“Below the Surface: A New Wave of Interdisciplinary Mediterranean Studies and Environmental Changes” is an international research initiative aiming at creating an interdisciplinary dialogue on the environmental history of the Modern Mediterranean with a focus on its coastal and marine ecosystems. This first workshop wants to explore future research directions and new collaborative efforts across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. 

Argument

“Below the Surface: A New Wave of Interdisciplinary Mediterranean Studies and Environmental Changes” is an international research initiative aiming at creating an interdisciplinary dialogue on the environmental history of the Modern Mediterranean with a focus on its coastal and marine ecosystems. This first workshop wants to explore future research directions and new collaborative efforts across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The Mediterranean Sea has experienced massive transformations over the last two centuries. Substantive demographic growth and urbanization along its coasts, alarming increase of marine pollution, loss of habitats, and the increasingly visible effects of climate change are putting at strain the environmental conditions of the middle Sea. Despite the increasing attention paid to the environmental transformations of the Mediterranean basin and their deep linkages with the social, economic, and political life of the people around the sea, these dimensions remain little explored in modern environmental histories.

Since the 1950s social and cultural anthropologists have sought to find the common denominator of a “Mediterranean identity” in the persistence of traditional cultural forms, particularly moral codes, such as “familism,” “honor,” and “shame.” In the early 1980s, however, the underlying assumptions of these scholars have been sharply criticized, up to the point of denying the very possibility of using the “Mediterranean” as a unit of analysis for understanding the “unity-in-diversity” of societies across the Mediterranean Sea. On the other hand, Mediterranean histories that have taken into account the environment, from the classic work of Fernand Braudel (1949) to the more recent analysis of Horden and Purcell (2000), have stopped at the threshold of urban-industrial modernity. The few contributions that have addressed the large scale environmental changes linked to urban-industrial development have done so either by devoting little attention to coastal and marine ecosystems (McNeill 1992) or within the framework of wide diachronic perspectives (Hughes 2005), which offer only a broad-brush synthesis of complex and differentiated processes.

We believe it is time to go back to the Mediterranean environment and shed light on the interlocked ecological and social processes that have reshaped it in the urban-industrial era, from the nineteenth century to the present. To be effective, this analysis must consider the ecological and geomorphological interdependencies that connect the Mediterranean coastal and marine environments in conjunction with other political, social, and cultural dimensions. A long-term perspective sensitive to cultural and social dimensions can help us understand the trajectories and drivers of the environmental challenges of the present. To avoid any essentialist assumption on the region’s unity, we think it is necessary to start from an empirical perspective based on multi-scalar, regional analyses.

Programme

Thursday, October 18, 2018

09:00-09:30 Welcome and coffee

09:30-12:30 Session 1: Marine science

• Paul Gourret, un océanographe de la République (1859-1903). DANIEL FAGET (TELEMME - Aix-Marseille, France)
• Investigating Marine Invertebrates: The Naples Zoological Station and its Research Program 1873-1913. KATHARINA STEINER (University of Zurich, Switzerland)
• Intimate Ecologies, Nationalist Science? Ruder Boskovic Center forMarine Research. PAMELA BALLINGER (University of Michigan, USA)
• The Military and Economic Construction of a Maritime Space. LINO CAMPRUBÍ (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain)

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

• 11:00-12:30 Discussion

12:30-14:30 Lunch break

14:30-17:30 Session 2: Coastal landscape change

• “A Self- replicating and World-altering Avalanche”: The EnvironmentalHistories of the Columbian Exchange around the Mediterranean Basinand the Port of Genoa, Italy. ROBERT HEARN (University of Nottingham, UK)
• The Making of an Eastern Mediterranean ‘Gateway City’: Izmir in the Nineteenth Century. ONUR INAL (Türkei Europa Zentrum, University of Hamburg, Germany)
• Of Sands and Flowerbeds: Observations of «Vast Climactic Changes» Along the Suez Canal, 1859-1869. LUCIA CARMINATI (University of Arizona, USA)
• Eastern Adriatic: Lifestyle and Landscape Change over the Last Two Centuries. BORNA FUERST-BJELIS (University of Zagreb, Croatia)
• Geohistory of Urbanization Effects on Algiers’ Coastal Plain. NAJET AROUA (École polytechnique d’architecture et d’urbanismed’Alger, Algeria)

16:00-16:30 Coffee break

• 16:30-17:30 Discussion

19:00 Workshop Dinner (Buffet) at Sciences Po Menton

Friday, October 19, 2018

09:30-12:30 Session 3: Pollution

• Phosphates in Gabes and Social Change in Tunisia: Connected Histories. MAX AJL (Cornell University, USA)
• Le Secrétariat permanent pour les problèmes de pollutions industrielles face à la pollution des eaux de l’étang-de-Berre et du golfe de Fos. Un tournant environnemental (1971-1985) ? XAVIER DAUMALIN (TELEMME Aix Marseille, France)
• The ENEA’s Marine Environment Research Centre in La Spezia, Italy: dynamics of its 60 years activity in the EU and Mediterranean context. CARLO PAPUCCI and ROBERTA DELFANTI (ENEA La Spezia, Italy)
• The BLUEMED Project: Setting the Scene for Future Research and Innovation in theMediterranean Sea. MARIO SPROVIERI (Istituto per l’Ambiente Marino Costiero CNR, Italy)

10:30-11:00 Coffee break

• 11:00-12:30 Discussion

12:30-14:30 Lunch break

14:30-17:30 Session 4: Protected areas

• Preservation and Destruction: Coastal Development and Environmental Protection on the Yugoslav Adriatic Seaside Since the 1980s. JOSEF DJORDJEVSKI (University of California San Diego, USA)
• Legal Globalization of Environmental Conservation of Mediterranean Coastal Areas. ITAI APTER (University of Haifa, Israel)
• The Fisheries Communities of the Bay of Monastir in Tunisia: Societal Foundations and Contemporary Realities. RACHA SALLEMI (University of Manouba, Tunisia)

16:00-16:30 Coffee break

• 16:30-17:30 Discussion
• 19:00 Workshop Dinner (Location to be confirmed)

Saturday, October 20, 2018

• 10:00-11:30 Final roundtable discussion
• 11:30-12:00 Coffee break
• 12:00-12:30 Closing address
• 12:30 Closing lunch