Page 20 - Changing Living Spaces

Satosthi Murayama

On the other hand, twenty-seven networking groups are active un-
der the European Society for Social Sciences and History, regardless
of nationality (as of September 2020; European Social Science History
Conference n.d.). These academic activities began in 1996 when the
first academic journals on environmental history appeared. There were
groups that participated from the beginning as academic meeting so-
cieties, groups that originally existed but later disappeared, or new-
ly formed groups. Since academic societies are grouped together with
a social science approach, the direction of today’s research can be seen
in the organization of the groups: Africa, Antiquity, Asia, Criminal
Justice, Culture, Economic History, Education and Childhood, Ethnicity
and Migration, Family and Demography, Global History, Health and
Environment, Labour, Latin America, Material and Consumer Culture,
Medieval, Oral History and Life Histories, Politics, Citizenship and
Nations, Religion, Rural, Science and Technology, Sexuality, Social
Inequality, Spatial and Digital History, Theory and Historiography,
Urban, Women and Gender. These twenty-seven groups may see the rea-
sons and motivations for their ongoing activities in their own method-
ologies and areas of interest, in existing historical research groups, or in
contemporary social issues.
Two world-class academic journals have been published in environ-
mental history research, first developed in the 1960s: Environmental
History (an American journal founded in 1996) and Environment and
History (a European journal founded in 1995). Furthermore, the World
Environmental History Conference has been held once every five years
since 2009. Many panels and sessions have been organized at the con-
ferences of the European Environmental History Society, held biennial-
ly, the American Environmental History Society, held annually, and the
World Environmental History Society. There have been, of course, various
trends in research themes.
Considering the different themes that had been addressed to date, we
came up with sixty-five keywords to cover as many topics as possible.
These keywords can be found in table 1, where five or six sub-items (key-
words) are provided under each overhead item: (1) Animals, (2) Plants, (3)
Microorganisms, (4) Water, (5) Air, (6) Land, (7) Disasters, (8) Foods, (9)
Waste, (10) Humans. The fifty-five keywords and ten overhead items as
keywords amount to sixty-five keywords. We also kept in mind the wide
range of socio-economic history, geography, meteorology, and other relat-
ed academic journals that cannot be listed herein.

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