The World History Association’s 2027 Annual Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA will be organized around the theme of inflection points past and present. Inflection points help us to conceptualize the movement from one historical state to another: the neolithic or agricultural revolution, the development of the bureaucratic state, the rise of industrialization. Every inflection point exists in reference to a defined scale and scope of historical analysis. Some signal epistemic shifts, such as the development of writing, the Chinese civil service exam, or the printing press. Others mark pivots in transregional power, such as the decline of classical empires or World War II. Still others emerge through interdisciplinary research and allow us to theorize significant climate-influenced developments, such as the depopulation of Classical Maya highland cities or the rise of the Dutch maritime empire. Those of most relevance to world history represent interrelated shifts that reverberate across and between societies. Some posited inflection points may be mirages, or more limited than proposed, but often they do mark unfolding sequences of interconnected changes. Discussing and debating them can help us to understand the world in which we live.

This symposium aims to provide a forum for scholars, archivists, community and cultural organizations interested in critical approaches to digital archives containing materials from and about the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region. In this space, archives have been historically imposed, looted, extracted, dispersed, destroyed, but also rescued, rebuilt and reinvented, pioneering practices of resistance, reparation and return that raise compelling ethical, theoretical and practical questions for scholars and stakeholders (Carbajal and Caswell, 2021; Ghaddar, 2025). We are interested in digitisation as a transformative process that reshapes archival practices, knowledge production, and power relations. The symposium invites participants to engage in discussion around three interconnected themes and interpretative lenses.

A decade after Nicole Seymour's chapter “Trans Ecology and the Transgender Road Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, following Susan Stryker’s foreword to the 2020 book Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature, and after TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly’s November 2024 issue on trans* ecologies, which built on the Queer and Trans* Ecologies (QTE) Interdisciplinary Initiative symposium that drew more than six hundred participants, transecology as a field needs a comprehensive reference handbook. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Transecology will be the first such volume: covering 38 topics, organized across four sections moving outward in scale from the molecular body to the deep-time planet. See the full list of topics with descriptions at the end of this CFP. Readers may be especially interested in Topic 37: Transecological Thought and the Naming of the Epoch and Topic 15: Non-Anglophone and Global South Transecologies. The debate over naming the current epoch, and the distinctive question of who counts as the anthropos, speaks directly to world history's own interest in periodization schemes that claim to describe humanity as a whole. Non-Anglophone transecological thought models exactly the kind of globally distributed, non-Western-centered scholarship world history increasingly aims to practice rather than merely describe.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the inadequacy of health cooperation between the so-called global north and south had dire and lethal consequences for humanity. The rapid spread of the disease, alarming death rates and governments’ unilateral agendas led to repeated calls from health experts for collaborative action across the globe. Instead, the world has witnessed heightened geopolitical rivalries, reproduction of Orientalist binaries and vaccine inequity that deprioritize health as a global public good. Today, health practitioners and scholars across disciplines agree that building new coordination mechanisms and, by this means, strengthening the capacity of local community groups in lower-income countries is crucial to stamp out communicable diseases. While these appeals are in line with the mantra of humanitarian efforts since the World Humanitarian Summit of 2016, ‘as local as possible, as international as necessary’, there is still limited consensus as to how we can induce and sustain localised sanitary internationalism. With these pressing issues in mind, we would like to invite historians of diplomacy, medicine, IR, empires, and other related fields to turn to the guidance of the past.

The conference at ZZF Potsdam will examine how different types of infrastructural actors (system builders, service and maintenance personnel, users, and activists) created and transformed the mobility, energy, digital, and communication infrastructures, which were essential for the creation of contemporary, highly mobile societies.