[ Call for Papers | Applications ]

SOYUZ, the Post-Communist Cultural Studies Interest Group, invites paper proposals and, for the first time, poster proposals, for its 2006 meeting, to be held March 3-5, 2006, at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. The Main Topic will be:

Walls and Bridges: Refiguring "Socialist" and "Postsocialist" Spaces in a Deterritorializing World

The Soyuz symposium will be an intimate forum where scholars (including graduate students, junior faculty, and senior faculty) from across the world can exchange ideas and engage in dialogue.
A detailled Call for Papers was published.
The 2006 Soyuz Symposium will focus on the deterritorialization of postsocialism and invites papers and posters that propose new ethnographic, theoretical, and methodological models for configuring the spaces and places of postsocialist life. Although categories such as "socialism", "late socialism", and "postsocialism" continue to be central to studies of state socialist societies, particularly in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, critics have argued that over-reliance on these categories has produced a sense of geographic, ethnographic, and methodological isolationism. As a result, boundaries created by uncritical application of the concepts of socialism and postsocialism may have prevented analysts from hearing the perspectives of scholars and informants who are positioned differently within these conceptual geographies.

Taking cues from recent globalization studies of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, this Symposium challenges participants to map out new conceptual frameworks that contest, query, or reject the traditional binary categories of socialism and postsocialism. In particular, we are interested in ethnographic work that attends carefully to local discourses of locality, translocality, and globality as alternatives to, or critical engagements with, traditional notions of socialism and postsocialism. Possible questions to consider include: To what extent is it still legitimate to propose a geography of socialism/postsocialism? How do the critical lessons from globalization studies help socialist/postsocialist scholars rethink the categories and boundaries that define and constitute our field sites and our scholarly conversations? Where are the borders, centers, and peripheries of socialism/postsocialism in a global, deterritorialized world, and who are our interlocutors? How do global technologies create, transform, or eliminate socialist/postsocialist communities? What do methodologies from globalization research (multi-sited fieldwork, global commodity chains, virtual ethnography, etc.) contribute to studies of socialism/postsocialism and to new research alliances?

Proposed papers and posters should be based on ethnographic research in a socialist or postsocialist society (please specify if you are proposing a paper, a poster, or you have no preference). Presentations and posters may come from any discipline (anthropology, sociology, folklore, political science, history, literary studies, etc.), but must combine solid ethnographic evidence with theoretical analysis. Suggested length for proposals is 200-400 words.

Please send proposals and a brief c.v. to Professor William Graves (wgraves(AT)bryant.edu) and Professor Melissa Caldwell (lissa(AT)ucsc.edu) by December 1, 2005. Decisions will be made and notification sent out in early January 2006.