Short report on ESSHC 2002

With about 225 sessions and about 900 participants from 50 different countries the fourth ESSHC is a successful event.

Participants came from all over the world. 75 % of the participants come from Europe ( Benelux countries 17.5 %, North West Europe 10%, Central Europe 12%, Eastern-Europe almost 6%, Southern Europe over 13% and the UK and Ireland over 15%). Almost 19% of all participants come from USA and Canada, 0.7 % from Australia and New Zealand, 1.5 % from Latin America, 1.7 % from Asia and 0.7 % from Africa.

There are 29 networks and although we tried to spread the sessions more evenly over the networks, we did not quite succeed. We started out by limiting the number of sessions to 15 as discussed on the business meeting 2000, but this resulted in less sessions altogether, so we allowed the larger networks to extend this number. Big networks are as before: Ethnicity and Migration, Family and Demography, Social Inequality and Labour.

Some developments are very encouraging:

• Antiquity is back with a new chair and is doing very well this year.
• Gender is all over the networks and so are themes like Culture, Economics and Ethnicity and Migration, all signs of the integration of research.
• Several sessions are co-organized by two networks, also a good sign of integration.

For Health and Technology no new chairs could be found. This resulted in only one network session for Health and three for Technology, but when we look at the related sessions in other networks both topics are well represented. New network chairs should be able to make these networks do very well next time.

All in all the ESSHC 2002 is well spread in topics: geographically as well as in time. This is a continuation of a trend.

More information on:

• Some pictures of the ESSHC 2002 in progress
• Statement of accounts ESSHC 2002