 2019; Storie et al. 2019; Richter 2020). Within this process, the underpinning memories can be strongly personal and at the same time highly collective in their connections to regional and national identities. Twentieth-century wars, population transfers, and exile have left strong marks on the collective notions of homelands, national borders, and boundaries of belonging both at home and abroad (e.g. Kuutma and Annist 2020; Sruoginis 2023). As the recent reshaping of the imagined geography of Europe or altering of monumental landscapes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine further remind us, the connection to a place and memory is intrinsically multiscalar and relational (e.g. Jõekalda 2024; Hagelin and Gibson 2025).
We welcome various interpretations of the core themes of memory and environment and seek to provoke a wide-ranging interdisciplinary discussion on questions such as: What stories are buried beneath the landscapes of the Baltic region? How do ecological and social scars function as historical records? How can interdisciplinary methodologies reveal the entanglement of human and ecological histories? The workshop prioritises work conducted in the humanities and social sciences but will also consider ecological studies, if they draw conclusions relevant to humanities and social science topics.
Potential themes and approaches can include but are not limited to:
- Sites of remembrance and memorialisation
- Holocaust and genocide studies
- Conservation and environmental protection
- Minority identities or diaspora memory
- Research into oppression and safe spaces
- Geopolitics and the environment
- The environment and place in literature, art, and music
- The role of environment in folklore studies
- Postcolonial approaches and semiotics
- The environment as a place of resource extraction
- Heritage and tourism
- Political ecology
- Environmental and more-than-human histories
- Environment and independence movements
Please send a 250-word abstract and a 150-word bio note by 15 August 2026 to baseesbalticstudiesgroup@gmail.com
Organising Committee: Dmitrijs Andrejevs (University of Manchester), John Freeman (independent scholar), Karl Stuklis (University of Glasgow), Paris Pin-Yü Chen (University of Birmingham), Rasa Kamarauskaitė (University of Amsterdam), Stefan Tung (University College London)