Programme :
Presentations by Streams
A Victory for Ukraine: International context and implications
Energy politics
Between Peripheries and Frontiers: Moral Communities and Historical Imagination on the Social Margins
The past two decades have witnessed a powerful return of geographic and spatial imaginaries as well as categories such as ‘peripheries’ and ‘margins’ as sites for theorizing nation and community-building. These regions and territories—whether literal or metaphorical—are understood as capable of producing insights that counterbalance hegemonic narratives stemming from the metropolis or centre. This panel focuses on emic and local perceptions of peripherality, asking how individuals relegated to geographic and/or social margins have long challenged these classifications and divisions through local tropes of righteousness, the heroic past, and honor. These vernacular moralities and historical imaginaries play a central role in mediating belonging and collective identities, while enabling communities to make claims on symbolic and material resources otherwise reserved for historical-cultural hubs or monopolized by absolute and relative elites. History knows many examples of ‘backwater’ regions that became frontiers for new utopias, while erstwhile outlier groups came to be viewed as guardians of national traditions or bearers of radical moral imaginaries promising to transform society. How does the designation of a place as ‘an outpost,’ ‘heartland,’ or ‘backwater’ change over time? How do competing national and political projects reshape local identities, communal boundaries, and life-worlds? What happens when utopian projects collapse and ‘pioneers’ become ‘backwoodsmen,’ ‘provincials,’ or simply ‘survivors’? How are the labels of ‘marginality’ and ‘backwardness’ subverted to assert cultural authenticity and moral virtue? How are belonging and community boundaries (re)negotiated in social and geographical peripheries? And what role do changing ideologies or constructions of ‘the cosmopolitan centre’ play in relation to these meaning-making processes?
The Many Legacies of Antisemitism
Art and Culture Post Stalin
Economic and Industrial Exchanges During and After the Cold War
Reconsidering the Political in Soviet History
This panel is comprised of papers forming part of a 2025 Europe-Asia Studies Special Issue based on the first-ever Conference of Political Historians of the Post-War Soviet Union, held at the University of Glasgow in June 2022. The special, and these papers, are designed to foreground a ‘return to political history’ in the study of the USSR and its constituent republics. These papers focus on the tension between the ‘push’ of the recurring power struggles and instability that characterised the post-Stalin period, and the ‘pull’ of political debates within and among the Soviet republics in Ukraine, Latvia, and Belarus. As Soviet politics were fundamentally linked to personalities, this panel ties together the issues of succession, high politics/rivalries, and the roles of key Soviet political personalities with a paper about Ekaterina Furtseva.
Political developments in Belarus before and after 2020: the role of civil society, the opposition and the EU
Vanished Histories/Displaced Communities. Gender Perspective and Centre-Periphery Dynamics in Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Creative Communities
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project, "Vanished Histories / Displaced Communities". Our aim is to explore how contemporary discourses and practices of inequality have deep-rooted origins in earlier processes and to unearth marginalized, dislodged and forgotten communities. The overarching goal of this project is to deconstruct the invisible, hidden and insular structures of Soviet and post-Soviet colonial modernities.
In this panel, we will examine diverse ways that this dynamics manifested itself in late Soviet and early Russian local professional and mass communities. These groups often existed outside of the capital and were actively engaged in creative fields, such as craft and design, fashion, audiovisual aesthetics, and unofficial photography. By paying attention to non-verbal media and material cultures we aim to visualise how the country swung back and forth, oscillating between liberal and conservative trends which were positioned on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum.
The projects created within these communities will be analyzed from three distinct perspectives:
Gender-related: we will explore how social stereotypes and gender roles were reflected in the objects of material and visual culture.
Regional: we will investigate how national and regional identities found expression in design and advertising and which tools were used to govern center-peripherial relationships.
Temporal: we will consider how remembering and acknowledging the past played a role in envisioning and creating the future within these communities.
In addition to these analytical viewpoints, the papers will examine the institutional dimension of these processes. This involves understanding which organizational forms were involved in the construction and deconstruction of hierarchies.
Nagorno-Karabakh
The Eighteenth-century Linguistic and Religious Hybridity in the Balkans: The Sermons against Witches and Sorceresses
The panel discusses the cultural and linguistic hybridity which characterises the didactic sermons produced in the eighteenth-century Balkan Slavonic milieu. It focuses on the collection of works against sorcery and magic practices, written by Josef Bradati (d.ca.1789), a monk from Rila Monastery. The papers examine the intricate religious hybridity presented in the sermons, in which local women-healers are stigmatised as the key agent in the deviation from Orthodoxy. The panel explores the linguistic conceptualisation of the woman and womanhood seen through the critical prism of the Christian priests, the terminology designating magic practices and their agents in these sermons, and the complexity of the language and the sources used to produce them.
Re-telling stories of the Central and East European Jews from transnational, translocal and transmedia perspectives
The aim of the panel is to discuss various ways of re-telling stories of the Central and East European Jews in cinema and literature, from transnational, translocal and transmedia perspectives. Analysis of selected fiction and documentary films, novels and (auto)biographical writings will allow to explore visible/ invisible, forgotten/ not-yet-remembered histories of individual people and of Jewish communities. In the East-Central European context – a region fraught with overlapping memories - the idea of re-telling stories comes together with a need of theoretical and methodological reflections on (trans)nationality, (trans)locality and interconnectivity of media.
Contemporary post-Soviet necropolitics and necroaesthetics
The worldwide death toll, boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the most recent phase in the Middle East conflict, invites a discussion whether there is such a thing as a national concept of death. The papers in this panel approach the issue through, on the one hand, late Soviet and post-Soviet (Russian) countercultural sources, such as the legacy of the Iuzhinskii circle and Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevism. On the other, the symbolic appeal of the (un)dead, apparent in reinvigorated accusations of zombification following the outbreak and intensification of the war in Ukraine, point to anxieties about contagion and the presumed power of propaganda.
Trust and New Literary Forms
As the literary histories of multiple languages and cultures underpin, experimentations with literary forms, genres, modes of writing and mechanisms of literary distribution often result from a feeling of doubt towards established literary norms. In turn, such experimentations cause contradictory responses: feelings such as enthusiasm, as well as suspicion; attitudes of hope, but also scepticism; visions of the future which are, at times, optimistic and, at others, pessimistic. Put simply, literary experimentation is a matter of trust. Annette Baier’s definition of trust as a three-place predicate (A entrusts B with C which is, in turn, valuable to A) suggests that the study of trust is essentially the study of objects, concepts, and beliefs which are of value to a given person, a community or a society at a given moment in time and space; but also, of the structures and mechanisms that exist to provide care for them. Based on the above definition, the three papers in this panel use trust as a conceptual framework to explore how the literary experimentation in four contemporary case studies – Katja Petrowskaja’s book Maybe Esther (Vielleicht Esther, 2014), Evgenii Gornyi’s digital project Others’ Words (Chuzhye slova, 2001), Roman Prokofiev’s Zvezdnaia Krov'-5. Vechnost’ and Evgenii Gartzevich’s Otmorozhennyi – serves to reinvent the cultural work that literature, authors, readers and institutions could do in order to provide care for what, according to these works, is of value in the current moment.
Stand-up Comedy
Finding their place: communities and the future
New approaches to the military history of the Russian Civil War
A Victory for Ukraine: International context and implications
Energy politics
The Many Legacies of Antisemitism
Art and Culture Post Stalin
Economic and Industrial Exchanges During and After the Cold War
Reconsidering the Political in Soviet History
This panel is comprised of papers forming part of a 2025 Europe-Asia Studies Special Issue based on the first-ever Conference of Political Historians of the Post-War Soviet Union, held at the University of Glasgow in June 2022. The special, and these papers, are designed to foreground a ‘return to political history’ in the study of the USSR and its constituent republics. These papers focus on the tension between the ‘push’ of the recurring power struggles and instability that characterised the post-Stalin period, and the ‘pull’ of political debates within and among the Soviet republics in Ukraine, Latvia, and Belarus. As Soviet politics were fundamentally linked to personalities, this panel ties together the issues of succession, high politics/rivalries, and the roles of key Soviet political personalities with a paper about Ekaterina Furtseva.
Political developments in Belarus before and after 2020: the role of civil society, the opposition and the EU
Vanished Histories/Displaced Communities. Gender Perspective and Centre-Periphery Dynamics in Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Creative Communities
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project, "Vanished Histories / Displaced Communities". Our aim is to explore how contemporary discourses and practices of inequality have deep-rooted origins in earlier processes and to unearth marginalized, dislodged and forgotten communities. The overarching goal of this project is to deconstruct the invisible, hidden and insular structures of Soviet and post-Soviet colonial modernities.
In this panel, we will examine diverse ways that this dynamics manifested itself in late Soviet and early Russian local professional and mass communities. These groups often existed outside of the capital and were actively engaged in creative fields, such as craft and design, fashion, audiovisual aesthetics, and unofficial photography. By paying attention to non-verbal media and material cultures we aim to visualise how the country swung back and forth, oscillating between liberal and conservative trends which were positioned on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum.
The projects created within these communities will be analyzed from three distinct perspectives:
Gender-related: we will explore how social stereotypes and gender roles were reflected in the objects of material and visual culture.
Regional: we will investigate how national and regional identities found expression in design and advertising and which tools were used to govern center-peripherial relationships.
Temporal: we will consider how remembering and acknowledging the past played a role in envisioning and creating the future within these communities.
In addition to these analytical viewpoints, the papers will examine the institutional dimension of these processes. This involves understanding which organizational forms were involved in the construction and deconstruction of hierarchies.
Nagorno-Karabakh
Finding their place: communities and the future
Between Peripheries and Frontiers: Moral Communities and Historical Imagination on the Social Margins
The past two decades have witnessed a powerful return of geographic and spatial imaginaries as well as categories such as ‘peripheries’ and ‘margins’ as sites for theorizing nation and community-building. These regions and territories—whether literal or metaphorical—are understood as capable of producing insights that counterbalance hegemonic narratives stemming from the metropolis or centre. This panel focuses on emic and local perceptions of peripherality, asking how individuals relegated to geographic and/or social margins have long challenged these classifications and divisions through local tropes of righteousness, the heroic past, and honor. These vernacular moralities and historical imaginaries play a central role in mediating belonging and collective identities, while enabling communities to make claims on symbolic and material resources otherwise reserved for historical-cultural hubs or monopolized by absolute and relative elites. History knows many examples of ‘backwater’ regions that became frontiers for new utopias, while erstwhile outlier groups came to be viewed as guardians of national traditions or bearers of radical moral imaginaries promising to transform society. How does the designation of a place as ‘an outpost,’ ‘heartland,’ or ‘backwater’ change over time? How do competing national and political projects reshape local identities, communal boundaries, and life-worlds? What happens when utopian projects collapse and ‘pioneers’ become ‘backwoodsmen,’ ‘provincials,’ or simply ‘survivors’? How are the labels of ‘marginality’ and ‘backwardness’ subverted to assert cultural authenticity and moral virtue? How are belonging and community boundaries (re)negotiated in social and geographical peripheries? And what role do changing ideologies or constructions of ‘the cosmopolitan centre’ play in relation to these meaning-making processes?
The Eighteenth-century Linguistic and Religious Hybridity in the Balkans: The Sermons against Witches and Sorceresses
The panel discusses the cultural and linguistic hybridity which characterises the didactic sermons produced in the eighteenth-century Balkan Slavonic milieu. It focuses on the collection of works against sorcery and magic practices, written by Josef Bradati (d.ca.1789), a monk from Rila Monastery. The papers examine the intricate religious hybridity presented in the sermons, in which local women-healers are stigmatised as the key agent in the deviation from Orthodoxy. The panel explores the linguistic conceptualisation of the woman and womanhood seen through the critical prism of the Christian priests, the terminology designating magic practices and their agents in these sermons, and the complexity of the language and the sources used to produce them.
Re-telling stories of the Central and East European Jews from transnational, translocal and transmedia perspectives
The aim of the panel is to discuss various ways of re-telling stories of the Central and East European Jews in cinema and literature, from transnational, translocal and transmedia perspectives. Analysis of selected fiction and documentary films, novels and (auto)biographical writings will allow to explore visible/ invisible, forgotten/ not-yet-remembered histories of individual people and of Jewish communities. In the East-Central European context – a region fraught with overlapping memories - the idea of re-telling stories comes together with a need of theoretical and methodological reflections on (trans)nationality, (trans)locality and interconnectivity of media.
Trust and New Literary Forms
As the literary histories of multiple languages and cultures underpin, experimentations with literary forms, genres, modes of writing and mechanisms of literary distribution often result from a feeling of doubt towards established literary norms. In turn, such experimentations cause contradictory responses: feelings such as enthusiasm, as well as suspicion; attitudes of hope, but also scepticism; visions of the future which are, at times, optimistic and, at others, pessimistic. Put simply, literary experimentation is a matter of trust. Annette Baier’s definition of trust as a three-place predicate (A entrusts B with C which is, in turn, valuable to A) suggests that the study of trust is essentially the study of objects, concepts, and beliefs which are of value to a given person, a community or a society at a given moment in time and space; but also, of the structures and mechanisms that exist to provide care for them. Based on the above definition, the three papers in this panel use trust as a conceptual framework to explore how the literary experimentation in four contemporary case studies – Katja Petrowskaja’s book Maybe Esther (Vielleicht Esther, 2014), Evgenii Gornyi’s digital project Others’ Words (Chuzhye slova, 2001), Roman Prokofiev’s Zvezdnaia Krov'-5. Vechnost’ and Evgenii Gartzevich’s Otmorozhennyi – serves to reinvent the cultural work that literature, authors, readers and institutions could do in order to provide care for what, according to these works, is of value in the current moment.
Stand-up Comedy
New approaches to the military history of the Russian Civil War
A Victory for Ukraine: International context and implications
Energy politics
The Many Legacies of Antisemitism
Art and Culture Post Stalin
Economic and Industrial Exchanges During and After the Cold War
Reconsidering the Political in Soviet History
This panel is comprised of papers forming part of a 2025 Europe-Asia Studies Special Issue based on the first-ever Conference of Political Historians of the Post-War Soviet Union, held at the University of Glasgow in June 2022. The special, and these papers, are designed to foreground a ‘return to political history’ in the study of the USSR and its constituent republics. These papers focus on the tension between the ‘push’ of the recurring power struggles and instability that characterised the post-Stalin period, and the ‘pull’ of political debates within and among the Soviet republics in Ukraine, Latvia, and Belarus. As Soviet politics were fundamentally linked to personalities, this panel ties together the issues of succession, high politics/rivalries, and the roles of key Soviet political personalities with a paper about Ekaterina Furtseva.
Political developments in Belarus before and after 2020: the role of civil society, the opposition and the EU
Vanished Histories/Displaced Communities. Gender Perspective and Centre-Periphery Dynamics in Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Creative Communities
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project, "Vanished Histories / Displaced Communities". Our aim is to explore how contemporary discourses and practices of inequality have deep-rooted origins in earlier processes and to unearth marginalized, dislodged and forgotten communities. The overarching goal of this project is to deconstruct the invisible, hidden and insular structures of Soviet and post-Soviet colonial modernities.
In this panel, we will examine diverse ways that this dynamics manifested itself in late Soviet and early Russian local professional and mass communities. These groups often existed outside of the capital and were actively engaged in creative fields, such as craft and design, fashion, audiovisual aesthetics, and unofficial photography. By paying attention to non-verbal media and material cultures we aim to visualise how the country swung back and forth, oscillating between liberal and conservative trends which were positioned on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum.
The projects created within these communities will be analyzed from three distinct perspectives:
Gender-related: we will explore how social stereotypes and gender roles were reflected in the objects of material and visual culture.
Regional: we will investigate how national and regional identities found expression in design and advertising and which tools were used to govern center-peripherial relationships.
Temporal: we will consider how remembering and acknowledging the past played a role in envisioning and creating the future within these communities.
In addition to these analytical viewpoints, the papers will examine the institutional dimension of these processes. This involves understanding which organizational forms were involved in the construction and deconstruction of hierarchies.
Nagorno-Karabakh
Contemporary post-Soviet necropolitics and necroaesthetics
The worldwide death toll, boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the most recent phase in the Middle East conflict, invites a discussion whether there is such a thing as a national concept of death. The papers in this panel approach the issue through, on the one hand, late Soviet and post-Soviet (Russian) countercultural sources, such as the legacy of the Iuzhinskii circle and Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevism. On the other, the symbolic appeal of the (un)dead, apparent in reinvigorated accusations of zombification following the outbreak and intensification of the war in Ukraine, point to anxieties about contagion and the presumed power of propaganda.
Finding their place: communities and the future
Between Peripheries and Frontiers: Moral Communities and Historical Imagination on the Social Margins
The past two decades have witnessed a powerful return of geographic and spatial imaginaries as well as categories such as ‘peripheries’ and ‘margins’ as sites for theorizing nation and community-building. These regions and territories—whether literal or metaphorical—are understood as capable of producing insights that counterbalance hegemonic narratives stemming from the metropolis or centre. This panel focuses on emic and local perceptions of peripherality, asking how individuals relegated to geographic and/or social margins have long challenged these classifications and divisions through local tropes of righteousness, the heroic past, and honor. These vernacular moralities and historical imaginaries play a central role in mediating belonging and collective identities, while enabling communities to make claims on symbolic and material resources otherwise reserved for historical-cultural hubs or monopolized by absolute and relative elites. History knows many examples of ‘backwater’ regions that became frontiers for new utopias, while erstwhile outlier groups came to be viewed as guardians of national traditions or bearers of radical moral imaginaries promising to transform society. How does the designation of a place as ‘an outpost,’ ‘heartland,’ or ‘backwater’ change over time? How do competing national and political projects reshape local identities, communal boundaries, and life-worlds? What happens when utopian projects collapse and ‘pioneers’ become ‘backwoodsmen,’ ‘provincials,’ or simply ‘survivors’? How are the labels of ‘marginality’ and ‘backwardness’ subverted to assert cultural authenticity and moral virtue? How are belonging and community boundaries (re)negotiated in social and geographical peripheries? And what role do changing ideologies or constructions of ‘the cosmopolitan centre’ play in relation to these meaning-making processes?
The Eighteenth-century Linguistic and Religious Hybridity in the Balkans: The Sermons against Witches and Sorceresses
The panel discusses the cultural and linguistic hybridity which characterises the didactic sermons produced in the eighteenth-century Balkan Slavonic milieu. It focuses on the collection of works against sorcery and magic practices, written by Josef Bradati (d.ca.1789), a monk from Rila Monastery. The papers examine the intricate religious hybridity presented in the sermons, in which local women-healers are stigmatised as the key agent in the deviation from Orthodoxy. The panel explores the linguistic conceptualisation of the woman and womanhood seen through the critical prism of the Christian priests, the terminology designating magic practices and their agents in these sermons, and the complexity of the language and the sources used to produce them.
Re-telling stories of the Central and East European Jews from transnational, translocal and transmedia perspectives
The aim of the panel is to discuss various ways of re-telling stories of the Central and East European Jews in cinema and literature, from transnational, translocal and transmedia perspectives. Analysis of selected fiction and documentary films, novels and (auto)biographical writings will allow to explore visible/ invisible, forgotten/ not-yet-remembered histories of individual people and of Jewish communities. In the East-Central European context – a region fraught with overlapping memories - the idea of re-telling stories comes together with a need of theoretical and methodological reflections on (trans)nationality, (trans)locality and interconnectivity of media.
Trust and New Literary Forms
As the literary histories of multiple languages and cultures underpin, experimentations with literary forms, genres, modes of writing and mechanisms of literary distribution often result from a feeling of doubt towards established literary norms. In turn, such experimentations cause contradictory responses: feelings such as enthusiasm, as well as suspicion; attitudes of hope, but also scepticism; visions of the future which are, at times, optimistic and, at others, pessimistic. Put simply, literary experimentation is a matter of trust. Annette Baier’s definition of trust as a three-place predicate (A entrusts B with C which is, in turn, valuable to A) suggests that the study of trust is essentially the study of objects, concepts, and beliefs which are of value to a given person, a community or a society at a given moment in time and space; but also, of the structures and mechanisms that exist to provide care for them. Based on the above definition, the three papers in this panel use trust as a conceptual framework to explore how the literary experimentation in four contemporary case studies – Katja Petrowskaja’s book Maybe Esther (Vielleicht Esther, 2014), Evgenii Gornyi’s digital project Others’ Words (Chuzhye slova, 2001), Roman Prokofiev’s Zvezdnaia Krov'-5. Vechnost’ and Evgenii Gartzevich’s Otmorozhennyi – serves to reinvent the cultural work that literature, authors, readers and institutions could do in order to provide care for what, according to these works, is of value in the current moment.
Stand-up Comedy
New approaches to the military history of the Russian Civil War
A Victory for Ukraine: International context and implications
The Many Legacies of Antisemitism
Art and Culture Post Stalin
Economic and Industrial Exchanges During and After the Cold War
Reconsidering the Political in Soviet History
This panel is comprised of papers forming part of a 2025 Europe-Asia Studies Special Issue based on the first-ever Conference of Political Historians of the Post-War Soviet Union, held at the University of Glasgow in June 2022. The special, and these papers, are designed to foreground a ‘return to political history’ in the study of the USSR and its constituent republics. These papers focus on the tension between the ‘push’ of the recurring power struggles and instability that characterised the post-Stalin period, and the ‘pull’ of political debates within and among the Soviet republics in Ukraine, Latvia, and Belarus. As Soviet politics were fundamentally linked to personalities, this panel ties together the issues of succession, high politics/rivalries, and the roles of key Soviet political personalities with a paper about Ekaterina Furtseva.
Vanished Histories/Displaced Communities. Gender Perspective and Centre-Periphery Dynamics in Late Soviet and Early Post-Soviet Creative Communities
This panel is part of a larger interdisciplinary collective project, "Vanished Histories / Displaced Communities". Our aim is to explore how contemporary discourses and practices of inequality have deep-rooted origins in earlier processes and to unearth marginalized, dislodged and forgotten communities. The overarching goal of this project is to deconstruct the invisible, hidden and insular structures of Soviet and post-Soviet colonial modernities.
In this panel, we will examine diverse ways that this dynamics manifested itself in late Soviet and early Russian local professional and mass communities. These groups often existed outside of the capital and were actively engaged in creative fields, such as craft and design, fashion, audiovisual aesthetics, and unofficial photography. By paying attention to non-verbal media and material cultures we aim to visualise how the country swung back and forth, oscillating between liberal and conservative trends which were positioned on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum.
The projects created within these communities will be analyzed from three distinct perspectives:
Gender-related: we will explore how social stereotypes and gender roles were reflected in the objects of material and visual culture.
Regional: we will investigate how national and regional identities found expression in design and advertising and which tools were used to govern center-peripherial relationships.
Temporal: we will consider how remembering and acknowledging the past played a role in envisioning and creating the future within these communities.
In addition to these analytical viewpoints, the papers will examine the institutional dimension of these processes. This involves understanding which organizational forms were involved in the construction and deconstruction of hierarchies.
Art and Culture Post Stalin
The Eighteenth-century Linguistic and Religious Hybridity in the Balkans: The Sermons against Witches and Sorceresses
The panel discusses the cultural and linguistic hybridity which characterises the didactic sermons produced in the eighteenth-century Balkan Slavonic milieu. It focuses on the collection of works against sorcery and magic practices, written by Josef Bradati (d.ca.1789), a monk from Rila Monastery. The papers examine the intricate religious hybridity presented in the sermons, in which local women-healers are stigmatised as the key agent in the deviation from Orthodoxy. The panel explores the linguistic conceptualisation of the woman and womanhood seen through the critical prism of the Christian priests, the terminology designating magic practices and their agents in these sermons, and the complexity of the language and the sources used to produce them.
Russian Military, Violent Entrepreneurs and Political Repercussions
The panel will look into the factors driving internal changes within the Russian military, private military companies and other armed groups as well as political repercussion of tensions between ‘violent entrepreneurs’ during the war in Ukraine. How developments in the battlefield affect reconfigurations within the Russian armed groups? Do these developments render Russian authorities more vulnerable or more secure and what are the links between the siloviki, regime dynamics and domestic political support for the war? What can be said about the organizational behavior of these entrepreneurs? The panelists will rely on the variety of data and methodologies that will shed more light on how violent entrepreneurs and army ‘transmit’ the war back in Russia as well as the long-term implications for the regime resilience.
Russian foreign policy (1) – global engagement
Resisting Imperialism through Decolonisation
Human Rights and Democracy in Wartime Ukraine
A wide range of human rights are being violated during the war in Ukraine. We are called upon to rethink the mechanisms of their protection and guarantees in various spheres – from social dialogue and labor rights to European integration and women's rights, from the international dimension of human rights to the instruments of participatory and representative democracy – to outline the challenges and prospects for the post-war recovery of Ukraine.
Poland – policy and politics
Czechoslovakia and Poland: Cultural and Political Histories
Imperial Russia in the Long 19th Century
Soviet Culture and Cold War Politics
Parliaments in Socialist Federations: Institutional Designs and Functions of Soviet, Czechoslovak, and Yugoslav Assemblies, 1968–1987
Comparing the supreme state assemblies in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, this panel explores the designs and functions of parliaments in socialist federations. The Soviet and Czechoslovak ruling communist parties embraced a universalist approach to modernity by introducing “parliaments” rather than unique socialist institutions. Initially, this was also the case in Yugoslavia, but in 1974, the Communist leadership introduced a new, complex system of representation that significantly differed from both the liberal template of a parliament and the vernacular versions of the institution in other socialist states. Despite these different designs, the functions of the three socialist federal assemblies were largely similar and predominantly focused on propagandistic and symbolic objectives. These objectives included descriptive representation of different national and social groups and the integration of a single political community in a top-down manner.
Queering and gender in film and media
Besieged by the Future 1: In the Shadow of Military Strategy
Russia's war against Ukraine has prompted a renewed debate about the limitations of social sciences and humanities to supply decision makers with predictive knowledge that is deemed necessary for action. However, these forms of criticism disregard the performative role of the anticipatory knowledge as well as the social contexts in which this type of knowledge operates. At the same time there is an ongoing boom of historical and critical studies of future making practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, where scholars explore a wide range of practices of making sense of the future with the help of science, from literary fiction to computer modeling, from everyday practices to business consulting. This colloquium seeks to gather scholars representing different disciplines to take stock on the research into the diverse forms of future-making in the region and to consider their political impacts.
Cultural map of Ukraine. How has value been changed through the Russian invasion?
Russia's war on Ukraine
Teaching of Slavonic Languages
Lithuanian Society in Transition
This panel focuses on the impact of social transition on the cohort of Lithuanians born between 1980 and 2000. Since 1990, Lithuania has experienced radical social change from socialism to Western-style liberal democracy. Based on an extensive set of biographical interviews, individual papers examine the social characteristics of this cohort and their adaptive behaviours, including attitudinal change. The main focus of the panel is to determine a generational identity for this cohort.
Badly Behaved Pasts: On Monuments, Graffiti, Film, and Plays that 'refuse to go'
This panel will discuss the 'stickiness' of memory across various forms of artistic media. We refer here to memories that 'refuse to go', partially due to their form of transmission (eg. 'sticky sites' such as graffiti), and others due to artistic domino-effects (e.g. play adaptations that inspired yet more adaptations). Kitty Brandon-James, from UCL School of Slavonic Studies, discusses the re-appropriation of monuments as sites of resistance, and new techniques employed by young artists who challenge and corroborate previous orthodoxies. Alma Prelec, from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, analyses commemoration of the Spanish Civil War in the Former Yugoslavia, through particular focus on the play 'Ay, Carmela'. Elisa Bailey, from Lord Cultural Resources (Toronto, Canada, although based in Spain), explores three case studies from Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine, that draw out the ongoing oscillation between contesting being coopted by hegemonic narratives.
The Metamodern Turn in Russian Culture: Affect, Ambiguity and Recycling
Since the early 2010s a new sensibility has emerged in Russia's cultural mainstream, neither quite modern nor fully postmodern, but rather characterised by a constant oscillation between these two. Some scholars have called this new practice 'metamodern': with, between and beyond the (post)modern. Conscious of the impossibility of grand narratives but striving to create one nonetheless, metamodern art is characterised by ambiguity, affect, recycling of the (Soviet) past, as well as oscillations between irony and seriousness, patriotism and protest, endorsement and criticism of the status quo, political engagement and apoliticism. In this panel, we therefore discuss the main features of this new sensibility, analyse some of its most representative visual and musical artefacts, as well as connecting them to the broader sociopolitical picture.
Women's Rights in 20th Century Eastern Europe
Russian Military, Violent Entrepreneurs and Political Repercussions
The panel will look into the factors driving internal changes within the Russian military, private military companies and other armed groups as well as political repercussion of tensions between ‘violent entrepreneurs’ during the war in Ukraine. How developments in the battlefield affect reconfigurations within the Russian armed groups? Do these developments render Russian authorities more vulnerable or more secure and what are the links between the siloviki, regime dynamics and domestic political support for the war? What can be said about the organizational behavior of these entrepreneurs? The panelists will rely on the variety of data and methodologies that will shed more light on how violent entrepreneurs and army ‘transmit’ the war back in Russia as well as the long-term implications for the regime resilience.
Russian foreign policy (1) – global engagement
Resisting Imperialism through Decolonisation
Human Rights and Democracy in Wartime Ukraine
A wide range of human rights are being violated during the war in Ukraine. We are called upon to rethink the mechanisms of their protection and guarantees in various spheres – from social dialogue and labor rights to European integration and women's rights, from the international dimension of human rights to the instruments of participatory and representative democracy – to outline the challenges and prospects for the post-war recovery of Ukraine.
Poland – policy and politics
Czechoslovakia and Poland: Cultural and Political Histories
Imperial Russia in the Long 19th Century
Soviet Culture and Cold War Politics
Queering and gender in film and media
Teaching of Slavonic Languages
Badly Behaved Pasts: On Monuments, Graffiti, Film, and Plays that 'refuse to go'
This panel will discuss the 'stickiness' of memory across various forms of artistic media. We refer here to memories that 'refuse to go', partially due to their form of transmission (eg. 'sticky sites' such as graffiti), and others due to artistic domino-effects (e.g. play adaptations that inspired yet more adaptations). Kitty Brandon-James, from UCL School of Slavonic Studies, discusses the re-appropriation of monuments as sites of resistance, and new techniques employed by young artists who challenge and corroborate previous orthodoxies. Alma Prelec, from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, analyses commemoration of the Spanish Civil War in the Former Yugoslavia, through particular focus on the play 'Ay, Carmela'. Elisa Bailey, from Lord Cultural Resources (Toronto, Canada, although based in Spain), explores three case studies from Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine, that draw out the ongoing oscillation between contesting being coopted by hegemonic narratives.
The Metamodern Turn in Russian Culture: Affect, Ambiguity and Recycling
Since the early 2010s a new sensibility has emerged in Russia's cultural mainstream, neither quite modern nor fully postmodern, but rather characterised by a constant oscillation between these two. Some scholars have called this new practice 'metamodern': with, between and beyond the (post)modern. Conscious of the impossibility of grand narratives but striving to create one nonetheless, metamodern art is characterised by ambiguity, affect, recycling of the (Soviet) past, as well as oscillations between irony and seriousness, patriotism and protest, endorsement and criticism of the status quo, political engagement and apoliticism. In this panel, we therefore discuss the main features of this new sensibility, analyse some of its most representative visual and musical artefacts, as well as connecting them to the broader sociopolitical picture.
Parliaments in Socialist Federations: Institutional Designs and Functions of Soviet, Czechoslovak, and Yugoslav Assemblies, 1968–1987
Comparing the supreme state assemblies in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, this panel explores the designs and functions of parliaments in socialist federations. The Soviet and Czechoslovak ruling communist parties embraced a universalist approach to modernity by introducing “parliaments” rather than unique socialist institutions. Initially, this was also the case in Yugoslavia, but in 1974, the Communist leadership introduced a new, complex system of representation that significantly differed from both the liberal template of a parliament and the vernacular versions of the institution in other socialist states. Despite these different designs, the functions of the three socialist federal assemblies were largely similar and predominantly focused on propagandistic and symbolic objectives. These objectives included descriptive representation of different national and social groups and the integration of a single political community in a top-down manner.
Besieged by the Future 1: In the Shadow of Military Strategy
Russia's war against Ukraine has prompted a renewed debate about the limitations of social sciences and humanities to supply decision makers with predictive knowledge that is deemed necessary for action. However, these forms of criticism disregard the performative role of the anticipatory knowledge as well as the social contexts in which this type of knowledge operates. At the same time there is an ongoing boom of historical and critical studies of future making practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, where scholars explore a wide range of practices of making sense of the future with the help of science, from literary fiction to computer modeling, from everyday practices to business consulting. This colloquium seeks to gather scholars representing different disciplines to take stock on the research into the diverse forms of future-making in the region and to consider their political impacts.
Cultural map of Ukraine. How has value been changed through the Russian invasion?
Russia's war on Ukraine
Lithuanian Society in Transition
This panel focuses on the impact of social transition on the cohort of Lithuanians born between 1980 and 2000. Since 1990, Lithuania has experienced radical social change from socialism to Western-style liberal democracy. Based on an extensive set of biographical interviews, individual papers examine the social characteristics of this cohort and their adaptive behaviours, including attitudinal change. The main focus of the panel is to determine a generational identity for this cohort.
Women's Rights in 20th Century Eastern Europe
Russian Military, Violent Entrepreneurs and Political Repercussions
The panel will look into the factors driving internal changes within the Russian military, private military companies and other armed groups as well as political repercussion of tensions between ‘violent entrepreneurs’ during the war in Ukraine. How developments in the battlefield affect reconfigurations within the Russian armed groups? Do these developments render Russian authorities more vulnerable or more secure and what are the links between the siloviki, regime dynamics and domestic political support for the war? What can be said about the organizational behavior of these entrepreneurs? The panelists will rely on the variety of data and methodologies that will shed more light on how violent entrepreneurs and army ‘transmit’ the war back in Russia as well as the long-term implications for the regime resilience.
Russian foreign policy (1) – global engagement
Resisting Imperialism through Decolonisation
Human Rights and Democracy in Wartime Ukraine
A wide range of human rights are being violated during the war in Ukraine. We are called upon to rethink the mechanisms of their protection and guarantees in various spheres – from social dialogue and labor rights to European integration and women's rights, from the international dimension of human rights to the instruments of participatory and representative democracy – to outline the challenges and prospects for the post-war recovery of Ukraine.
Poland – policy and politics
Czechoslovakia and Poland: Cultural and Political Histories
Soviet Culture and Cold War Politics
Queering and gender in film and media
Badly Behaved Pasts: On Monuments, Graffiti, Film, and Plays that 'refuse to go'
This panel will discuss the 'stickiness' of memory across various forms of artistic media. We refer here to memories that 'refuse to go', partially due to their form of transmission (eg. 'sticky sites' such as graffiti), and others due to artistic domino-effects (e.g. play adaptations that inspired yet more adaptations). Kitty Brandon-James, from UCL School of Slavonic Studies, discusses the re-appropriation of monuments as sites of resistance, and new techniques employed by young artists who challenge and corroborate previous orthodoxies. Alma Prelec, from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, analyses commemoration of the Spanish Civil War in the Former Yugoslavia, through particular focus on the play 'Ay, Carmela'. Elisa Bailey, from Lord Cultural Resources (Toronto, Canada, although based in Spain), explores three case studies from Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine, that draw out the ongoing oscillation between contesting being coopted by hegemonic narratives.
The Metamodern Turn in Russian Culture: Affect, Ambiguity and Recycling
Since the early 2010s a new sensibility has emerged in Russia's cultural mainstream, neither quite modern nor fully postmodern, but rather characterised by a constant oscillation between these two. Some scholars have called this new practice 'metamodern': with, between and beyond the (post)modern. Conscious of the impossibility of grand narratives but striving to create one nonetheless, metamodern art is characterised by ambiguity, affect, recycling of the (Soviet) past, as well as oscillations between irony and seriousness, patriotism and protest, endorsement and criticism of the status quo, political engagement and apoliticism. In this panel, we therefore discuss the main features of this new sensibility, analyse some of its most representative visual and musical artefacts, as well as connecting them to the broader sociopolitical picture.
Parliaments in Socialist Federations: Institutional Designs and Functions of Soviet, Czechoslovak, and Yugoslav Assemblies, 1968–1987
Comparing the supreme state assemblies in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, this panel explores the designs and functions of parliaments in socialist federations. The Soviet and Czechoslovak ruling communist parties embraced a universalist approach to modernity by introducing “parliaments” rather than unique socialist institutions. Initially, this was also the case in Yugoslavia, but in 1974, the Communist leadership introduced a new, complex system of representation that significantly differed from both the liberal template of a parliament and the vernacular versions of the institution in other socialist states. Despite these different designs, the functions of the three socialist federal assemblies were largely similar and predominantly focused on propagandistic and symbolic objectives. These objectives included descriptive representation of different national and social groups and the integration of a single political community in a top-down manner.
Teaching of Slavonic Languages
Besieged by the Future 1: In the Shadow of Military Strategy
Russia's war against Ukraine has prompted a renewed debate about the limitations of social sciences and humanities to supply decision makers with predictive knowledge that is deemed necessary for action. However, these forms of criticism disregard the performative role of the anticipatory knowledge as well as the social contexts in which this type of knowledge operates. At the same time there is an ongoing boom of historical and critical studies of future making practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, where scholars explore a wide range of practices of making sense of the future with the help of science, from literary fiction to computer modeling, from everyday practices to business consulting. This colloquium seeks to gather scholars representing different disciplines to take stock on the research into the diverse forms of future-making in the region and to consider their political impacts.
Lithuanian Society in Transition
This panel focuses on the impact of social transition on the cohort of Lithuanians born between 1980 and 2000. Since 1990, Lithuania has experienced radical social change from socialism to Western-style liberal democracy. Based on an extensive set of biographical interviews, individual papers examine the social characteristics of this cohort and their adaptive behaviours, including attitudinal change. The main focus of the panel is to determine a generational identity for this cohort.
Resisting Imperialism through Decolonisation
Human Rights and Democracy in Wartime Ukraine
A wide range of human rights are being violated during the war in Ukraine. We are called upon to rethink the mechanisms of their protection and guarantees in various spheres – from social dialogue and labor rights to European integration and women's rights, from the international dimension of human rights to the instruments of participatory and representative democracy – to outline the challenges and prospects for the post-war recovery of Ukraine.
Poland – policy and politics
Czechoslovakia and Poland: Cultural and Political Histories
Soviet Culture and Cold War Politics
Badly Behaved Pasts: On Monuments, Graffiti, Film, and Plays that 'refuse to go'
This panel will discuss the 'stickiness' of memory across various forms of artistic media. We refer here to memories that 'refuse to go', partially due to their form of transmission (eg. 'sticky sites' such as graffiti), and others due to artistic domino-effects (e.g. play adaptations that inspired yet more adaptations). Kitty Brandon-James, from UCL School of Slavonic Studies, discusses the re-appropriation of monuments as sites of resistance, and new techniques employed by young artists who challenge and corroborate previous orthodoxies. Alma Prelec, from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, analyses commemoration of the Spanish Civil War in the Former Yugoslavia, through particular focus on the play 'Ay, Carmela'. Elisa Bailey, from Lord Cultural Resources (Toronto, Canada, although based in Spain), explores three case studies from Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine, that draw out the ongoing oscillation between contesting being coopted by hegemonic narratives.
The Metamodern Turn in Russian Culture: Affect, Ambiguity and Recycling
Since the early 2010s a new sensibility has emerged in Russia's cultural mainstream, neither quite modern nor fully postmodern, but rather characterised by a constant oscillation between these two. Some scholars have called this new practice 'metamodern': with, between and beyond the (post)modern. Conscious of the impossibility of grand narratives but striving to create one nonetheless, metamodern art is characterised by ambiguity, affect, recycling of the (Soviet) past, as well as oscillations between irony and seriousness, patriotism and protest, endorsement and criticism of the status quo, political engagement and apoliticism. In this panel, we therefore discuss the main features of this new sensibility, analyse some of its most representative visual and musical artefacts, as well as connecting them to the broader sociopolitical picture.
Teaching of Slavonic Languages
Resisting Imperialism through Decolonisation
Czechoslovakia and Poland: Cultural and Political Histories
Soviet Culture and Cold War Politics
Lithuanian Society in Transition
This panel focuses on the impact of social transition on the cohort of Lithuanians born between 1980 and 2000. Since 1990, Lithuania has experienced radical social change from socialism to Western-style liberal democracy. Based on an extensive set of biographical interviews, individual papers examine the social characteristics of this cohort and their adaptive behaviours, including attitudinal change. The main focus of the panel is to determine a generational identity for this cohort.
Political Economy of Illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Understanding illiberalism in CEE requires an analysis of history, economics and politics. This panel brings an historical perspective on illiberal political economy together with more contemporary analysis. Papers explore the interaction of international constraints with domestic choices paying particularly attention to the role of membership of international bodies such as the European Union.
Russian foreign policy (2) – history, imperialism, and symbolism
Identities and discourses – civic, ethnic, and national
Who is Polish - What is Polishness? Practising and challenging language, literature, identity and culture
Empire and the Arts: Objects, Collections, and the Russian Taste for Western Luxury
This panel explores imperial art patronage, elite taste, and tsarist strategies of collecting and display of art and objects during the first half of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on rethinking the effects of empire and its cultural manifestations.
Decolonizing Understanding of Disability in the Baltic and Eastern European Countries
While Eastern Europe and Baltic countries have a rich and complex history, it remains a relatively understudied area in Disability Studies. One of the critical questions is the impact of Soviet ideology on the enforcement of able-bodied norms, the marginalisation of individuals with disabilities, and the perpetuation of invisibility. The doctrine enforced through media, culture, and laws, politics of disability has also left marks on contemporary times. Therefore, it is even more necessary to grapple with these legacies and the progress made in promoting inclusivity and decolonizing disability narratives.
This panel explores disability studies in Baltic and Eastern Europe, providing a unique perspective on the experiences of individuals with disabilities in the region, both past and present. The panel consists of three distinct but interconnected papers that collectively challenge preconceived notions, question traditional narratives, and illuminate the multifaceted nature of disability within the socio-political contexts of these countries. These papers offer a nuanced understanding of disability within the complex socio-political contexts of Baltic and Eastern European countries, spanning different periods and locations.
From Modernity to Degrowth: Environmental Realities and Alternatives from the Socialist Anthropocene
This panel presents research into environmental and economic policies, visions, activism and alternatives from state socialist and post-socialist societies, organized under the theme of the Socialist Anthropocene. Based in the concept of the Anthropocene as an event of human-driven geological change, the Socialist Anthropocene is a distinct, if not wholly discrete, expression of humanity’s will and ability to transform and harness nature in the service of equality, equity, and common solidarity, even when that ability has led to exploitation, violence, and environmental destruction. From Poland’s chemical modernity in the 1960s to contemporary ecosocialisms and their genesis in state socialist nations, our panel seeks in part to understand how growth and productive modernity informed state socialist policies, as well as triggered sharp criticisms from diverse activists seeking a more sustainable relationship with the natural world. We also seek to contextualize degrowth in a longer intellectual and activist genealogy, as well as offer further paths of policies and activism, now and into the future.
Religion and the State since the 19th Century
Anti-Gender Backlash and Feminist Resistance in the Post-Soviet States
The post-Soviet states have witnessed a complex interplay of political, cultural, and societal transformations in recent years, leading to a resurgence of anti-gender equality and anti-feminist discourses. These discourses manifest themselves in various forms, from legislative initiatives limiting reproductive rights and curtailing LGBTQ+ rights to the promotion of traditional gender roles and the rejection of feminist ideologies.
This panel focuses on the following key themes:
Origins of anti-gender equality backlash: What are the historical, political, and cultural factors that have contributed to the rise of anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses in post-Soviet states? How have these discourses evolved over time?
Actors and institutions: How do diverse actors and institutions within post-Soviet states, including governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations, and educational institutions, contribute to or counteract the spread of anti-gender equality and anti-feminist discourses?
Implications for women's rights: How do anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses impact women's rights and gender equality in the region? Are there discernible patterns in terms of policy changes and their effects on women's lives and opportunities?
International dimensions: How do these discourses resonate on the international stage? What implications do they have for regional and global gender equality agendas and human rights initiatives?
Feminist resistance and advocacy: What strategies have emerged for feminist resistance in the face of the backlash? What role do civil society organizations, activists, and academia play in challenging anti-gender discourses and promoting gender equality?
Representation of social and ethnic groups in Soviet and post-Soviet media
Besieged by the Future 2: Embodiments and Aesthetics
Populist Solidarity and the Prospects of Development
This panel explores diverse appeals to, and practices of, solidarity in populist politics. Instead of strict delineation of populism as ideology, style, or a form of politics, we consider populism as an element of any mass mobilization appealing to popular solidarity against the politics of actually or supposedly ruling elites. Such appeals may be grounded in ideas of the past and tradition, shared legacies of state-socialism, romantic nationalism, folk Catholicism, and rural populism. Others may be grounded in new emancipatory movements such as co-operativism, local foodways, and alternative community projects that may or may not invoke populist sentiments explicitly. We suggest that appeals to solidarity is necessary for any feasible and legitimate policy to be applied in countries with deep populist legacies and acts as a possible mobilization of resources for the development of transformative projects. The theme of solidarity can thus help illuminate how the effects of global economic, pandemic, and security crises emerge in reactionary or/and progressive forms of populism. We propose to look at the interplay of several dimensions of mass politics via the lens of solidarity. What forms and patterns of class, ethnic, or status solidarity appeal to populism? What is the major representation of solidarity – who are the people – in particular national cases? With whom exactly the populist solidarity builds unity and whom it divides?
The panel is open to papers inspired by historical-structural perspectives on political economy, as well as to more culturalist approaches to economy and politics. Preference will be given to proposals featuring research in one or more of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It is the intention to proceed to a publication that would highlight the importance of case studies on populist solidarity in democracies emerging after/in a consequence of state-socialism.
Linguistic Perspectives on Slavonic Literary Texts
Media and geopolitical shifts
Memory and Trauma
Czechoslovakian Literature and Culture
Growing Up under Socialism: Soviet Adolescence and Life-Writing
Research on adolescence and teenagehood is an actively developing area, still underrepresented in the history of socialist states. Scholars in this field have primarily focused on children or young adults, with insufficient attention paid to the experiences and practices of the transitional period between these socially recognised states. Our panel aims to, at least partially, fill this gap and explore coming-of-age experiences in socialist societies, focusing on the Soviet Union in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. In our presentations, we are going to dwell on the ideologies surrounding adolescence in the USSR, as well as the diaries of Soviet teenagers and the discursive tools and cultural concepts they used in their life-writing to navigate their journey to adulthood.
Language and Identity
Circulating social and economic values
Political Economy of Illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Understanding illiberalism in CEE requires an analysis of history, economics and politics. This panel brings an historical perspective on illiberal political economy together with more contemporary analysis. Papers explore the interaction of international constraints with domestic choices paying particularly attention to the role of membership of international bodies such as the European Union.
Russian foreign policy (2) – history, imperialism, and symbolism
Identities and discourses – civic, ethnic, and national
Who is Polish - What is Polishness? Practising and challenging language, literature, identity and culture
Empire and the Arts: Objects, Collections, and the Russian Taste for Western Luxury
This panel explores imperial art patronage, elite taste, and tsarist strategies of collecting and display of art and objects during the first half of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on rethinking the effects of empire and its cultural manifestations.
Religion and the State since the 19th Century
Anti-Gender Backlash and Feminist Resistance in the Post-Soviet States
The post-Soviet states have witnessed a complex interplay of political, cultural, and societal transformations in recent years, leading to a resurgence of anti-gender equality and anti-feminist discourses. These discourses manifest themselves in various forms, from legislative initiatives limiting reproductive rights and curtailing LGBTQ+ rights to the promotion of traditional gender roles and the rejection of feminist ideologies.
This panel focuses on the following key themes:
Origins of anti-gender equality backlash: What are the historical, political, and cultural factors that have contributed to the rise of anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses in post-Soviet states? How have these discourses evolved over time?
Actors and institutions: How do diverse actors and institutions within post-Soviet states, including governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations, and educational institutions, contribute to or counteract the spread of anti-gender equality and anti-feminist discourses?
Implications for women's rights: How do anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses impact women's rights and gender equality in the region? Are there discernible patterns in terms of policy changes and their effects on women's lives and opportunities?
International dimensions: How do these discourses resonate on the international stage? What implications do they have for regional and global gender equality agendas and human rights initiatives?
Feminist resistance and advocacy: What strategies have emerged for feminist resistance in the face of the backlash? What role do civil society organizations, activists, and academia play in challenging anti-gender discourses and promoting gender equality?
Representation of social and ethnic groups in Soviet and post-Soviet media
Populist Solidarity and the Prospects of Development
This panel explores diverse appeals to, and practices of, solidarity in populist politics. Instead of strict delineation of populism as ideology, style, or a form of politics, we consider populism as an element of any mass mobilization appealing to popular solidarity against the politics of actually or supposedly ruling elites. Such appeals may be grounded in ideas of the past and tradition, shared legacies of state-socialism, romantic nationalism, folk Catholicism, and rural populism. Others may be grounded in new emancipatory movements such as co-operativism, local foodways, and alternative community projects that may or may not invoke populist sentiments explicitly. We suggest that appeals to solidarity is necessary for any feasible and legitimate policy to be applied in countries with deep populist legacies and acts as a possible mobilization of resources for the development of transformative projects. The theme of solidarity can thus help illuminate how the effects of global economic, pandemic, and security crises emerge in reactionary or/and progressive forms of populism. We propose to look at the interplay of several dimensions of mass politics via the lens of solidarity. What forms and patterns of class, ethnic, or status solidarity appeal to populism? What is the major representation of solidarity – who are the people – in particular national cases? With whom exactly the populist solidarity builds unity and whom it divides?
The panel is open to papers inspired by historical-structural perspectives on political economy, as well as to more culturalist approaches to economy and politics. Preference will be given to proposals featuring research in one or more of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It is the intention to proceed to a publication that would highlight the importance of case studies on populist solidarity in democracies emerging after/in a consequence of state-socialism.
Memory and Trauma
Czechoslovakian Literature and Culture
Circulating social and economic values
Decolonizing Understanding of Disability in the Baltic and Eastern European Countries
While Eastern Europe and Baltic countries have a rich and complex history, it remains a relatively understudied area in Disability Studies. One of the critical questions is the impact of Soviet ideology on the enforcement of able-bodied norms, the marginalisation of individuals with disabilities, and the perpetuation of invisibility. The doctrine enforced through media, culture, and laws, politics of disability has also left marks on contemporary times. Therefore, it is even more necessary to grapple with these legacies and the progress made in promoting inclusivity and decolonizing disability narratives.
This panel explores disability studies in Baltic and Eastern Europe, providing a unique perspective on the experiences of individuals with disabilities in the region, both past and present. The panel consists of three distinct but interconnected papers that collectively challenge preconceived notions, question traditional narratives, and illuminate the multifaceted nature of disability within the socio-political contexts of these countries. These papers offer a nuanced understanding of disability within the complex socio-political contexts of Baltic and Eastern European countries, spanning different periods and locations.
From Modernity to Degrowth: Environmental Realities and Alternatives from the Socialist Anthropocene
This panel presents research into environmental and economic policies, visions, activism and alternatives from state socialist and post-socialist societies, organized under the theme of the Socialist Anthropocene. Based in the concept of the Anthropocene as an event of human-driven geological change, the Socialist Anthropocene is a distinct, if not wholly discrete, expression of humanity’s will and ability to transform and harness nature in the service of equality, equity, and common solidarity, even when that ability has led to exploitation, violence, and environmental destruction. From Poland’s chemical modernity in the 1960s to contemporary ecosocialisms and their genesis in state socialist nations, our panel seeks in part to understand how growth and productive modernity informed state socialist policies, as well as triggered sharp criticisms from diverse activists seeking a more sustainable relationship with the natural world. We also seek to contextualize degrowth in a longer intellectual and activist genealogy, as well as offer further paths of policies and activism, now and into the future.
Besieged by the Future 2: Embodiments and Aesthetics
Linguistic Perspectives on Slavonic Literary Texts
Media and geopolitical shifts
Growing Up under Socialism: Soviet Adolescence and Life-Writing
Research on adolescence and teenagehood is an actively developing area, still underrepresented in the history of socialist states. Scholars in this field have primarily focused on children or young adults, with insufficient attention paid to the experiences and practices of the transitional period between these socially recognised states. Our panel aims to, at least partially, fill this gap and explore coming-of-age experiences in socialist societies, focusing on the Soviet Union in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. In our presentations, we are going to dwell on the ideologies surrounding adolescence in the USSR, as well as the diaries of Soviet teenagers and the discursive tools and cultural concepts they used in their life-writing to navigate their journey to adulthood.
Language and Identity
Political Economy of Illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Understanding illiberalism in CEE requires an analysis of history, economics and politics. This panel brings an historical perspective on illiberal political economy together with more contemporary analysis. Papers explore the interaction of international constraints with domestic choices paying particularly attention to the role of membership of international bodies such as the European Union.
Russian foreign policy (2) – history, imperialism, and symbolism
Identities and discourses – civic, ethnic, and national
Who is Polish - What is Polishness? Practising and challenging language, literature, identity and culture
Empire and the Arts: Objects, Collections, and the Russian Taste for Western Luxury
This panel explores imperial art patronage, elite taste, and tsarist strategies of collecting and display of art and objects during the first half of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on rethinking the effects of empire and its cultural manifestations.
Religion and the State since the 19th Century
Anti-Gender Backlash and Feminist Resistance in the Post-Soviet States
The post-Soviet states have witnessed a complex interplay of political, cultural, and societal transformations in recent years, leading to a resurgence of anti-gender equality and anti-feminist discourses. These discourses manifest themselves in various forms, from legislative initiatives limiting reproductive rights and curtailing LGBTQ+ rights to the promotion of traditional gender roles and the rejection of feminist ideologies.
This panel focuses on the following key themes:
Origins of anti-gender equality backlash: What are the historical, political, and cultural factors that have contributed to the rise of anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses in post-Soviet states? How have these discourses evolved over time?
Actors and institutions: How do diverse actors and institutions within post-Soviet states, including governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations, and educational institutions, contribute to or counteract the spread of anti-gender equality and anti-feminist discourses?
Implications for women's rights: How do anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses impact women's rights and gender equality in the region? Are there discernible patterns in terms of policy changes and their effects on women's lives and opportunities?
International dimensions: How do these discourses resonate on the international stage? What implications do they have for regional and global gender equality agendas and human rights initiatives?
Feminist resistance and advocacy: What strategies have emerged for feminist resistance in the face of the backlash? What role do civil society organizations, activists, and academia play in challenging anti-gender discourses and promoting gender equality?
Representation of social and ethnic groups in Soviet and post-Soviet media
Populist Solidarity and the Prospects of Development
This panel explores diverse appeals to, and practices of, solidarity in populist politics. Instead of strict delineation of populism as ideology, style, or a form of politics, we consider populism as an element of any mass mobilization appealing to popular solidarity against the politics of actually or supposedly ruling elites. Such appeals may be grounded in ideas of the past and tradition, shared legacies of state-socialism, romantic nationalism, folk Catholicism, and rural populism. Others may be grounded in new emancipatory movements such as co-operativism, local foodways, and alternative community projects that may or may not invoke populist sentiments explicitly. We suggest that appeals to solidarity is necessary for any feasible and legitimate policy to be applied in countries with deep populist legacies and acts as a possible mobilization of resources for the development of transformative projects. The theme of solidarity can thus help illuminate how the effects of global economic, pandemic, and security crises emerge in reactionary or/and progressive forms of populism. We propose to look at the interplay of several dimensions of mass politics via the lens of solidarity. What forms and patterns of class, ethnic, or status solidarity appeal to populism? What is the major representation of solidarity – who are the people – in particular national cases? With whom exactly the populist solidarity builds unity and whom it divides?
The panel is open to papers inspired by historical-structural perspectives on political economy, as well as to more culturalist approaches to economy and politics. Preference will be given to proposals featuring research in one or more of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It is the intention to proceed to a publication that would highlight the importance of case studies on populist solidarity in democracies emerging after/in a consequence of state-socialism.
Czechoslovakian Literature and Culture
Circulating social and economic values
Decolonizing Understanding of Disability in the Baltic and Eastern European Countries
While Eastern Europe and Baltic countries have a rich and complex history, it remains a relatively understudied area in Disability Studies. One of the critical questions is the impact of Soviet ideology on the enforcement of able-bodied norms, the marginalisation of individuals with disabilities, and the perpetuation of invisibility. The doctrine enforced through media, culture, and laws, politics of disability has also left marks on contemporary times. Therefore, it is even more necessary to grapple with these legacies and the progress made in promoting inclusivity and decolonizing disability narratives.
This panel explores disability studies in Baltic and Eastern Europe, providing a unique perspective on the experiences of individuals with disabilities in the region, both past and present. The panel consists of three distinct but interconnected papers that collectively challenge preconceived notions, question traditional narratives, and illuminate the multifaceted nature of disability within the socio-political contexts of these countries. These papers offer a nuanced understanding of disability within the complex socio-political contexts of Baltic and Eastern European countries, spanning different periods and locations.
Media and geopolitical shifts
Growing Up under Socialism: Soviet Adolescence and Life-Writing
Research on adolescence and teenagehood is an actively developing area, still underrepresented in the history of socialist states. Scholars in this field have primarily focused on children or young adults, with insufficient attention paid to the experiences and practices of the transitional period between these socially recognised states. Our panel aims to, at least partially, fill this gap and explore coming-of-age experiences in socialist societies, focusing on the Soviet Union in the Stalinist and post-Stalinist periods. In our presentations, we are going to dwell on the ideologies surrounding adolescence in the USSR, as well as the diaries of Soviet teenagers and the discursive tools and cultural concepts they used in their life-writing to navigate their journey to adulthood.
Language and Identity
Russian foreign policy (2) – history, imperialism, and symbolism
Identities and discourses – civic, ethnic, and national
Who is Polish - What is Polishness? Practising and challenging language, literature, identity and culture
Anti-Gender Backlash and Feminist Resistance in the Post-Soviet States
The post-Soviet states have witnessed a complex interplay of political, cultural, and societal transformations in recent years, leading to a resurgence of anti-gender equality and anti-feminist discourses. These discourses manifest themselves in various forms, from legislative initiatives limiting reproductive rights and curtailing LGBTQ+ rights to the promotion of traditional gender roles and the rejection of feminist ideologies.
This panel focuses on the following key themes:
Origins of anti-gender equality backlash: What are the historical, political, and cultural factors that have contributed to the rise of anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses in post-Soviet states? How have these discourses evolved over time?
Actors and institutions: How do diverse actors and institutions within post-Soviet states, including governmental bodies, non-governmental organizations, and educational institutions, contribute to or counteract the spread of anti-gender equality and anti-feminist discourses?
Implications for women's rights: How do anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses impact women's rights and gender equality in the region? Are there discernible patterns in terms of policy changes and their effects on women's lives and opportunities?
International dimensions: How do these discourses resonate on the international stage? What implications do they have for regional and global gender equality agendas and human rights initiatives?
Feminist resistance and advocacy: What strategies have emerged for feminist resistance in the face of the backlash? What role do civil society organizations, activists, and academia play in challenging anti-gender discourses and promoting gender equality?
Representation of social and ethnic groups in Soviet and post-Soviet media
Populist Solidarity and the Prospects of Development
This panel explores diverse appeals to, and practices of, solidarity in populist politics. Instead of strict delineation of populism as ideology, style, or a form of politics, we consider populism as an element of any mass mobilization appealing to popular solidarity against the politics of actually or supposedly ruling elites. Such appeals may be grounded in ideas of the past and tradition, shared legacies of state-socialism, romantic nationalism, folk Catholicism, and rural populism. Others may be grounded in new emancipatory movements such as co-operativism, local foodways, and alternative community projects that may or may not invoke populist sentiments explicitly. We suggest that appeals to solidarity is necessary for any feasible and legitimate policy to be applied in countries with deep populist legacies and acts as a possible mobilization of resources for the development of transformative projects. The theme of solidarity can thus help illuminate how the effects of global economic, pandemic, and security crises emerge in reactionary or/and progressive forms of populism. We propose to look at the interplay of several dimensions of mass politics via the lens of solidarity. What forms and patterns of class, ethnic, or status solidarity appeal to populism? What is the major representation of solidarity – who are the people – in particular national cases? With whom exactly the populist solidarity builds unity and whom it divides?
The panel is open to papers inspired by historical-structural perspectives on political economy, as well as to more culturalist approaches to economy and politics. Preference will be given to proposals featuring research in one or more of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It is the intention to proceed to a publication that would highlight the importance of case studies on populist solidarity in democracies emerging after/in a consequence of state-socialism.
Czechoslovakian Literature and Culture
Circulating social and economic values
Russian foreign policy (2) – history, imperialism, and symbolism
Representation of social and ethnic groups in Soviet and post-Soviet media
Czechoslovakian Literature and Culture
Wartime Ideological and Intellectual Transformations of Russia
This panel explores how the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the authoritarian hardening of the Russian regime at home have transformed intellectual and ideological identities and reconfigured the dividing lines structuring public debates.
The panel examines the regime’s wartime ideological production by looking at its two main dimensions: its evolving ideational content and the plurality of actors involved in idea production, including both individual entrepreneurs of influence and academic institutions. The panel highlights the marketplace dimension of the regime’s ideological production across state and non-state actors. Moreover, the panel includes analysis of the evolution of anti-regime discourse by looking at the development of a new sphere of ideational resistance against the war inside and outside Russia. The panel therefore insists on the continued competitive aspect of intellectual and ideological debates even in wartime.
The panel specifically investigates (1) the formation of a new state ideology and its bucreaucratization process relying on the role of academic institutions in co-authoring the state language, (2) the theorization of a right-wing anticolonialism as one of the new official doctrines, denouncing the West as an epistemological imperialism that has « decentered » Russian identity, (3) the new polarization shaping Russian nationalists’ « identity talk » and (4) the divisions of the Russian philosophical field into exile philosophy and war philosophy.
The Politics of Illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Drawn from ongoing research on contemporary Central European politics, the papers will focus on conceptualization(s) of illiberalism, its sources, and its implications for EU and NATO enlargement.
Conflict, contestation, and (de)colonisation
Holocaust Memory in Poland: New Perspectives on the Old Problem
REELIT (Russian and East European Literature in Translation): Human and machine translation, past and present
Human and machine translation, past and present.
This panel will consider a variety of aspects of translation: contemporary or historical aspects of machine translation, poetry translation and/or fiction translation.
Media, communication, and censorship
New approaches to disinformation in (and beyond) the Russian context
Based around early findings of a 3-year AHRC funded project led from the University of Manchester and entitled '(Mis)translating Deceit: Disinformation as a Translingual, Discursive Dynamic', this panel will consist of four papers by project team members and associates offering new perspectives on disinformation. Attention will be paid specifically to the significance of shifts in how the notion's meaning is understood over time, contested across lingua-cultural environments, and reshaped by its discursive encounters with counter-disinformation rhetoric, and to how 'disinformation narratives' (a term we problematise) are adapted for consumption in different cultural environments, and re-interpreted by their target audiences. Focusing primarily on the Soviet and Russian contexts, the panel will spell out the implications for approaches to disinformation and state propaganda more generally. The four papers will be followed by comments from a discussant (also a project team member).
Myths, memories and commemorations in the North I
The papers in this panel present results from the ongoing research project Normemo: Memory politics in the North: Norway and Russia 1993-2023. The project examines the memory politics and memory culture in Northwest Russia and in Russia's relations with its nordic neighbours throughout the post-Soviet period. The papers critically examine the transformation of historical narratives and memory work in local communities, at borders and on interstate diplomatic level. Scrutinizing processes of negotiations, contestations and adaptations between (trans-)regional and federal mnemonic actors, we explore the discussions that evolve around representing the past at regional level, what normative attitudes they reveal, and what material and symbolic resources act and compete in these processes.
Rethinking Central and Eastern Europe in the Pre-Industrial Age
The Politics of National Identity before 1939
Approaches to Religion in War
This panel, organised by Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe Study Group. raises a range of theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues that scholars of religion are facing at the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. These issues are discussed through focusing on themes such as the relevance of the postcolonial perspective for understanding religion at the time of war, securitisation of religions, and the use of religiously inflected narratives in warfare. Submissions are invited on other themes relevant to the panel's title.
Besieged by the Future 3: Taming Post-Socialist Economies
Ukraine's Minorities at War: Cultural Identity and Resilience
The panel focuses on Ukraine’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities who have undergone forced displacement, emigration, the destruction of familiar ways of life, and a transformation of identity and language behaviour during the last nine years. The researchers examine the impact of Russia's war against Ukraine on the cultural identities of minority groups and consider the mechanisms and components of their resilience in times of crisis. Key themes addressed include minorities’ collective memory and survival strategies, mobilization and humanitarianism, forced displacement and the preservation of identity. While most works on the Russo-Ukrainian war focus on the international context and the causes of the war and its humanitarian consequences for the population of Ukraine and the region as a whole, this panel seeks to mainstream the issue of cultural minorities, which is often neglected in the coverage of this type of conflict.
Organisational and social transformation of the higher education sector
Strict Negative Concord in Eastern and Central European Languages
Negative Concord is a technical term for the linguistic phenomenon when the multiple occurrence of negative expressions does not turn the sentence into a positive statement. Asymmetric Negative Concord widely used in Romance languages. Preverbal negative expressions function as negative licensers, while post-verbal negative expressions are Negative Concord Items, in need of a licenser. The clause negator is obligatory with postverbal negative expressions while it is banned with pre-verbal ones.
The Strict Negative Concord strategy means that the clause negator is obligatory irrespective of the number of negative expressions in pre-verbal or post-verbal position in the sentence. This strategy is widely used in Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. The panel presents some new facts about Strict Negative Concord in Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovenian, and Hungarian, to create a platform for further comparison.
Post-Soviet Literature
Knowledge formation: secular and religious experience in the late Russian Empire
At the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire experienced a dramatic increase in the forms and variations of personal, social, and religious knowledge. In an atmosphere of dramatically increased cultural transfer and social transformation, even such seemingly conservative and rigid formations as Orthodoxy became subject to change and had to (and often wanted to) respond to the challenge of modernity. In our papers we want to examine these changes at different levels: 1. at the level of educational institutions, how Orthodox academic education responded to the demands of secular knowledge; 2. at the level of the interaction between church and literature as social institutions, here it is a question of how social expectations directed equally at church and literature were accommodated and discussed, and 3. how, in interaction and mutual repulsion from the Orthodox tradition, non-Orthodox religious and social practices could be established in Russian culture.
The Challenges of Economic Development and the Impact of Global Shocks in Eurasia
Reimagining Russian culture in the 1960s-2020s through Women's Perspectives.
The panel will examine the representations of Soviet and post-Soviet women in Russian literature and film in the 1960s-2020s in various contexts pertaining to major socio-political trends and identity construction both on the national and transnational levels. It will discuss the construction of female gender identity in Soviet cinema in the 1960s-80s and provide examples from the films featuring Soviet female gymnasts who were used as an emblem of Soviet triumph over the West. It will also analyse Olga Sedakova's cycle "The Chinese Journey" (1980, 1986) in the context of the re-emergence of Eurasianist ideas in Russian culture and of the re-discovery of Russian modernist legacy. In the final part, the panel will talk about several anti-war poems written by Vera Pavlova and Evgeniya Berkovich who challenge Russian official propaganda narrative about the war in Ukraine.
Wartime Ideological and Intellectual Transformations of Russia
This panel explores how the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the authoritarian hardening of the Russian regime at home have transformed intellectual and ideological identities and reconfigured the dividing lines structuring public debates.
The panel examines the regime’s wartime ideological production by looking at its two main dimensions: its evolving ideational content and the plurality of actors involved in idea production, including both individual entrepreneurs of influence and academic institutions. The panel highlights the marketplace dimension of the regime’s ideological production across state and non-state actors. Moreover, the panel includes analysis of the evolution of anti-regime discourse by looking at the development of a new sphere of ideational resistance against the war inside and outside Russia. The panel therefore insists on the continued competitive aspect of intellectual and ideological debates even in wartime.
The panel specifically investigates (1) the formation of a new state ideology and its bucreaucratization process relying on the role of academic institutions in co-authoring the state language, (2) the theorization of a right-wing anticolonialism as one of the new official doctrines, denouncing the West as an epistemological imperialism that has « decentered » Russian identity, (3) the new polarization shaping Russian nationalists’ « identity talk » and (4) the divisions of the Russian philosophical field into exile philosophy and war philosophy.
The Politics of Illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Drawn from ongoing research on contemporary Central European politics, the papers will focus on conceptualization(s) of illiberalism, its sources, and its implications for EU and NATO enlargement.
Conflict, contestation, and (de)colonisation
Media, communication, and censorship
New approaches to disinformation in (and beyond) the Russian context
Based around early findings of a 3-year AHRC funded project led from the University of Manchester and entitled '(Mis)translating Deceit: Disinformation as a Translingual, Discursive Dynamic', this panel will consist of four papers by project team members and associates offering new perspectives on disinformation. Attention will be paid specifically to the significance of shifts in how the notion's meaning is understood over time, contested across lingua-cultural environments, and reshaped by its discursive encounters with counter-disinformation rhetoric, and to how 'disinformation narratives' (a term we problematise) are adapted for consumption in different cultural environments, and re-interpreted by their target audiences. Focusing primarily on the Soviet and Russian contexts, the panel will spell out the implications for approaches to disinformation and state propaganda more generally. The four papers will be followed by comments from a discussant (also a project team member).
Myths, memories and commemorations in the North I
The papers in this panel present results from the ongoing research project Normemo: Memory politics in the North: Norway and Russia 1993-2023. The project examines the memory politics and memory culture in Northwest Russia and in Russia's relations with its nordic neighbours throughout the post-Soviet period. The papers critically examine the transformation of historical narratives and memory work in local communities, at borders and on interstate diplomatic level. Scrutinizing processes of negotiations, contestations and adaptations between (trans-)regional and federal mnemonic actors, we explore the discussions that evolve around representing the past at regional level, what normative attitudes they reveal, and what material and symbolic resources act and compete in these processes.
Rethinking Central and Eastern Europe in the Pre-Industrial Age
The Politics of National Identity before 1939
Ukraine's Minorities at War: Cultural Identity and Resilience
The panel focuses on Ukraine’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities who have undergone forced displacement, emigration, the destruction of familiar ways of life, and a transformation of identity and language behaviour during the last nine years. The researchers examine the impact of Russia's war against Ukraine on the cultural identities of minority groups and consider the mechanisms and components of their resilience in times of crisis. Key themes addressed include minorities’ collective memory and survival strategies, mobilization and humanitarianism, forced displacement and the preservation of identity. While most works on the Russo-Ukrainian war focus on the international context and the causes of the war and its humanitarian consequences for the population of Ukraine and the region as a whole, this panel seeks to mainstream the issue of cultural minorities, which is often neglected in the coverage of this type of conflict.
Organisational and social transformation of the higher education sector
Post-Soviet Literature
The Challenges of Economic Development and the Impact of Global Shocks in Eurasia
Holocaust Memory in Poland: New Perspectives on the Old Problem
REELIT (Russian and East European Literature in Translation): Human and machine translation, past and present
Human and machine translation, past and present.
This panel will consider a variety of aspects of translation: contemporary or historical aspects of machine translation, poetry translation and/or fiction translation.
Approaches to Religion in War
This panel, organised by Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe Study Group. raises a range of theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues that scholars of religion are facing at the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. These issues are discussed through focusing on themes such as the relevance of the postcolonial perspective for understanding religion at the time of war, securitisation of religions, and the use of religiously inflected narratives in warfare. Submissions are invited on other themes relevant to the panel's title.
Besieged by the Future 3: Taming Post-Socialist Economies
Strict Negative Concord in Eastern and Central European Languages
Negative Concord is a technical term for the linguistic phenomenon when the multiple occurrence of negative expressions does not turn the sentence into a positive statement. Asymmetric Negative Concord widely used in Romance languages. Preverbal negative expressions function as negative licensers, while post-verbal negative expressions are Negative Concord Items, in need of a licenser. The clause negator is obligatory with postverbal negative expressions while it is banned with pre-verbal ones.
The Strict Negative Concord strategy means that the clause negator is obligatory irrespective of the number of negative expressions in pre-verbal or post-verbal position in the sentence. This strategy is widely used in Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. The panel presents some new facts about Strict Negative Concord in Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovenian, and Hungarian, to create a platform for further comparison.
Knowledge formation: secular and religious experience in the late Russian Empire
At the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire experienced a dramatic increase in the forms and variations of personal, social, and religious knowledge. In an atmosphere of dramatically increased cultural transfer and social transformation, even such seemingly conservative and rigid formations as Orthodoxy became subject to change and had to (and often wanted to) respond to the challenge of modernity. In our papers we want to examine these changes at different levels: 1. at the level of educational institutions, how Orthodox academic education responded to the demands of secular knowledge; 2. at the level of the interaction between church and literature as social institutions, here it is a question of how social expectations directed equally at church and literature were accommodated and discussed, and 3. how, in interaction and mutual repulsion from the Orthodox tradition, non-Orthodox religious and social practices could be established in Russian culture.
Reimagining Russian culture in the 1960s-2020s through Women's Perspectives.
The panel will examine the representations of Soviet and post-Soviet women in Russian literature and film in the 1960s-2020s in various contexts pertaining to major socio-political trends and identity construction both on the national and transnational levels. It will discuss the construction of female gender identity in Soviet cinema in the 1960s-80s and provide examples from the films featuring Soviet female gymnasts who were used as an emblem of Soviet triumph over the West. It will also analyse Olga Sedakova's cycle "The Chinese Journey" (1980, 1986) in the context of the re-emergence of Eurasianist ideas in Russian culture and of the re-discovery of Russian modernist legacy. In the final part, the panel will talk about several anti-war poems written by Vera Pavlova and Evgeniya Berkovich who challenge Russian official propaganda narrative about the war in Ukraine.
Wartime Ideological and Intellectual Transformations of Russia
This panel explores how the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the authoritarian hardening of the Russian regime at home have transformed intellectual and ideological identities and reconfigured the dividing lines structuring public debates.
The panel examines the regime’s wartime ideological production by looking at its two main dimensions: its evolving ideational content and the plurality of actors involved in idea production, including both individual entrepreneurs of influence and academic institutions. The panel highlights the marketplace dimension of the regime’s ideological production across state and non-state actors. Moreover, the panel includes analysis of the evolution of anti-regime discourse by looking at the development of a new sphere of ideational resistance against the war inside and outside Russia. The panel therefore insists on the continued competitive aspect of intellectual and ideological debates even in wartime.
The panel specifically investigates (1) the formation of a new state ideology and its bucreaucratization process relying on the role of academic institutions in co-authoring the state language, (2) the theorization of a right-wing anticolonialism as one of the new official doctrines, denouncing the West as an epistemological imperialism that has « decentered » Russian identity, (3) the new polarization shaping Russian nationalists’ « identity talk » and (4) the divisions of the Russian philosophical field into exile philosophy and war philosophy.
The Politics of Illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Drawn from ongoing research on contemporary Central European politics, the papers will focus on conceptualization(s) of illiberalism, its sources, and its implications for EU and NATO enlargement.
Conflict, contestation, and (de)colonisation
Media, communication, and censorship
Myths, memories and commemorations in the North I
The papers in this panel present results from the ongoing research project Normemo: Memory politics in the North: Norway and Russia 1993-2023. The project examines the memory politics and memory culture in Northwest Russia and in Russia's relations with its nordic neighbours throughout the post-Soviet period. The papers critically examine the transformation of historical narratives and memory work in local communities, at borders and on interstate diplomatic level. Scrutinizing processes of negotiations, contestations and adaptations between (trans-)regional and federal mnemonic actors, we explore the discussions that evolve around representing the past at regional level, what normative attitudes they reveal, and what material and symbolic resources act and compete in these processes.
Rethinking Central and Eastern Europe in the Pre-Industrial Age
The Politics of National Identity before 1939
Ukraine's Minorities at War: Cultural Identity and Resilience
The panel focuses on Ukraine’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities who have undergone forced displacement, emigration, the destruction of familiar ways of life, and a transformation of identity and language behaviour during the last nine years. The researchers examine the impact of Russia's war against Ukraine on the cultural identities of minority groups and consider the mechanisms and components of their resilience in times of crisis. Key themes addressed include minorities’ collective memory and survival strategies, mobilization and humanitarianism, forced displacement and the preservation of identity. While most works on the Russo-Ukrainian war focus on the international context and the causes of the war and its humanitarian consequences for the population of Ukraine and the region as a whole, this panel seeks to mainstream the issue of cultural minorities, which is often neglected in the coverage of this type of conflict.
Post-Soviet Literature
The Challenges of Economic Development and the Impact of Global Shocks in Eurasia
Holocaust Memory in Poland: New Perspectives on the Old Problem
REELIT (Russian and East European Literature in Translation): Human and machine translation, past and present
Human and machine translation, past and present.
This panel will consider a variety of aspects of translation: contemporary or historical aspects of machine translation, poetry translation and/or fiction translation.
Approaches to Religion in War
This panel, organised by Religion and Spirituality in Russia and Eastern Europe Study Group. raises a range of theoretical, conceptual and methodological issues that scholars of religion are facing at the time of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. These issues are discussed through focusing on themes such as the relevance of the postcolonial perspective for understanding religion at the time of war, securitisation of religions, and the use of religiously inflected narratives in warfare. Submissions are invited on other themes relevant to the panel's title.
Strict Negative Concord in Eastern and Central European Languages
Negative Concord is a technical term for the linguistic phenomenon when the multiple occurrence of negative expressions does not turn the sentence into a positive statement. Asymmetric Negative Concord widely used in Romance languages. Preverbal negative expressions function as negative licensers, while post-verbal negative expressions are Negative Concord Items, in need of a licenser. The clause negator is obligatory with postverbal negative expressions while it is banned with pre-verbal ones.
The Strict Negative Concord strategy means that the clause negator is obligatory irrespective of the number of negative expressions in pre-verbal or post-verbal position in the sentence. This strategy is widely used in Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. The panel presents some new facts about Strict Negative Concord in Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovenian, and Hungarian, to create a platform for further comparison.
Knowledge formation: secular and religious experience in the late Russian Empire
At the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire experienced a dramatic increase in the forms and variations of personal, social, and religious knowledge. In an atmosphere of dramatically increased cultural transfer and social transformation, even such seemingly conservative and rigid formations as Orthodoxy became subject to change and had to (and often wanted to) respond to the challenge of modernity. In our papers we want to examine these changes at different levels: 1. at the level of educational institutions, how Orthodox academic education responded to the demands of secular knowledge; 2. at the level of the interaction between church and literature as social institutions, here it is a question of how social expectations directed equally at church and literature were accommodated and discussed, and 3. how, in interaction and mutual repulsion from the Orthodox tradition, non-Orthodox religious and social practices could be established in Russian culture.
Reimagining Russian culture in the 1960s-2020s through Women's Perspectives.
The panel will examine the representations of Soviet and post-Soviet women in Russian literature and film in the 1960s-2020s in various contexts pertaining to major socio-political trends and identity construction both on the national and transnational levels. It will discuss the construction of female gender identity in Soviet cinema in the 1960s-80s and provide examples from the films featuring Soviet female gymnasts who were used as an emblem of Soviet triumph over the West. It will also analyse Olga Sedakova's cycle "The Chinese Journey" (1980, 1986) in the context of the re-emergence of Eurasianist ideas in Russian culture and of the re-discovery of Russian modernist legacy. In the final part, the panel will talk about several anti-war poems written by Vera Pavlova and Evgeniya Berkovich who challenge Russian official propaganda narrative about the war in Ukraine.
The Politics of Illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe
Drawn from ongoing research on contemporary Central European politics, the papers will focus on conceptualization(s) of illiberalism, its sources, and its implications for EU and NATO enlargement.
Conflict, contestation, and (de)colonisation
Media, communication, and censorship
New approaches to disinformation in (and beyond) the Russian context
Based around early findings of a 3-year AHRC funded project led from the University of Manchester and entitled '(Mis)translating Deceit: Disinformation as a Translingual, Discursive Dynamic', this panel will consist of four papers by project team members and associates offering new perspectives on disinformation. Attention will be paid specifically to the significance of shifts in how the notion's meaning is understood over time, contested across lingua-cultural environments, and reshaped by its discursive encounters with counter-disinformation rhetoric, and to how 'disinformation narratives' (a term we problematise) are adapted for consumption in different cultural environments, and re-interpreted by their target audiences. Focusing primarily on the Soviet and Russian contexts, the panel will spell out the implications for approaches to disinformation and state propaganda more generally. The four papers will be followed by comments from a discussant (also a project team member).
Myths, memories and commemorations in the North I
The papers in this panel present results from the ongoing research project Normemo: Memory politics in the North: Norway and Russia 1993-2023. The project examines the memory politics and memory culture in Northwest Russia and in Russia's relations with its nordic neighbours throughout the post-Soviet period. The papers critically examine the transformation of historical narratives and memory work in local communities, at borders and on interstate diplomatic level. Scrutinizing processes of negotiations, contestations and adaptations between (trans-)regional and federal mnemonic actors, we explore the discussions that evolve around representing the past at regional level, what normative attitudes they reveal, and what material and symbolic resources act and compete in these processes.
Rethinking Central and Eastern Europe in the Pre-Industrial Age
The Politics of National Identity before 1939
Ukraine's Minorities at War: Cultural Identity and Resilience
The panel focuses on Ukraine’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic minorities who have undergone forced displacement, emigration, the destruction of familiar ways of life, and a transformation of identity and language behaviour during the last nine years. The researchers examine the impact of Russia's war against Ukraine on the cultural identities of minority groups and consider the mechanisms and components of their resilience in times of crisis. Key themes addressed include minorities’ collective memory and survival strategies, mobilization and humanitarianism, forced displacement and the preservation of identity. While most works on the Russo-Ukrainian war focus on the international context and the causes of the war and its humanitarian consequences for the population of Ukraine and the region as a whole, this panel seeks to mainstream the issue of cultural minorities, which is often neglected in the coverage of this type of conflict.
Post-Soviet Literature
Strict Negative Concord in Eastern and Central European Languages
Negative Concord is a technical term for the linguistic phenomenon when the multiple occurrence of negative expressions does not turn the sentence into a positive statement. Asymmetric Negative Concord widely used in Romance languages. Preverbal negative expressions function as negative licensers, while post-verbal negative expressions are Negative Concord Items, in need of a licenser. The clause negator is obligatory with postverbal negative expressions while it is banned with pre-verbal ones.
The Strict Negative Concord strategy means that the clause negator is obligatory irrespective of the number of negative expressions in pre-verbal or post-verbal position in the sentence. This strategy is widely used in Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages. The panel presents some new facts about Strict Negative Concord in Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovenian, and Hungarian, to create a platform for further comparison.
Authoritarian backsliding and forms of resistance 1
Recent developments Eastern Europe have been examined in different ways, as an illustration of autocratic legalism (Scheppele 2018), democratic backsliding (Cianetti, Dawson, and Hanley 2018; Waldner and Lust 2018; Bernhard 2021), an expression of the populist uprising (Bodnar 2018) or a counter-revolution against liberal democracy (Sajó 2021; Krastev and Holmes 2019). These phenomena however are not limited solely to post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and can be found – to different degrees – across the entire EU polity. This panel examines the different forms of authoritarian backsliding and the processes of resistance they encounter from social and civil rights activists, various professional groups and the broader civil society.
Forgotten? Missing narratives about Poles during and after the Second World War
On Music, Migrations, Diaspora and Cultural Exchanges
This panel is organised by the BASEES Slavonic and East European Music Study Group — SEEM (until 2023: Study Group for Russian and East European Music — REEM). The panel comprises three papers, each dealing with various facets of music, migrations, diaspora and cultural exchanges. The panelists focus on Romanian composers born between 1935 and 1945 who emigrated to France in the early 1970s, on the career of the remarkable British cellist Elizabeth Wilson (b. 1947) who served as an unofficial ambassador for non-conformist Soviet music during the Cold War, and finally on three waves of emigration of Ukrainian composers to the United Kingdom (after WWII, after 1991, and today). All three papers shed light on the hitherto unknown details from personal and collective histories and explain how the protagonists contributed to cultural exchanges in the most difficult circumstances.
Political Participation and Democracy in CEE
Political participation by active and engaged society are often seen as the key characteristic of healthy and functioning democracies. Traditionally, political participation has been seen as the engagement with the political parties – voting, running for office, joining political parties -, activities that are seen to ensure representative politics. However, democratic systems have evolved, multiplied and changed. While representative democracy remains the dominant form of governance in Europe, we increasingly see forms of direct engagement of individuals as well as different communities via participatory budgeting platforms, formal and informal social movements, non-governmental organizations, protests or even politicized consumption habits. The question of what constitutes political participation and how it influences the current political landscape, as well as the reciprocal impact of the political landscape on political participation,has sparked a vibrant debate.
Theoretically the impact of political participation is unsettled. Historically, Eastern European studies have analyzed political participation in the context of democratization, linking the passive civic engagement to Soviet legacies. While participation in formal organizations is still largely passive in the Eastern European region, civic apathy is now frequently used to describe political participation also in older democracies. We can see emergence of informal movements indicating change in political engagement across Europe, but is it beneficial to democratic orders? The history or informal movements, such as Solidarnosc, shows us an example that informal societal ties can be mobilized to bring major changes or even overthrow the dominant system. To better understand the effects and causes of political participation, we are interested in looking at the ways in which people participate in politics.
This panel invites interdisciplinary research on the various types of political participation, questioning the forms of it and contemporary relationship with the state in the Central and Eastern European region. Some of the questions we ask, but are not limited to, what forms of political participation can strengthen democratic governance? What kind of everyday political practices people engage in? How the form of government fosters new types of political participation? Should states strive to increase political participation and what are the threats? Can political participation cure the ills of contemporary democracies? Should the passive political participation still be seen in the context of Soviet legacies or it rather represents the issues of the contemporary democracies that reach further out than just the Eastern European region?
Myths, memories and commemorations in the North II
The papers in this panel present results from the ongoing research project Normemo: Memory politics in the North: Norway and Russia 1993-2023. The project examines the memory politics and memory culture in Northwest Russia and in Russia's relations with its nordic neighbours throughout the post-Soviet period. The papers critically examine the transformation of historical narratives and memory work in local communities, at borders and on interstate diplomatic level. Scrutinizing processes of negotiations, contestations and adaptations between (trans-)regional and federal mnemonic actors, we explore the discussions that evolve around representing the past at regional level, what normative attitudes they reveal, and what material and symbolic resources act and compete in these processes.
New outlooks on economic life in the late Russian empire
This panel offers three perspectives on how we might look again at economic practices in the late Russian empire, in each case offering a reinterpretation or new exploration of a theme or topic that has been neglected in recent scholarship. Focusing on promysly (trades) in the European North, begging and almsgiving in Russian villages, and iarmarki (trade fairs) across the empire but particularly in Central Asia, the papers centre rural landscapes, economies and communities, seeking to understand and to highlight the many varied ways in which social and economic practices were mutually constitutive. The papers explore why and how people became involved in various specific economic activities (including, but not limited to, the production of tar, the sale of sheep, the collection of crusts), and consider multiple scales of production, value and exchange. The cases presented also situate, where possible, economic life in remote localities of the Russian empire in regional, global and trans-imperial settings, thus overcoming binary centre-periphery research perspectives and emphasising the agency and connectedness of local life, often seen as inert and passive. Collectively, the papers reflect on themes of empire and social and geographic marginalisation, considering what the history of groups (peasants, villagers, beggars and pastoralists) and places (Arkhangel’sk province, Central Asia) that often fall beyond the reach of more traditional economic histories can bring to our wider understandings of economic life in the late imperial period.
Religion as a cultural and political resource in Russia
Besieged by the Future 4: Infrastructuring Preservation and Ruination
Russia's war against Ukraine has prompted a renewed debate about the limitations of social sciences and humanities to supply decision makers with predictive knowledge that is deemed necessary for action. However, these forms of criticism disregard the performative role of the anticipatory knowledge as well as the social contexts in which this type of knowledge operates. At the same time there is an ongoing boom of historical and critical studies of future making practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, where scholars explore a wide range of practices of making sense of the future with the help of science, from literary fiction to computer modeling, from everyday practices to business consulting. This colloquium seeks to gather scholars representing different disciplines to take stock on the research into the diverse forms of future-making in the region and to consider their political impacts.
Religion and politics
The Power of Objects: Critical Studies of the Indigenous Heritage in Siberia
The notion of indigenous heritage is one of those taken-for-granted concepts that is constantly encountered in anthropological literature but rarely subjected to critical reflection (Moore 2022). Indigenous heritage is entangled with a broader conceptualisation of heritage regimes which are ‘fundamentally material and emerge from the power relationship’ and affect the politics of cultural recognition (Geismar 2015: 72). The Russian state heritage regime is closely intervened with its nationality policy. Thus, 2022, officially proclaimed by president Putin as ‘the Year of the Cultural Heritage of the peoples of Russia,’ ended with the opening of the Imperial Hall in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg, celebrating the idea of a ‘multiethnic empire’ through particular objects (‘imperial gifts’). The ideology behind the production of the national regime of heritage becomes clearer when it is juxtaposed against indigenous understandings of heritage, which are encompassed into their systems of values and grounded on the fluid dynamics of interaction with meaningful objects. This panel proposes new ideas and forms of examining the concept of indigenous heritage in an attempt to challenge the dominant top-down conceptualisation of heritage in Russia and to overcome the spatial limitations of current research by including Siberian Studies. In particular, we focus on the category of objects associated with human-non-human interactions (mostly interactions with spirits, but not only) among Siberian and Arctic indigenous communities. This category comprises objects that are loaded with high cultural value, situated at the crossroads of contested discourses and narratives. We propose to look at these objects through shifting sets of relationships and contexts, including those of family, museum, memory, and imagination.
Language and Scholarship, Linguistic Theory
19th-Century Russian Literature and Culture
20th-century Russophone Poetic Affiliations as Products of Creative Affinity or a Matter of Place and Time.
In early years of the twentieth century, poets writing in Russian had a choice of poetic groups and movements to associate themselves with, if they so wished. The personnel, artistic agenda, and legacy of some of these groups, and those that emerged later, have been the object of study for literary historians seeking to define and map poetic networks, while poets themselves have announced their affinities in their own work, dedicating poems to figures in their own circle, and so asserting their connections to particular tendencies or traditions. The three papers in this panel explore different kinds of affiliation. Short-lived associations in a particular place and time can leave a lasting trace in the public imagination, without necessarily being firmly founded in a shared artistic credo or style. Other affiliations may be more indicative of a common creative vision among contemporaries which can endure over decades after the group has ceased to exist, but may be expressed in poems dedicated to fellow-poets long after their death which explore the survivor’s relationship with an often forgotten or marginalised tradition. The sense of connection can extend beyond time and space, as poets living in diaspora create communities which transcend the boundaries of space and time to find their place in a tradition that they themselves define.
Jewish Culture and Memory
Energy Transition and State Funding in the Times of Uncertainty
Inside the Soviet Security State: Identity, Memory and Espionage
Authoritarian backsliding and forms of resistance 1
Recent developments Eastern Europe have been examined in different ways, as an illustration of autocratic legalism (Scheppele 2018), democratic backsliding (Cianetti, Dawson, and Hanley 2018; Waldner and Lust 2018; Bernhard 2021), an expression of the populist uprising (Bodnar 2018) or a counter-revolution against liberal democracy (Sajó 2021; Krastev and Holmes 2019). These phenomena however are not limited solely to post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and can be found – to different degrees – across the entire EU polity. This panel examines the different forms of authoritarian backsliding and the processes of resistance they encounter from social and civil rights activists, various professional groups and the broader civil society.
On Music, Migrations, Diaspora and Cultural Exchanges
This panel is organised by the BASEES Slavonic and East European Music Study Group — SEEM (until 2023: Study Group for Russian and East European Music — REEM). The panel comprises three papers, each dealing with various facets of music, migrations, diaspora and cultural exchanges. The panelists focus on Romanian composers born between 1935 and 1945 who emigrated to France in the early 1970s, on the career of the remarkable British cellist Elizabeth Wilson (b. 1947) who served as an unofficial ambassador for non-conformist Soviet music during the Cold War, and finally on three waves of emigration of Ukrainian composers to the United Kingdom (after WWII, after 1991, and today). All three papers shed light on the hitherto unknown details from personal and collective histories and explain how the protagonists contributed to cultural exchanges in the most difficult circumstances.
Religion as a cultural and political resource in Russia
Religion and politics
The Power of Objects: Critical Studies of the Indigenous Heritage in Siberia
The notion of indigenous heritage is one of those taken-for-granted concepts that is constantly encountered in anthropological literature but rarely subjected to critical reflection (Moore 2022). Indigenous heritage is entangled with a broader conceptualisation of heritage regimes which are ‘fundamentally material and emerge from the power relationship’ and affect the politics of cultural recognition (Geismar 2015: 72). The Russian state heritage regime is closely intervened with its nationality policy. Thus, 2022, officially proclaimed by president Putin as ‘the Year of the Cultural Heritage of the peoples of Russia,’ ended with the opening of the Imperial Hall in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg, celebrating the idea of a ‘multiethnic empire’ through particular objects (‘imperial gifts’). The ideology behind the production of the national regime of heritage becomes clearer when it is juxtaposed against indigenous understandings of heritage, which are encompassed into their systems of values and grounded on the fluid dynamics of interaction with meaningful objects. This panel proposes new ideas and forms of examining the concept of indigenous heritage in an attempt to challenge the dominant top-down conceptualisation of heritage in Russia and to overcome the spatial limitations of current research by including Siberian Studies. In particular, we focus on the category of objects associated with human-non-human interactions (mostly interactions with spirits, but not only) among Siberian and Arctic indigenous communities. This category comprises objects that are loaded with high cultural value, situated at the crossroads of contested discourses and narratives. We propose to look at these objects through shifting sets of relationships and contexts, including those of family, museum, memory, and imagination.
19th-Century Russian Literature and Culture
Jewish Culture and Memory
Inside the Soviet Security State: Identity, Memory and Espionage
Forgotten? Missing narratives about Poles during and after the Second World War
Political Participation and Democracy in CEE
Political participation by active and engaged society are often seen as the key characteristic of healthy and functioning democracies. Traditionally, political participation has been seen as the engagement with the political parties – voting, running for office, joining political parties -, activities that are seen to ensure representative politics. However, democratic systems have evolved, multiplied and changed. While representative democracy remains the dominant form of governance in Europe, we increasingly see forms of direct engagement of individuals as well as different communities via participatory budgeting platforms, formal and informal social movements, non-governmental organizations, protests or even politicized consumption habits. The question of what constitutes political participation and how it influences the current political landscape, as well as the reciprocal impact of the political landscape on political participation,has sparked a vibrant debate.
Theoretically the impact of political participation is unsettled. Historically, Eastern European studies have analyzed political participation in the context of democratization, linking the passive civic engagement to Soviet legacies. While participation in formal organizations is still largely passive in the Eastern European region, civic apathy is now frequently used to describe political participation also in older democracies. We can see emergence of informal movements indicating change in political engagement across Europe, but is it beneficial to democratic orders? The history or informal movements, such as Solidarnosc, shows us an example that informal societal ties can be mobilized to bring major changes or even overthrow the dominant system. To better understand the effects and causes of political participation, we are interested in looking at the ways in which people participate in politics.
This panel invites interdisciplinary research on the various types of political participation, questioning the forms of it and contemporary relationship with the state in the Central and Eastern European region. Some of the questions we ask, but are not limited to, what forms of political participation can strengthen democratic governance? What kind of everyday political practices people engage in? How the form of government fosters new types of political participation? Should states strive to increase political participation and what are the threats? Can political participation cure the ills of contemporary democracies? Should the passive political participation still be seen in the context of Soviet legacies or it rather represents the issues of the contemporary democracies that reach further out than just the Eastern European region?
Myths, memories and commemorations in the North II
The papers in this panel present results from the ongoing research project Normemo: Memory politics in the North: Norway and Russia 1993-2023. The project examines the memory politics and memory culture in Northwest Russia and in Russia's relations with its nordic neighbours throughout the post-Soviet period. The papers critically examine the transformation of historical narratives and memory work in local communities, at borders and on interstate diplomatic level. Scrutinizing processes of negotiations, contestations and adaptations between (trans-)regional and federal mnemonic actors, we explore the discussions that evolve around representing the past at regional level, what normative attitudes they reveal, and what material and symbolic resources act and compete in these processes.
New outlooks on economic life in the late Russian empire
This panel offers three perspectives on how we might look again at economic practices in the late Russian empire, in each case offering a reinterpretation or new exploration of a theme or topic that has been neglected in recent scholarship. Focusing on promysly (trades) in the European North, begging and almsgiving in Russian villages, and iarmarki (trade fairs) across the empire but particularly in Central Asia, the papers centre rural landscapes, economies and communities, seeking to understand and to highlight the many varied ways in which social and economic practices were mutually constitutive. The papers explore why and how people became involved in various specific economic activities (including, but not limited to, the production of tar, the sale of sheep, the collection of crusts), and consider multiple scales of production, value and exchange. The cases presented also situate, where possible, economic life in remote localities of the Russian empire in regional, global and trans-imperial settings, thus overcoming binary centre-periphery research perspectives and emphasising the agency and connectedness of local life, often seen as inert and passive. Collectively, the papers reflect on themes of empire and social and geographic marginalisation, considering what the history of groups (peasants, villagers, beggars and pastoralists) and places (Arkhangel’sk province, Central Asia) that often fall beyond the reach of more traditional economic histories can bring to our wider understandings of economic life in the late imperial period.
Besieged by the Future 4: Infrastructuring Preservation and Ruination
Russia's war against Ukraine has prompted a renewed debate about the limitations of social sciences and humanities to supply decision makers with predictive knowledge that is deemed necessary for action. However, these forms of criticism disregard the performative role of the anticipatory knowledge as well as the social contexts in which this type of knowledge operates. At the same time there is an ongoing boom of historical and critical studies of future making practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, where scholars explore a wide range of practices of making sense of the future with the help of science, from literary fiction to computer modeling, from everyday practices to business consulting. This colloquium seeks to gather scholars representing different disciplines to take stock on the research into the diverse forms of future-making in the region and to consider their political impacts.
Language and Scholarship, Linguistic Theory
20th-century Russophone Poetic Affiliations as Products of Creative Affinity or a Matter of Place and Time.
In early years of the twentieth century, poets writing in Russian had a choice of poetic groups and movements to associate themselves with, if they so wished. The personnel, artistic agenda, and legacy of some of these groups, and those that emerged later, have been the object of study for literary historians seeking to define and map poetic networks, while poets themselves have announced their affinities in their own work, dedicating poems to figures in their own circle, and so asserting their connections to particular tendencies or traditions. The three papers in this panel explore different kinds of affiliation. Short-lived associations in a particular place and time can leave a lasting trace in the public imagination, without necessarily being firmly founded in a shared artistic credo or style. Other affiliations may be more indicative of a common creative vision among contemporaries which can endure over decades after the group has ceased to exist, but may be expressed in poems dedicated to fellow-poets long after their death which explore the survivor’s relationship with an often forgotten or marginalised tradition. The sense of connection can extend beyond time and space, as poets living in diaspora create communities which transcend the boundaries of space and time to find their place in a tradition that they themselves define.
Energy Transition and State Funding in the Times of Uncertainty
Authoritarian backsliding and forms of resistance 1
Recent developments Eastern Europe have been examined in different ways, as an illustration of autocratic legalism (Scheppele 2018), democratic backsliding (Cianetti, Dawson, and Hanley 2018; Waldner and Lust 2018; Bernhard 2021), an expression of the populist uprising (Bodnar 2018) or a counter-revolution against liberal democracy (Sajó 2021; Krastev and Holmes 2019). These phenomena however are not limited solely to post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and can be found – to different degrees – across the entire EU polity. This panel examines the different forms of authoritarian backsliding and the processes of resistance they encounter from social and civil rights activists, various professional groups and the broader civil society.
On Music, Migrations, Diaspora and Cultural Exchanges
This panel is organised by the BASEES Slavonic and East European Music Study Group — SEEM (until 2023: Study Group for Russian and East European Music — REEM). The panel comprises three papers, each dealing with various facets of music, migrations, diaspora and cultural exchanges. The panelists focus on Romanian composers born between 1935 and 1945 who emigrated to France in the early 1970s, on the career of the remarkable British cellist Elizabeth Wilson (b. 1947) who served as an unofficial ambassador for non-conformist Soviet music during the Cold War, and finally on three waves of emigration of Ukrainian composers to the United Kingdom (after WWII, after 1991, and today). All three papers shed light on the hitherto unknown details from personal and collective histories and explain how the protagonists contributed to cultural exchanges in the most difficult circumstances.
Religion as a cultural and political resource in Russia
Religion and politics
The Power of Objects: Critical Studies of the Indigenous Heritage in Siberia
The notion of indigenous heritage is one of those taken-for-granted concepts that is constantly encountered in anthropological literature but rarely subjected to critical reflection (Moore 2022). Indigenous heritage is entangled with a broader conceptualisation of heritage regimes which are ‘fundamentally material and emerge from the power relationship’ and affect the politics of cultural recognition (Geismar 2015: 72). The Russian state heritage regime is closely intervened with its nationality policy. Thus, 2022, officially proclaimed by president Putin as ‘the Year of the Cultural Heritage of the peoples of Russia,’ ended with the opening of the Imperial Hall in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg, celebrating the idea of a ‘multiethnic empire’ through particular objects (‘imperial gifts’). The ideology behind the production of the national regime of heritage becomes clearer when it is juxtaposed against indigenous understandings of heritage, which are encompassed into their systems of values and grounded on the fluid dynamics of interaction with meaningful objects. This panel proposes new ideas and forms of examining the concept of indigenous heritage in an attempt to challenge the dominant top-down conceptualisation of heritage in Russia and to overcome the spatial limitations of current research by including Siberian Studies. In particular, we focus on the category of objects associated with human-non-human interactions (mostly interactions with spirits, but not only) among Siberian and Arctic indigenous communities. This category comprises objects that are loaded with high cultural value, situated at the crossroads of contested discourses and narratives. We propose to look at these objects through shifting sets of relationships and contexts, including those of family, museum, memory, and imagination.
19th-Century Russian Literature and Culture
Jewish Culture and Memory
Inside the Soviet Security State: Identity, Memory and Espionage
Political Participation and Democracy in CEE
Political participation by active and engaged society are often seen as the key characteristic of healthy and functioning democracies. Traditionally, political participation has been seen as the engagement with the political parties – voting, running for office, joining political parties -, activities that are seen to ensure representative politics. However, democratic systems have evolved, multiplied and changed. While representative democracy remains the dominant form of governance in Europe, we increasingly see forms of direct engagement of individuals as well as different communities via participatory budgeting platforms, formal and informal social movements, non-governmental organizations, protests or even politicized consumption habits. The question of what constitutes political participation and how it influences the current political landscape, as well as the reciprocal impact of the political landscape on political participation,has sparked a vibrant debate.
Theoretically the impact of political participation is unsettled. Historically, Eastern European studies have analyzed political participation in the context of democratization, linking the passive civic engagement to Soviet legacies. While participation in formal organizations is still largely passive in the Eastern European region, civic apathy is now frequently used to describe political participation also in older democracies. We can see emergence of informal movements indicating change in political engagement across Europe, but is it beneficial to democratic orders? The history or informal movements, such as Solidarnosc, shows us an example that informal societal ties can be mobilized to bring major changes or even overthrow the dominant system. To better understand the effects and causes of political participation, we are interested in looking at the ways in which people participate in politics.
This panel invites interdisciplinary research on the various types of political participation, questioning the forms of it and contemporary relationship with the state in the Central and Eastern European region. Some of the questions we ask, but are not limited to, what forms of political participation can strengthen democratic governance? What kind of everyday political practices people engage in? How the form of government fosters new types of political participation? Should states strive to increase political participation and what are the threats? Can political participation cure the ills of contemporary democracies? Should the passive political participation still be seen in the context of Soviet legacies or it rather represents the issues of the contemporary democracies that reach further out than just the Eastern European region?
Myths, memories and commemorations in the North II
The papers in this panel present results from the ongoing research project Normemo: Memory politics in the North: Norway and Russia 1993-2023. The project examines the memory politics and memory culture in Northwest Russia and in Russia's relations with its nordic neighbours throughout the post-Soviet period. The papers critically examine the transformation of historical narratives and memory work in local communities, at borders and on interstate diplomatic level. Scrutinizing processes of negotiations, contestations and adaptations between (trans-)regional and federal mnemonic actors, we explore the discussions that evolve around representing the past at regional level, what normative attitudes they reveal, and what material and symbolic resources act and compete in these processes.
New outlooks on economic life in the late Russian empire
This panel offers three perspectives on how we might look again at economic practices in the late Russian empire, in each case offering a reinterpretation or new exploration of a theme or topic that has been neglected in recent scholarship. Focusing on promysly (trades) in the European North, begging and almsgiving in Russian villages, and iarmarki (trade fairs) across the empire but particularly in Central Asia, the papers centre rural landscapes, economies and communities, seeking to understand and to highlight the many varied ways in which social and economic practices were mutually constitutive. The papers explore why and how people became involved in various specific economic activities (including, but not limited to, the production of tar, the sale of sheep, the collection of crusts), and consider multiple scales of production, value and exchange. The cases presented also situate, where possible, economic life in remote localities of the Russian empire in regional, global and trans-imperial settings, thus overcoming binary centre-periphery research perspectives and emphasising the agency and connectedness of local life, often seen as inert and passive. Collectively, the papers reflect on themes of empire and social and geographic marginalisation, considering what the history of groups (peasants, villagers, beggars and pastoralists) and places (Arkhangel’sk province, Central Asia) that often fall beyond the reach of more traditional economic histories can bring to our wider understandings of economic life in the late imperial period.
Besieged by the Future 4: Infrastructuring Preservation and Ruination
Russia's war against Ukraine has prompted a renewed debate about the limitations of social sciences and humanities to supply decision makers with predictive knowledge that is deemed necessary for action. However, these forms of criticism disregard the performative role of the anticipatory knowledge as well as the social contexts in which this type of knowledge operates. At the same time there is an ongoing boom of historical and critical studies of future making practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts, where scholars explore a wide range of practices of making sense of the future with the help of science, from literary fiction to computer modeling, from everyday practices to business consulting. This colloquium seeks to gather scholars representing different disciplines to take stock on the research into the diverse forms of future-making in the region and to consider their political impacts.
20th-century Russophone Poetic Affiliations as Products of Creative Affinity or a Matter of Place and Time.
In early years of the twentieth century, poets writing in Russian had a choice of poetic groups and movements to associate themselves with, if they so wished. The personnel, artistic agenda, and legacy of some of these groups, and those that emerged later, have been the object of study for literary historians seeking to define and map poetic networks, while poets themselves have announced their affinities in their own work, dedicating poems to figures in their own circle, and so asserting their connections to particular tendencies or traditions. The three papers in this panel explore different kinds of affiliation. Short-lived associations in a particular place and time can leave a lasting trace in the public imagination, without necessarily being firmly founded in a shared artistic credo or style. Other affiliations may be more indicative of a common creative vision among contemporaries which can endure over decades after the group has ceased to exist, but may be expressed in poems dedicated to fellow-poets long after their death which explore the survivor’s relationship with an often forgotten or marginalised tradition. The sense of connection can extend beyond time and space, as poets living in diaspora create communities which transcend the boundaries of space and time to find their place in a tradition that they themselves define.
Energy Transition and State Funding in the Times of Uncertainty
Religion as a cultural and political resource in Russia
Religion and politics
The Power of Objects: Critical Studies of the Indigenous Heritage in Siberia
The notion of indigenous heritage is one of those taken-for-granted concepts that is constantly encountered in anthropological literature but rarely subjected to critical reflection (Moore 2022). Indigenous heritage is entangled with a broader conceptualisation of heritage regimes which are ‘fundamentally material and emerge from the power relationship’ and affect the politics of cultural recognition (Geismar 2015: 72). The Russian state heritage regime is closely intervened with its nationality policy. Thus, 2022, officially proclaimed by president Putin as ‘the Year of the Cultural Heritage of the peoples of Russia,’ ended with the opening of the Imperial Hall in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg, celebrating the idea of a ‘multiethnic empire’ through particular objects (‘imperial gifts’). The ideology behind the production of the national regime of heritage becomes clearer when it is juxtaposed against indigenous understandings of heritage, which are encompassed into their systems of values and grounded on the fluid dynamics of interaction with meaningful objects. This panel proposes new ideas and forms of examining the concept of indigenous heritage in an attempt to challenge the dominant top-down conceptualisation of heritage in Russia and to overcome the spatial limitations of current research by including Siberian Studies. In particular, we focus on the category of objects associated with human-non-human interactions (mostly interactions with spirits, but not only) among Siberian and Arctic indigenous communities. This category comprises objects that are loaded with high cultural value, situated at the crossroads of contested discourses and narratives. We propose to look at these objects through shifting sets of relationships and contexts, including those of family, museum, memory, and imagination.
19th-Century Russian Literature and Culture
Jewish Culture and Memory
Inside the Soviet Security State: Identity, Memory and Espionage
The Power of Objects: Critical Studies of the Indigenous Heritage in Siberia
The notion of indigenous heritage is one of those taken-for-granted concepts that is constantly encountered in anthropological literature but rarely subjected to critical reflection (Moore 2022). Indigenous heritage is entangled with a broader conceptualisation of heritage regimes which are ‘fundamentally material and emerge from the power relationship’ and affect the politics of cultural recognition (Geismar 2015: 72). The Russian state heritage regime is closely intervened with its nationality policy. Thus, 2022, officially proclaimed by president Putin as ‘the Year of the Cultural Heritage of the peoples of Russia,’ ended with the opening of the Imperial Hall in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology (Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg, celebrating the idea of a ‘multiethnic empire’ through particular objects (‘imperial gifts’). The ideology behind the production of the national regime of heritage becomes clearer when it is juxtaposed against indigenous understandings of heritage, which are encompassed into their systems of values and grounded on the fluid dynamics of interaction with meaningful objects. This panel proposes new ideas and forms of examining the concept of indigenous heritage in an attempt to challenge the dominant top-down conceptualisation of heritage in Russia and to overcome the spatial limitations of current research by including Siberian Studies. In particular, we focus on the category of objects associated with human-non-human interactions (mostly interactions with spirits, but not only) among Siberian and Arctic indigenous communities. This category comprises objects that are loaded with high cultural value, situated at the crossroads of contested discourses and narratives. We propose to look at these objects through shifting sets of relationships and contexts, including those of family, museum, memory, and imagination.
19th-Century Russian Literature and Culture
Activism and protest
Russian domestic politics (1) – war and repression
Transnationalising Polish Studies
Constitutions, leaders, and non-democracy
Geopolitical Conflict, Wars and Regime Changes in the post-Soviet space: Consequences for the EU, Countries and Businesses
This panel deals with the consequences of the geopolitical conflict between the collective West (EU and USA) and Russia as well as the war in Ukraine, going along with major changes at regional, bilateral and country level in the post-Soviet region, and beyond. This panel takes a look at the consequences at country/regional level (Central Asia), in regards to EU policies, and the consequences for multinational enterprises operating in the region.
In this context, I will also present my paper:
Political Risks in the Post-Soviet Region: Geopolitical & Country Risks: Business Management Strategies
The paper analyses political risks characteristic of the post-Soviet region, drawing an analytical distinction between geopolitical risks, and risks at regional vs. country level. In order to explain why these specific risks are characteristic of almost all countries belonging to the post-Soviet space, it further highlights their historical roots. What political risks are characteristic of the region? How are they connected to Soviet (and pre-Soviet) legacy? The paper furthermore provides answers to the question of how enterprises identify, assess and manage these risks. The analysis draws on literature research and first-hand insights in the form of interviews and background conversations gained through various field research trips into the region since 2011.
Film production and distribution in the countries of the
Revolutionary Russia in the Shadow of the Great War
Opting in to socialism: volunteering in the post-Stalin Soviet Union
Religion as an agent of change in Russia
Besieged by the Future 5: Environing Technologies of Space, Climate and the Atom
Ties and Relations of Belarusian Culture to Western and Central Europe as Phenomena of Confessionalization in 16/18 cc.
The topic of the panel is the multicultural and multidisciplinary approach to studying the interactive contacts between the Western and Central parts of Europe and the East Slavic component of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL). — The first presenter, Hanna Mazheika, examines the image of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that was constructed through communication channels during the early modern period. Janusz Radziwiłł’s activities and the correspondence exchange between him and King James gave the Grand Duchy of Lithuania very much a Protestant identity at the international level, which was in contrast to the Polish monarchical authority whose identity was clearly Catholic. — The second paper presenter A. Susha deals with Francysk Skaryna heritage in the world: there are 520 printed copies and 45 handwritten texts of the Skaryna books that are stored in public and private collections in Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, the USA, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. — The third presenter, S. Földvári deals with Belarusian liturgical books in the Hungarian Kingdom. There are four rarities in five copies in the recent territory of Hungary: A) “Apostle” printed by Spiridon Sobol in Kutein, 1632; -B) “Four Gospel and Psalter” printed by the Basilian Order in Vilna (Vilnius) / Jewie (Vievis), in 1641; -C) two examples of the Supraśľ Liturgicon 1695 (Halenchenka, 1986: № 175); -D) a Psalter, printed by the Orthodox Confraternity in Mogiliov, 1738; (Halenchenka 1986: № 216) He discovered new archival sources about the provenance of these books. — The fourth presenter Siarhei Marozaŭ deals with the anniversaries as a form of historical memory correction and forming identity. E.g. 800th anniversary of Niasvizh (1223), 700th of Vilnius and Lida (1323), 600th of Ivanov (1423), 500th of Petrikov (1523). 555 years of the first law collection of GDL (1468). 400th anniversary of the sad religious event –saint Yazafat Kuntsevich was killed in Vitebsk (1623). – For further details and CV-s of the authors, please visit the site of our panel: https://wp.me/PD47I-cW
Regional variation and the development of written / standard Ukrainian
An important characteristic of Ukrainian is its substantial dialectal and regional variation. This has also had a strong impact on the evolution of written / standard Ukrainian. Two writing traditions are of particular importance, those of the western Ukraine and those of south-eastern and central Ukraine. Language contact contributed further, typically superstrate elements to the existing regional variation. The emergence of a unified, albeit to some extent still pluricentric standard language is one of the key features in the history of modern Ukrainian.
The panel features three case studies at different junctures in time since the late 19th century to the present day. They show the complex linguistic and extra-linguistic, historical factors involved in the selection and deselection of phonetic-phonological, lexical and other variant forms for standard Ukrainian. How to analyse these factors and their interaction raises questions that are also relevant for the history of many other Slavonic written / standard languages.
Figuring Class through Culture: Representations and Practices in Postsocialist Eastern Europe
The liberalization of the economy in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s also reconfigured social stratification. While socialist societies privileged workers, the primary focus of political interest arguably shifted towards the middle class already in the late socialist era. Membership in the middle classes became one of the central promises and aspirations of the subsequent postsocialist economic and political transformations; the working classes, on the other hand, experienced symbolic devaluation. These processes, this panel suggests, did not have only a political and economic dimension. Equally important for subjective perceptions of class positions and expectations in postsocialism is culture. Particular cultural practices became associated with performances of class identities, while representations created and continue to create role models of class-specific behaviour. This panel examines these processes in historical perspective, charting their development from the late 1980s onwards, on examples from Poland, Romania and Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Constructing Memory in/about Russia: Sites, Texts, Monuments
This conference panel examines different ways of memory formation in Russian culture. Analysing relationships between the social, the political, and the cultural the papers try to reveal the forming mechanisms of personal, national, and emigrant memory in different media. The first paper, “Unforgettable Memorial of My Momentary Bliss”: Nature as a Place of Personal Memory in Russian Sentimentalism, examines the 18th-century shift in European commemorative attitudes when the role of personal emotions was to be a necessary condition for public praise and recognition. Focusing on Russian sentimentalism, it shows how natural settings obtained profoundly personal meaning, serving as symbolic places of memory, thereby forging emotional connections between authors and their readers. The second paper “Russian Temples of Fame: the Idea of Public Pantheon in Time of Alexander I and Nicolas I” focuses on the idea of a set of sculptural images of national great men which was very popular during the the first half of the 19th century. The paper traces the evolution of this concept from mainly literary construct in Alexander I's era to its partial realisation in commemorative practices of Nicolas I in the context of main European political and cultural trends. Finally, the third presentation, “Churches of the New Holy Martyrs of Russian Church outside of Russia: Twice Distanced Past?” delves into ROCOR’s distinctive perspective on the Soviet past and its unique approach to commemorating the New Martyrs in the USA, offering a compelling alternative to post-Soviet Russian memory work.
Entangled cultural transfers and East Central Europe
When talking about cultural transfers, we usually mean mutual processes between two actors that enrich those who take part in them, and aim at connecting rather than dividing, as well as processes in which there is a linear transmission of ideas, concepts, customs between their senders and recipients. Considering Eastern and Central Europe, the most obvious direction of cultural transfer is from the West to the East.
In our panel, however, we want to significantly complicate such an optimistic image of cultural transfers as sharing the Western ideological wealth. First, we want to identify and describe a dialectical and sometimes even contradictory relationship between the parties involved in them. In our opinion, such ambiguity is typical of cultural transfers occurring in Central and Eastern Europe as the world’s semi-periphery. Secondly, we want to emphasize that the cultural transfers may also involve concepts that serve to subordinate others, for instance colonial and radical nationalistic ideas. Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez will demonstrate a cultural transfer between German and Polish radical nationalistic feminists in the beginning of the 20th-century. Elżbieta Kwiecińska will show how Max Weber's idea of the German civilising mission to establish capitalism was appropriated by Roman Dmowski, an integral nationalistic politician and Stanisław Szczepanowski, a liberal economist who supported self-civilising of rural Habsburg Galicia. Piotr Puchalski will discuss the transfer of (post)colonial concepts between British, Polish, and African officials in West and East Africa during World War II, suggesting the ways in which discourse about race and German atrocities was used for political purposes by each group. Katarzyna Roman-Rawska will analyse antitotalitarian, anti-imperialist utopia of Russian futurist, Velimir Khlebnikov. The main point in our research are cultural transfers as an element shaping social practices, influencing institutions, national movements, identities, and culture.
Carpathian Visions: Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet Imaginings of the Hutsuls, 1918-1941
This panel will explore outside imaginings of the Hutsuls, a highland people living in the Carpathian mountains in modern-day western Ukraine, in the first half of the twentieth century. Amongst highlanders inhabiting the Eastern Carpathians, the Hutsuls have been a magnet of particular ethnographic curiosity from lowlanders. Despite being a remote community, the Hutsuls have repeatedly found themselves at the crossroads of rival national and imperial projects (Polish, Ukrainian, Habsburg and Soviet) that have each sought to embrace the highlanders’ culture and appropriate it for their own state- and/or nation-building ambitions.
The panel focuses on the years 1918-1941, in which the Hutsul region was a contested tri-state area, fought over between Ukrainians and the titular nations of independent Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland, before ultimately being annexed by the USSR into Soviet Ukraine. In a wider range of interdisciplinary approaches to multiple scholarly and cultural discourses as manifested in different media, the papers will examine the political visions of the Hutsuls propagated by Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet figures. The papers seek to highlight both competing and common features between Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet efforts towards the highlanders and outline how rival state and non-state aspirations towards a peripheral region have impacted on wider understandings of national and imperial identities.
Historical Perspective on Russia's Economic Colonisation
The Post-Soviet Afterlives of Eastern Europe's Empires
Activism and protest
Russian domestic politics (1) – war and repression
Constitutions, leaders, and non-democracy
Revolutionary Russia in the Shadow of the Great War
Besieged by the Future 5: Environing Technologies of Space, Climate and the Atom
Entangled cultural transfers and East Central Europe
When talking about cultural transfers, we usually mean mutual processes between two actors that enrich those who take part in them, and aim at connecting rather than dividing, as well as processes in which there is a linear transmission of ideas, concepts, customs between their senders and recipients. Considering Eastern and Central Europe, the most obvious direction of cultural transfer is from the West to the East.
In our panel, however, we want to significantly complicate such an optimistic image of cultural transfers as sharing the Western ideological wealth. First, we want to identify and describe a dialectical and sometimes even contradictory relationship between the parties involved in them. In our opinion, such ambiguity is typical of cultural transfers occurring in Central and Eastern Europe as the world’s semi-periphery. Secondly, we want to emphasize that the cultural transfers may also involve concepts that serve to subordinate others, for instance colonial and radical nationalistic ideas. Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez will demonstrate a cultural transfer between German and Polish radical nationalistic feminists in the beginning of the 20th-century. Elżbieta Kwiecińska will show how Max Weber's idea of the German civilising mission to establish capitalism was appropriated by Roman Dmowski, an integral nationalistic politician and Stanisław Szczepanowski, a liberal economist who supported self-civilising of rural Habsburg Galicia. Piotr Puchalski will discuss the transfer of (post)colonial concepts between British, Polish, and African officials in West and East Africa during World War II, suggesting the ways in which discourse about race and German atrocities was used for political purposes by each group. Katarzyna Roman-Rawska will analyse antitotalitarian, anti-imperialist utopia of Russian futurist, Velimir Khlebnikov. The main point in our research are cultural transfers as an element shaping social practices, influencing institutions, national movements, identities, and culture.
Historical Perspective on Russia's Economic Colonisation
The Post-Soviet Afterlives of Eastern Europe's Empires
Transnationalising Polish Studies
Geopolitical Conflict, Wars and Regime Changes in the post-Soviet space: Consequences for the EU, Countries and Businesses
This panel deals with the consequences of the geopolitical conflict between the collective West (EU and USA) and Russia as well as the war in Ukraine, going along with major changes at regional, bilateral and country level in the post-Soviet region, and beyond. This panel takes a look at the consequences at country/regional level (Central Asia), in regards to EU policies, and the consequences for multinational enterprises operating in the region.
In this context, I will also present my paper:
Political Risks in the Post-Soviet Region: Geopolitical & Country Risks: Business Management Strategies
The paper analyses political risks characteristic of the post-Soviet region, drawing an analytical distinction between geopolitical risks, and risks at regional vs. country level. In order to explain why these specific risks are characteristic of almost all countries belonging to the post-Soviet space, it further highlights their historical roots. What political risks are characteristic of the region? How are they connected to Soviet (and pre-Soviet) legacy? The paper furthermore provides answers to the question of how enterprises identify, assess and manage these risks. The analysis draws on literature research and first-hand insights in the form of interviews and background conversations gained through various field research trips into the region since 2011.
Film production and distribution in the countries of the
Opting in to socialism: volunteering in the post-Stalin Soviet Union
Religion as an agent of change in Russia
Ties and Relations of Belarusian Culture to Western and Central Europe as Phenomena of Confessionalization in 16/18 cc.
The topic of the panel is the multicultural and multidisciplinary approach to studying the interactive contacts between the Western and Central parts of Europe and the East Slavic component of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL). — The first presenter, Hanna Mazheika, examines the image of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that was constructed through communication channels during the early modern period. Janusz Radziwiłł’s activities and the correspondence exchange between him and King James gave the Grand Duchy of Lithuania very much a Protestant identity at the international level, which was in contrast to the Polish monarchical authority whose identity was clearly Catholic. — The second paper presenter A. Susha deals with Francysk Skaryna heritage in the world: there are 520 printed copies and 45 handwritten texts of the Skaryna books that are stored in public and private collections in Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, the USA, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. — The third presenter, S. Földvári deals with Belarusian liturgical books in the Hungarian Kingdom. There are four rarities in five copies in the recent territory of Hungary: A) “Apostle” printed by Spiridon Sobol in Kutein, 1632; -B) “Four Gospel and Psalter” printed by the Basilian Order in Vilna (Vilnius) / Jewie (Vievis), in 1641; -C) two examples of the Supraśľ Liturgicon 1695 (Halenchenka, 1986: № 175); -D) a Psalter, printed by the Orthodox Confraternity in Mogiliov, 1738; (Halenchenka 1986: № 216) He discovered new archival sources about the provenance of these books. — The fourth presenter Siarhei Marozaŭ deals with the anniversaries as a form of historical memory correction and forming identity. E.g. 800th anniversary of Niasvizh (1223), 700th of Vilnius and Lida (1323), 600th of Ivanov (1423), 500th of Petrikov (1523). 555 years of the first law collection of GDL (1468). 400th anniversary of the sad religious event –saint Yazafat Kuntsevich was killed in Vitebsk (1623). – For further details and CV-s of the authors, please visit the site of our panel: https://wp.me/PD47I-cW
Regional variation and the development of written / standard Ukrainian
An important characteristic of Ukrainian is its substantial dialectal and regional variation. This has also had a strong impact on the evolution of written / standard Ukrainian. Two writing traditions are of particular importance, those of the western Ukraine and those of south-eastern and central Ukraine. Language contact contributed further, typically superstrate elements to the existing regional variation. The emergence of a unified, albeit to some extent still pluricentric standard language is one of the key features in the history of modern Ukrainian.
The panel features three case studies at different junctures in time since the late 19th century to the present day. They show the complex linguistic and extra-linguistic, historical factors involved in the selection and deselection of phonetic-phonological, lexical and other variant forms for standard Ukrainian. How to analyse these factors and their interaction raises questions that are also relevant for the history of many other Slavonic written / standard languages.
Figuring Class through Culture: Representations and Practices in Postsocialist Eastern Europe
The liberalization of the economy in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s also reconfigured social stratification. While socialist societies privileged workers, the primary focus of political interest arguably shifted towards the middle class already in the late socialist era. Membership in the middle classes became one of the central promises and aspirations of the subsequent postsocialist economic and political transformations; the working classes, on the other hand, experienced symbolic devaluation. These processes, this panel suggests, did not have only a political and economic dimension. Equally important for subjective perceptions of class positions and expectations in postsocialism is culture. Particular cultural practices became associated with performances of class identities, while representations created and continue to create role models of class-specific behaviour. This panel examines these processes in historical perspective, charting their development from the late 1980s onwards, on examples from Poland, Romania and Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Constructing Memory in/about Russia: Sites, Texts, Monuments
This conference panel examines different ways of memory formation in Russian culture. Analysing relationships between the social, the political, and the cultural the papers try to reveal the forming mechanisms of personal, national, and emigrant memory in different media. The first paper, “Unforgettable Memorial of My Momentary Bliss”: Nature as a Place of Personal Memory in Russian Sentimentalism, examines the 18th-century shift in European commemorative attitudes when the role of personal emotions was to be a necessary condition for public praise and recognition. Focusing on Russian sentimentalism, it shows how natural settings obtained profoundly personal meaning, serving as symbolic places of memory, thereby forging emotional connections between authors and their readers. The second paper “Russian Temples of Fame: the Idea of Public Pantheon in Time of Alexander I and Nicolas I” focuses on the idea of a set of sculptural images of national great men which was very popular during the the first half of the 19th century. The paper traces the evolution of this concept from mainly literary construct in Alexander I's era to its partial realisation in commemorative practices of Nicolas I in the context of main European political and cultural trends. Finally, the third presentation, “Churches of the New Holy Martyrs of Russian Church outside of Russia: Twice Distanced Past?” delves into ROCOR’s distinctive perspective on the Soviet past and its unique approach to commemorating the New Martyrs in the USA, offering a compelling alternative to post-Soviet Russian memory work.
Carpathian Visions: Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet Imaginings of the Hutsuls, 1918-1941
This panel will explore outside imaginings of the Hutsuls, a highland people living in the Carpathian mountains in modern-day western Ukraine, in the first half of the twentieth century. Amongst highlanders inhabiting the Eastern Carpathians, the Hutsuls have been a magnet of particular ethnographic curiosity from lowlanders. Despite being a remote community, the Hutsuls have repeatedly found themselves at the crossroads of rival national and imperial projects (Polish, Ukrainian, Habsburg and Soviet) that have each sought to embrace the highlanders’ culture and appropriate it for their own state- and/or nation-building ambitions.
The panel focuses on the years 1918-1941, in which the Hutsul region was a contested tri-state area, fought over between Ukrainians and the titular nations of independent Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland, before ultimately being annexed by the USSR into Soviet Ukraine. In a wider range of interdisciplinary approaches to multiple scholarly and cultural discourses as manifested in different media, the papers will examine the political visions of the Hutsuls propagated by Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet figures. The papers seek to highlight both competing and common features between Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet efforts towards the highlanders and outline how rival state and non-state aspirations towards a peripheral region have impacted on wider understandings of national and imperial identities.
Activism and protest
Russian domestic politics (1) – war and repression
Constitutions, leaders, and non-democracy
Revolutionary Russia in the Shadow of the Great War
Besieged by the Future 5: Environing Technologies of Space, Climate and the Atom
Entangled cultural transfers and East Central Europe
When talking about cultural transfers, we usually mean mutual processes between two actors that enrich those who take part in them, and aim at connecting rather than dividing, as well as processes in which there is a linear transmission of ideas, concepts, customs between their senders and recipients. Considering Eastern and Central Europe, the most obvious direction of cultural transfer is from the West to the East.
In our panel, however, we want to significantly complicate such an optimistic image of cultural transfers as sharing the Western ideological wealth. First, we want to identify and describe a dialectical and sometimes even contradictory relationship between the parties involved in them. In our opinion, such ambiguity is typical of cultural transfers occurring in Central and Eastern Europe as the world’s semi-periphery. Secondly, we want to emphasize that the cultural transfers may also involve concepts that serve to subordinate others, for instance colonial and radical nationalistic ideas. Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez will demonstrate a cultural transfer between German and Polish radical nationalistic feminists in the beginning of the 20th-century. Elżbieta Kwiecińska will show how Max Weber's idea of the German civilising mission to establish capitalism was appropriated by Roman Dmowski, an integral nationalistic politician and Stanisław Szczepanowski, a liberal economist who supported self-civilising of rural Habsburg Galicia. Piotr Puchalski will discuss the transfer of (post)colonial concepts between British, Polish, and African officials in West and East Africa during World War II, suggesting the ways in which discourse about race and German atrocities was used for political purposes by each group. Katarzyna Roman-Rawska will analyse antitotalitarian, anti-imperialist utopia of Russian futurist, Velimir Khlebnikov. The main point in our research are cultural transfers as an element shaping social practices, influencing institutions, national movements, identities, and culture.
Historical Perspective on Russia's Economic Colonisation
The Post-Soviet Afterlives of Eastern Europe's Empires
Transnationalising Polish Studies
Geopolitical Conflict, Wars and Regime Changes in the post-Soviet space: Consequences for the EU, Countries and Businesses
This panel deals with the consequences of the geopolitical conflict between the collective West (EU and USA) and Russia as well as the war in Ukraine, going along with major changes at regional, bilateral and country level in the post-Soviet region, and beyond. This panel takes a look at the consequences at country/regional level (Central Asia), in regards to EU policies, and the consequences for multinational enterprises operating in the region.
In this context, I will also present my paper:
Political Risks in the Post-Soviet Region: Geopolitical & Country Risks: Business Management Strategies
The paper analyses political risks characteristic of the post-Soviet region, drawing an analytical distinction between geopolitical risks, and risks at regional vs. country level. In order to explain why these specific risks are characteristic of almost all countries belonging to the post-Soviet space, it further highlights their historical roots. What political risks are characteristic of the region? How are they connected to Soviet (and pre-Soviet) legacy? The paper furthermore provides answers to the question of how enterprises identify, assess and manage these risks. The analysis draws on literature research and first-hand insights in the form of interviews and background conversations gained through various field research trips into the region since 2011.
Opting in to socialism: volunteering in the post-Stalin Soviet Union
Religion as an agent of change in Russia
Ties and Relations of Belarusian Culture to Western and Central Europe as Phenomena of Confessionalization in 16/18 cc.
The topic of the panel is the multicultural and multidisciplinary approach to studying the interactive contacts between the Western and Central parts of Europe and the East Slavic component of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL). — The first presenter, Hanna Mazheika, examines the image of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that was constructed through communication channels during the early modern period. Janusz Radziwiłł’s activities and the correspondence exchange between him and King James gave the Grand Duchy of Lithuania very much a Protestant identity at the international level, which was in contrast to the Polish monarchical authority whose identity was clearly Catholic. — The second paper presenter A. Susha deals with Francysk Skaryna heritage in the world: there are 520 printed copies and 45 handwritten texts of the Skaryna books that are stored in public and private collections in Belarus, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovenia, the USA, Ukraine and the Czech Republic. — The third presenter, S. Földvári deals with Belarusian liturgical books in the Hungarian Kingdom. There are four rarities in five copies in the recent territory of Hungary: A) “Apostle” printed by Spiridon Sobol in Kutein, 1632; -B) “Four Gospel and Psalter” printed by the Basilian Order in Vilna (Vilnius) / Jewie (Vievis), in 1641; -C) two examples of the Supraśľ Liturgicon 1695 (Halenchenka, 1986: № 175); -D) a Psalter, printed by the Orthodox Confraternity in Mogiliov, 1738; (Halenchenka 1986: № 216) He discovered new archival sources about the provenance of these books. — The fourth presenter Siarhei Marozaŭ deals with the anniversaries as a form of historical memory correction and forming identity. E.g. 800th anniversary of Niasvizh (1223), 700th of Vilnius and Lida (1323), 600th of Ivanov (1423), 500th of Petrikov (1523). 555 years of the first law collection of GDL (1468). 400th anniversary of the sad religious event –saint Yazafat Kuntsevich was killed in Vitebsk (1623). – For further details and CV-s of the authors, please visit the site of our panel: https://wp.me/PD47I-cW
Regional variation and the development of written / standard Ukrainian
An important characteristic of Ukrainian is its substantial dialectal and regional variation. This has also had a strong impact on the evolution of written / standard Ukrainian. Two writing traditions are of particular importance, those of the western Ukraine and those of south-eastern and central Ukraine. Language contact contributed further, typically superstrate elements to the existing regional variation. The emergence of a unified, albeit to some extent still pluricentric standard language is one of the key features in the history of modern Ukrainian.
The panel features three case studies at different junctures in time since the late 19th century to the present day. They show the complex linguistic and extra-linguistic, historical factors involved in the selection and deselection of phonetic-phonological, lexical and other variant forms for standard Ukrainian. How to analyse these factors and their interaction raises questions that are also relevant for the history of many other Slavonic written / standard languages.
Figuring Class through Culture: Representations and Practices in Postsocialist Eastern Europe
The liberalization of the economy in Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s also reconfigured social stratification. While socialist societies privileged workers, the primary focus of political interest arguably shifted towards the middle class already in the late socialist era. Membership in the middle classes became one of the central promises and aspirations of the subsequent postsocialist economic and political transformations; the working classes, on the other hand, experienced symbolic devaluation. These processes, this panel suggests, did not have only a political and economic dimension. Equally important for subjective perceptions of class positions and expectations in postsocialism is culture. Particular cultural practices became associated with performances of class identities, while representations created and continue to create role models of class-specific behaviour. This panel examines these processes in historical perspective, charting their development from the late 1980s onwards, on examples from Poland, Romania and Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Constructing Memory in/about Russia: Sites, Texts, Monuments
This conference panel examines different ways of memory formation in Russian culture. Analysing relationships between the social, the political, and the cultural the papers try to reveal the forming mechanisms of personal, national, and emigrant memory in different media. The first paper, “Unforgettable Memorial of My Momentary Bliss”: Nature as a Place of Personal Memory in Russian Sentimentalism, examines the 18th-century shift in European commemorative attitudes when the role of personal emotions was to be a necessary condition for public praise and recognition. Focusing on Russian sentimentalism, it shows how natural settings obtained profoundly personal meaning, serving as symbolic places of memory, thereby forging emotional connections between authors and their readers. The second paper “Russian Temples of Fame: the Idea of Public Pantheon in Time of Alexander I and Nicolas I” focuses on the idea of a set of sculptural images of national great men which was very popular during the the first half of the 19th century. The paper traces the evolution of this concept from mainly literary construct in Alexander I's era to its partial realisation in commemorative practices of Nicolas I in the context of main European political and cultural trends. Finally, the third presentation, “Churches of the New Holy Martyrs of Russian Church outside of Russia: Twice Distanced Past?” delves into ROCOR’s distinctive perspective on the Soviet past and its unique approach to commemorating the New Martyrs in the USA, offering a compelling alternative to post-Soviet Russian memory work.
Carpathian Visions: Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet Imaginings of the Hutsuls, 1918-1941
This panel will explore outside imaginings of the Hutsuls, a highland people living in the Carpathian mountains in modern-day western Ukraine, in the first half of the twentieth century. Amongst highlanders inhabiting the Eastern Carpathians, the Hutsuls have been a magnet of particular ethnographic curiosity from lowlanders. Despite being a remote community, the Hutsuls have repeatedly found themselves at the crossroads of rival national and imperial projects (Polish, Ukrainian, Habsburg and Soviet) that have each sought to embrace the highlanders’ culture and appropriate it for their own state- and/or nation-building ambitions.
The panel focuses on the years 1918-1941, in which the Hutsul region was a contested tri-state area, fought over between Ukrainians and the titular nations of independent Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland, before ultimately being annexed by the USSR into Soviet Ukraine. In a wider range of interdisciplinary approaches to multiple scholarly and cultural discourses as manifested in different media, the papers will examine the political visions of the Hutsuls propagated by Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet figures. The papers seek to highlight both competing and common features between Polish, Ukrainian and Soviet efforts towards the highlanders and outline how rival state and non-state aspirations towards a peripheral region have impacted on wider understandings of national and imperial identities.
Activism and protest
Russian domestic politics (1) – war and repression
Constitutions, leaders, and non-democracy
Revolutionary Russia in the Shadow of the Great War
Entangled cultural transfers and East Central Europe
When talking about cultural transfers, we usually mean mutual processes between two actors that enrich those who take part in them, and aim at connecting rather than dividing, as well as processes in which there is a linear transmission of ideas, concepts, customs between their senders and recipients. Considering Eastern and Central Europe, the most obvious direction of cultural transfer is from the West to the East.
In our panel, however, we want to significantly complicate such an optimistic image of cultural transfers as sharing the Western ideological wealth. First, we want to identify and describe a dialectical and sometimes even contradictory relationship between the parties involved in them. In our opinion, such ambiguity is typical of cultural transfers occurring in Central and Eastern Europe as the world’s semi-periphery. Secondly, we want to emphasize that the cultural transfers may also involve concepts that serve to subordinate others, for instance colonial and radical nationalistic ideas. Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez will demonstrate a cultural transfer between German and Polish radical nationalistic feminists in the beginning of the 20th-century. Elżbieta Kwiecińska will show how Max Weber's idea of the German civilising mission to establish capitalism was appropriated by Roman Dmowski, an integral nationalistic politician and Stanisław Szczepanowski, a liberal economist who supported self-civilising of rural Habsburg Galicia. Piotr Puchalski will discuss the transfer of (post)colonial concepts between British, Polish, and African officials in West and East Africa during World War II, suggesting the ways in which discourse about race and German atrocities was used for political purposes by each group. Katarzyna Roman-Rawska will analyse antitotalitarian, anti-imperialist utopia of Russian futurist, Velimir Khlebnikov. The main point in our research are cultural transfers as an element shaping social practices, influencing institutions, national movements, identities, and culture.
Historical Perspective on Russia's Economic Colonisation
The Post-Soviet Afterlives of Eastern Europe's Empires
Activism and protest
Russian domestic politics (1) – war and repression
Constitutions, leaders, and non-democracy
Popular Resistance to the Regime in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia
The EU (1) – membership and leverage
Russian domestic politics (2) – parties, ideologies, and elites
Staging Poland and East-Central Europe in the early 20th century
Varieties of Rentierism: Third-Country Opportunities Amid Russia's War in Ukraine
Teaching difficult histories across Central and Eastern Europe
History teaching stands at the centre of political conflicts across Central and Eastern Europe. Authoritarian and populist regimes (ab)use history for present-day divisive purposes, such as winning a national election (Poland) or mobilising people for war (Russia). Against this trend, numerous local and transnational initiatives – including education-centred NGOs or international historical commissions – strive to underline history’s multi-perspectivity and its reconciliatory potential. This panel explores how difficult, contested histories are framed in textbooks and curricula across Central and Eastern Europe. How do international organisations, such as the European Union, EuroClio, or the Polish-German Textbook Commission, bridge competing narratives on the past? To what extent do transnational educational initiatives come into conflict with the priorities of national governments and regulators? How is the teaching of history affected by geopolitical events (such as the fall of the Iron Curtain), by territorial changes (such as the dissolution of the USSR), and by population movements (such as the influx of Ukrainian refugees into the EU in 2022)? What parallels do debates about education in Central and Eastern Europe have with those present in other parts of the world? Can the experiences with decolonisation and reconciliation in other countries inform educational practices and policymaking in the region? Papers in this panel cover a range of countries in Central and Eastern Europe (and beyond) and draw on literature and methods from diverse fields, including history, education, and literary studies. They are united by their sensitivity to the emotionally- and politically-charged nature of history teaching, but also by a cautious optimism about education’s reconciliatory potential.
Policies and practices of the information wars
Hungarian state- and nation-building experiences exported to the Balkans, Anatolia and Central Asia (19th-21st centuries)
The study of the global export of European state- and nation-building experiences from a historiographical perspective is essentially limited to the transatlantic world. Little research has examined the aspirations of Eastern European nations and nation-states in a global context. The relevant Hungarian, Czech (Slovak), Polish, etc. ambitions, however, have had a strong influence on the reform movements of many African, Latin American or Asian countries from the mid-19th century to the present.
What is unique about the export of Hungarian nation- and state-building experience is that, it is based on a former empire-building tradition and an empire-building ideology. At the turn of the century, the Hungarian political elite attempted (1896-1918) to formally organize the Kingdom of Hungary into an empire within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian dualist system, and to create an informal empire beyond the borders of the state, based on the ideology of Turanism, in the Balkans and, under fortunate conditions, in Anatolia and Turkic Central Asia. Although this experiment failed, Turanism survived the fall of the Danube Monarchy and created the ideological basis for the export of Hungarian nation- and state-building experiences to Central Asia that continue today.
This interdisciplinary panel aims to demonstrate how some of the engineers of the Hungarian nation and nation-state participated in the nation-building processes of Bosnia and Albania, modern Turkey, Central Asia and Mongolia.
Rethinking Dostoevsky
This panel includes three papers offering new approaches to Dostoevsky. Alina Wyman examines the suspension between two different value systems in Ivan Karamazov's philosophy of rebellion, arguing for an continuity of the 'underground' mentality in Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian novels, linking Ivan to the Underground Man and other 'metaphysical rebels'. Octavian Gabor explores the link between truth and freedom in The Brothers Karamazov, asking whether confession and revelation can set one free. Finally, Connor Doak's paper explores what a queer reading of Dostoevsky might look like, arguing that Dostoevsky's novels offer an implicit critique of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Russia, as well as offering glimpses of queer alternatives.
Ties and Relations of Belarusian Culture to Western and Central Europe as Phenomena of Confessionalization in 16/18 cc. - second panel of the session.
It is the continuation of the previous panel under the same title. It is an open panel, for further participants to join, who come beyond the first Belarusian panel, because that has already been full with four paper presenters. The main topic of the panel is the multicultural and multidisciplinary study of the interactive contacts between the East Slavic component of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (furthermore GDL). - furthermore, see the description of the first panel above.
Russian in Use, Russian in Context(s)
Human rights in Eastern Europe: historical and comparative perspectives
How we can use the past to better understand the future? To what extent do shared experiences of totalitarianism matter in conceptualising human rights? The speakers in this panel explore the different ways human rights developed in the region of Eastern Europe and Russia to cast new light on the unprecedented human rights mobilisation in five countries of Eastern Europe – Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Russia – whose citizens until recently brought more than fifty per cent of all the claims to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
Research Data Quality in Times of War: New Challenges, Questions, and Solutions
The full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine has fundamental consequences for conducting empirical research on the whole region. Access to the field is possible only to a limited extent, scientific cooperation is restricted, the validity of public opinion polls is questioned, terminologies and concepts need revision, and methods have to be adjusted, to name but a few challenges. This has severe consequences for the quality of research data, and thus, scientific work and knowledge production.
The participants of this panel address the (new) problems related to data quality: from gaining access to potential respondents, to comparability of data before and after the Russian invasion, or validity of public opinion polls under circumstances of large migration waves (as in Ukraine) or increasing repression of free thought (as in Russia).
As a potential solution, that combines a research data repository specifically designed for area studies on Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, with a discussion platform that brings together scholars that discuss such issues of research data quality, Discuss Data (www.discuss-data.net) will be presented in this panel.
Panelists:
Marnie Howlett, University of Oxford:
"Methods vs. Ethics When Researching War"
Eduard Klein, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen:
“The potential of Discuss Data for research data management and discussion platform for data quality”
Volodymyr Paniotto, Kyiv International Institute of Sociology:
“Methods for data quality assessment in surveys during the war in Ukraine and Russia”
Michael Rochlitz, University of Oxford:
"Conducting Public Opinion Survey in Russia: Data Quality, Practical Issues and Examples of Recent Research"
Gender, Identity and Body in Ekaterina Bakunina's Prose and Poetry
This panel marks a pioneering effort, being the first ever dedicated solely to the exploration of Ekaterina Bakunina's literary legacy. One of the forgotten figures of the Russian interwar diaspora, she explored topics as varied as national identity, women's physicality and sexuality and motherhood. Her work, particularly her feminist themes, positioned her ahead of her contemporaries, yet she faced neglect and criticism, largely stemming from her outspokenness, especially regarding the woman’s body, identity and position in society. The three talks in this panel will focus on different aspects of her oeuvre. In the first presentation, the presenter will analyse Bakunina’s poetry, delving into its intricate themes of identity and its distinctive "human document" style. Through this lens, the presentation aims to position Bakunina's lyrical work within the broader context of her literary contemporaries.The second talk will focus on the aspects of physicality and memory in the Bakunina's first novel Тело (1933). The last take will center around the notions of gender, identity and motherhood in Bakunina's second and last novel Любовь к шестерым (1935) and especially in the author's notions of maternity and matrimony in the context of both her émigré and Soviet contemporaries. The talks are arranged according to the chronology of Bakunina’s publications in order to follow the evolution of her writing. The panel will provide an excellent opportunity to reevaluate Bakunina’s contributions to literature and her place in the Russian émigré and feminist canons.
Joseph Brodsky's Legacy and Brodsky Studies
The panel will discuss the legacy of the Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) and the emergence of Brodsky studies. In 2024, a volume entitled JOSEPH BRODSKY AND MODERN RUSSIAN CULTURE edited by Joe Andrew, Katharine Hodgson, Robert Reid and Alexandra Smith will be published by Brill. This volume will contain a range of articles focused on Brodsky's writing and his legacy as well as on the role played by Valentina Polukhina in the creation of what we now call Brodsky Studies. Polukhina's impact on Brodsky scholarship will be assessed in two contributions to this panel, which are based on the chapters of the forthcoming volume. The third paper will focus on Brodsky's work and question the dominant interpretation of Brodsky as an a-political poet.
Roundtable: Russian coal industry in the era of climate change and energy transition.
Case of the Russian coal industry in the era of climate change and energy transition: Why it will survive and will not become a bargaining chip in relations with the West? Monograph presentation and roundtable discussionPanelists will discuss key conclusions of the book and possible outcomes for the Russian energy sector, based on a specific case of the coal industry. The Russian coal sector today faces challenges in the form of global decarbonization, sanctions, and difficulties in retaining market access and competitiveness. This new market environment warrants an examination of what lessons can be drawn from the past tribulations of one of Russia’s most iconic and strategically important industries. This book analyzes the Russian coal industry developments in historical and political contexts, including those of energy transition. The key tenets of contemporary dialogue between Russia and those who advocate for a speedy energy transition to phase out coal are presented. The book addresses the question of the coal industry as a sacrifice for the sake of Russia’s rapprochement with the West. The contribution of this book, therefore, is filling the gap between two large research inquiries – climate change mitigation and energy transition on the one hand, and the existing large coal industry of a given country on the other.
Late Soviet Temporalities: Buddhism and Late Soviet Culture
The 1960s and 1970s saw a remarkable revival of interest in organised religion, esotericism and spiritual practices, which in turn shaped the thought and artistic production of underground circles across the Soviet Union, including those in Kyiv, Moscow and Leningrad. In this context, artists, writers and philosophers became engaged with Eastern religious philosophy, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Sufism. Particularly Buddhism infused various texts and images that were produced in the underground milieus of late socialism. This panel explores how a “Buddhist turn” in the late Soviet Union shaped the aesthetics in literature, performance art and music. Some of the questions that this panel aims to address are the following: why did artists across the Soviet Union choose to incorporate Buddhist ideas and practices in their artistic expression? And how does the turn towards Buddhism in culture relates to the shift in perceptions of time during the late Soviet period? This panel explores these questions through three different case studies: Buddhist elements in metaphysical realist writing, and particularly that by Yuri Mamleev; the influence of Zen Buddhism on Valentin Silvestrov’s music; and the relationship between Buddhist meditative practices and the performance art of Collective Actions.
Popular Resistance to the Regime in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia
The EU (1) – membership and leverage
Russian domestic politics (2) – parties, ideologies, and elites
Teaching difficult histories across Central and Eastern Europe
History teaching stands at the centre of political conflicts across Central and Eastern Europe. Authoritarian and populist regimes (ab)use history for present-day divisive purposes, such as winning a national election (Poland) or mobilising people for war (Russia). Against this trend, numerous local and transnational initiatives – including education-centred NGOs or international historical commissions – strive to underline history’s multi-perspectivity and its reconciliatory potential. This panel explores how difficult, contested histories are framed in textbooks and curricula across Central and Eastern Europe. How do international organisations, such as the European Union, EuroClio, or the Polish-German Textbook Commission, bridge competing narratives on the past? To what extent do transnational educational initiatives come into conflict with the priorities of national governments and regulators? How is the teaching of history affected by geopolitical events (such as the fall of the Iron Curtain), by territorial changes (such as the dissolution of the USSR), and by population movements (such as the influx of Ukrainian refugees into the EU in 2022)? What parallels do debates about education in Central and Eastern Europe have with those present in other parts of the world? Can the experiences with decolonisation and reconciliation in other countries inform educational practices and policymaking in the region? Papers in this panel cover a range of countries in Central and Eastern Europe (and beyond) and draw on literature and methods from diverse fields, including history, education, and literary studies. They are united by their sensitivity to the emotionally- and politically-charged nature of history teaching, but also by a cautious optimism about education’s reconciliatory potential.
Policies and practices of the information wars
Hungarian state- and nation-building experiences exported to the Balkans, Anatolia and Central Asia (19th-21st centuries)
The study of the global export of European state- and nation-building experiences from a historiographical perspective is essentially limited to the transatlantic world. Little research has examined the aspirations of Eastern European nations and nation-states in a global context. The relevant Hungarian, Czech (Slovak), Polish, etc. ambitions, however, have had a strong influence on the reform movements of many African, Latin American or Asian countries from the mid-19th century to the present.
What is unique about the export of Hungarian nation- and state-building experience is that, it is based on a former empire-building tradition and an empire-building ideology. At the turn of the century, the Hungarian political elite attempted (1896-1918) to formally organize the Kingdom of Hungary into an empire within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian dualist system, and to create an informal empire beyond the borders of the state, based on the ideology of Turanism, in the Balkans and, under fortunate conditions, in Anatolia and Turkic Central Asia. Although this experiment failed, Turanism survived the fall of the Danube Monarchy and created the ideological basis for the export of Hungarian nation- and state-building experiences to Central Asia that continue today.
This interdisciplinary panel aims to demonstrate how some of the engineers of the Hungarian nation and nation-state participated in the nation-building processes of Bosnia and Albania, modern Turkey, Central Asia and Mongolia.
Human rights in Eastern Europe: historical and comparative perspectives
How we can use the past to better understand the future? To what extent do shared experiences of totalitarianism matter in conceptualising human rights? The speakers in this panel explore the different ways human rights developed in the region of Eastern Europe and Russia to cast new light on the unprecedented human rights mobilisation in five countries of Eastern Europe – Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Russia – whose citizens until recently brought more than fifty per cent of all the claims to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
Research Data Quality in Times of War: New Challenges, Questions, and Solutions
The full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine has fundamental consequences for conducting empirical research on the whole region. Access to the field is possible only to a limited extent, scientific cooperation is restricted, the validity of public opinion polls is questioned, terminologies and concepts need revision, and methods have to be adjusted, to name but a few challenges. This has severe consequences for the quality of research data, and thus, scientific work and knowledge production.
The participants of this panel address the (new) problems related to data quality: from gaining access to potential respondents, to comparability of data before and after the Russian invasion, or validity of public opinion polls under circumstances of large migration waves (as in Ukraine) or increasing repression of free thought (as in Russia).
As a potential solution, that combines a research data repository specifically designed for area studies on Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, with a discussion platform that brings together scholars that discuss such issues of research data quality, Discuss Data (www.discuss-data.net) will be presented in this panel.
Panelists:
Marnie Howlett, University of Oxford:
"Methods vs. Ethics When Researching War"
Eduard Klein, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen:
“The potential of Discuss Data for research data management and discussion platform for data quality”
Volodymyr Paniotto, Kyiv International Institute of Sociology:
“Methods for data quality assessment in surveys during the war in Ukraine and Russia”
Michael Rochlitz, University of Oxford:
"Conducting Public Opinion Survey in Russia: Data Quality, Practical Issues and Examples of Recent Research"
Joseph Brodsky's Legacy and Brodsky Studies
The panel will discuss the legacy of the Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) and the emergence of Brodsky studies. In 2024, a volume entitled JOSEPH BRODSKY AND MODERN RUSSIAN CULTURE edited by Joe Andrew, Katharine Hodgson, Robert Reid and Alexandra Smith will be published by Brill. This volume will contain a range of articles focused on Brodsky's writing and his legacy as well as on the role played by Valentina Polukhina in the creation of what we now call Brodsky Studies. Polukhina's impact on Brodsky scholarship will be assessed in two contributions to this panel, which are based on the chapters of the forthcoming volume. The third paper will focus on Brodsky's work and question the dominant interpretation of Brodsky as an a-political poet.
Late Soviet Temporalities: Buddhism and Late Soviet Culture
The 1960s and 1970s saw a remarkable revival of interest in organised religion, esotericism and spiritual practices, which in turn shaped the thought and artistic production of underground circles across the Soviet Union, including those in Kyiv, Moscow and Leningrad. In this context, artists, writers and philosophers became engaged with Eastern religious philosophy, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Sufism. Particularly Buddhism infused various texts and images that were produced in the underground milieus of late socialism. This panel explores how a “Buddhist turn” in the late Soviet Union shaped the aesthetics in literature, performance art and music. Some of the questions that this panel aims to address are the following: why did artists across the Soviet Union choose to incorporate Buddhist ideas and practices in their artistic expression? And how does the turn towards Buddhism in culture relates to the shift in perceptions of time during the late Soviet period? This panel explores these questions through three different case studies: Buddhist elements in metaphysical realist writing, and particularly that by Yuri Mamleev; the influence of Zen Buddhism on Valentin Silvestrov’s music; and the relationship between Buddhist meditative practices and the performance art of Collective Actions.
Staging Poland and East-Central Europe in the early 20th century
Varieties of Rentierism: Third-Country Opportunities Amid Russia's War in Ukraine
Rethinking Dostoevsky
This panel includes three papers offering new approaches to Dostoevsky. Alina Wyman examines the suspension between two different value systems in Ivan Karamazov's philosophy of rebellion, arguing for an continuity of the 'underground' mentality in Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian novels, linking Ivan to the Underground Man and other 'metaphysical rebels'. Octavian Gabor explores the link between truth and freedom in The Brothers Karamazov, asking whether confession and revelation can set one free. Finally, Connor Doak's paper explores what a queer reading of Dostoevsky might look like, arguing that Dostoevsky's novels offer an implicit critique of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Russia, as well as offering glimpses of queer alternatives.
Ties and Relations of Belarusian Culture to Western and Central Europe as Phenomena of Confessionalization in 16/18 cc. - second panel of the session.
It is the continuation of the previous panel under the same title. It is an open panel, for further participants to join, who come beyond the first Belarusian panel, because that has already been full with four paper presenters. The main topic of the panel is the multicultural and multidisciplinary study of the interactive contacts between the East Slavic component of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (furthermore GDL). - furthermore, see the description of the first panel above.
Russian in Use, Russian in Context(s)
Gender, Identity and Body in Ekaterina Bakunina's Prose and Poetry
This panel marks a pioneering effort, being the first ever dedicated solely to the exploration of Ekaterina Bakunina's literary legacy. One of the forgotten figures of the Russian interwar diaspora, she explored topics as varied as national identity, women's physicality and sexuality and motherhood. Her work, particularly her feminist themes, positioned her ahead of her contemporaries, yet she faced neglect and criticism, largely stemming from her outspokenness, especially regarding the woman’s body, identity and position in society. The three talks in this panel will focus on different aspects of her oeuvre. In the first presentation, the presenter will analyse Bakunina’s poetry, delving into its intricate themes of identity and its distinctive "human document" style. Through this lens, the presentation aims to position Bakunina's lyrical work within the broader context of her literary contemporaries.The second talk will focus on the aspects of physicality and memory in the Bakunina's first novel Тело (1933). The last take will center around the notions of gender, identity and motherhood in Bakunina's second and last novel Любовь к шестерым (1935) and especially in the author's notions of maternity and matrimony in the context of both her émigré and Soviet contemporaries. The talks are arranged according to the chronology of Bakunina’s publications in order to follow the evolution of her writing. The panel will provide an excellent opportunity to reevaluate Bakunina’s contributions to literature and her place in the Russian émigré and feminist canons.
Popular Resistance to the Regime in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia
The EU (1) – membership and leverage
Russian domestic politics (2) – parties, ideologies, and elites
Teaching difficult histories across Central and Eastern Europe
History teaching stands at the centre of political conflicts across Central and Eastern Europe. Authoritarian and populist regimes (ab)use history for present-day divisive purposes, such as winning a national election (Poland) or mobilising people for war (Russia). Against this trend, numerous local and transnational initiatives – including education-centred NGOs or international historical commissions – strive to underline history’s multi-perspectivity and its reconciliatory potential. This panel explores how difficult, contested histories are framed in textbooks and curricula across Central and Eastern Europe. How do international organisations, such as the European Union, EuroClio, or the Polish-German Textbook Commission, bridge competing narratives on the past? To what extent do transnational educational initiatives come into conflict with the priorities of national governments and regulators? How is the teaching of history affected by geopolitical events (such as the fall of the Iron Curtain), by territorial changes (such as the dissolution of the USSR), and by population movements (such as the influx of Ukrainian refugees into the EU in 2022)? What parallels do debates about education in Central and Eastern Europe have with those present in other parts of the world? Can the experiences with decolonisation and reconciliation in other countries inform educational practices and policymaking in the region? Papers in this panel cover a range of countries in Central and Eastern Europe (and beyond) and draw on literature and methods from diverse fields, including history, education, and literary studies. They are united by their sensitivity to the emotionally- and politically-charged nature of history teaching, but also by a cautious optimism about education’s reconciliatory potential.
Policies and practices of the information wars
Hungarian state- and nation-building experiences exported to the Balkans, Anatolia and Central Asia (19th-21st centuries)
The study of the global export of European state- and nation-building experiences from a historiographical perspective is essentially limited to the transatlantic world. Little research has examined the aspirations of Eastern European nations and nation-states in a global context. The relevant Hungarian, Czech (Slovak), Polish, etc. ambitions, however, have had a strong influence on the reform movements of many African, Latin American or Asian countries from the mid-19th century to the present.
What is unique about the export of Hungarian nation- and state-building experience is that, it is based on a former empire-building tradition and an empire-building ideology. At the turn of the century, the Hungarian political elite attempted (1896-1918) to formally organize the Kingdom of Hungary into an empire within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian dualist system, and to create an informal empire beyond the borders of the state, based on the ideology of Turanism, in the Balkans and, under fortunate conditions, in Anatolia and Turkic Central Asia. Although this experiment failed, Turanism survived the fall of the Danube Monarchy and created the ideological basis for the export of Hungarian nation- and state-building experiences to Central Asia that continue today.
This interdisciplinary panel aims to demonstrate how some of the engineers of the Hungarian nation and nation-state participated in the nation-building processes of Bosnia and Albania, modern Turkey, Central Asia and Mongolia.
Human rights in Eastern Europe: historical and comparative perspectives
How we can use the past to better understand the future? To what extent do shared experiences of totalitarianism matter in conceptualising human rights? The speakers in this panel explore the different ways human rights developed in the region of Eastern Europe and Russia to cast new light on the unprecedented human rights mobilisation in five countries of Eastern Europe – Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Russia – whose citizens until recently brought more than fifty per cent of all the claims to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
Research Data Quality in Times of War: New Challenges, Questions, and Solutions
The full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine has fundamental consequences for conducting empirical research on the whole region. Access to the field is possible only to a limited extent, scientific cooperation is restricted, the validity of public opinion polls is questioned, terminologies and concepts need revision, and methods have to be adjusted, to name but a few challenges. This has severe consequences for the quality of research data, and thus, scientific work and knowledge production.
The participants of this panel address the (new) problems related to data quality: from gaining access to potential respondents, to comparability of data before and after the Russian invasion, or validity of public opinion polls under circumstances of large migration waves (as in Ukraine) or increasing repression of free thought (as in Russia).
As a potential solution, that combines a research data repository specifically designed for area studies on Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, with a discussion platform that brings together scholars that discuss such issues of research data quality, Discuss Data (www.discuss-data.net) will be presented in this panel.
Panelists:
Marnie Howlett, University of Oxford:
"Methods vs. Ethics When Researching War"
Eduard Klein, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen:
“The potential of Discuss Data for research data management and discussion platform for data quality”
Volodymyr Paniotto, Kyiv International Institute of Sociology:
“Methods for data quality assessment in surveys during the war in Ukraine and Russia”
Michael Rochlitz, University of Oxford:
"Conducting Public Opinion Survey in Russia: Data Quality, Practical Issues and Examples of Recent Research"
Joseph Brodsky's Legacy and Brodsky Studies
The panel will discuss the legacy of the Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) and the emergence of Brodsky studies. In 2024, a volume entitled JOSEPH BRODSKY AND MODERN RUSSIAN CULTURE edited by Joe Andrew, Katharine Hodgson, Robert Reid and Alexandra Smith will be published by Brill. This volume will contain a range of articles focused on Brodsky's writing and his legacy as well as on the role played by Valentina Polukhina in the creation of what we now call Brodsky Studies. Polukhina's impact on Brodsky scholarship will be assessed in two contributions to this panel, which are based on the chapters of the forthcoming volume. The third paper will focus on Brodsky's work and question the dominant interpretation of Brodsky as an a-political poet.
Late Soviet Temporalities: Buddhism and Late Soviet Culture
The 1960s and 1970s saw a remarkable revival of interest in organised religion, esotericism and spiritual practices, which in turn shaped the thought and artistic production of underground circles across the Soviet Union, including those in Kyiv, Moscow and Leningrad. In this context, artists, writers and philosophers became engaged with Eastern religious philosophy, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Sufism. Particularly Buddhism infused various texts and images that were produced in the underground milieus of late socialism. This panel explores how a “Buddhist turn” in the late Soviet Union shaped the aesthetics in literature, performance art and music. Some of the questions that this panel aims to address are the following: why did artists across the Soviet Union choose to incorporate Buddhist ideas and practices in their artistic expression? And how does the turn towards Buddhism in culture relates to the shift in perceptions of time during the late Soviet period? This panel explores these questions through three different case studies: Buddhist elements in metaphysical realist writing, and particularly that by Yuri Mamleev; the influence of Zen Buddhism on Valentin Silvestrov’s music; and the relationship between Buddhist meditative practices and the performance art of Collective Actions.
Staging Poland and East-Central Europe in the early 20th century
Varieties of Rentierism: Third-Country Opportunities Amid Russia's War in Ukraine
Rethinking Dostoevsky
This panel includes three papers offering new approaches to Dostoevsky. Alina Wyman examines the suspension between two different value systems in Ivan Karamazov's philosophy of rebellion, arguing for an continuity of the 'underground' mentality in Dostoevsky’s post-Siberian novels, linking Ivan to the Underground Man and other 'metaphysical rebels'. Octavian Gabor explores the link between truth and freedom in The Brothers Karamazov, asking whether confession and revelation can set one free. Finally, Connor Doak's paper explores what a queer reading of Dostoevsky might look like, arguing that Dostoevsky's novels offer an implicit critique of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century Russia, as well as offering glimpses of queer alternatives.
Russian in Use, Russian in Context(s)
Gender, Identity and Body in Ekaterina Bakunina's Prose and Poetry
This panel marks a pioneering effort, being the first ever dedicated solely to the exploration of Ekaterina Bakunina's literary legacy. One of the forgotten figures of the Russian interwar diaspora, she explored topics as varied as national identity, women's physicality and sexuality and motherhood. Her work, particularly her feminist themes, positioned her ahead of her contemporaries, yet she faced neglect and criticism, largely stemming from her outspokenness, especially regarding the woman’s body, identity and position in society. The three talks in this panel will focus on different aspects of her oeuvre. In the first presentation, the presenter will analyse Bakunina’s poetry, delving into its intricate themes of identity and its distinctive "human document" style. Through this lens, the presentation aims to position Bakunina's lyrical work within the broader context of her literary contemporaries.The second talk will focus on the aspects of physicality and memory in the Bakunina's first novel Тело (1933). The last take will center around the notions of gender, identity and motherhood in Bakunina's second and last novel Любовь к шестерым (1935) and especially in the author's notions of maternity and matrimony in the context of both her émigré and Soviet contemporaries. The talks are arranged according to the chronology of Bakunina’s publications in order to follow the evolution of her writing. The panel will provide an excellent opportunity to reevaluate Bakunina’s contributions to literature and her place in the Russian émigré and feminist canons.
Popular Resistance to the Regime in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia
Teaching difficult histories across Central and Eastern Europe
History teaching stands at the centre of political conflicts across Central and Eastern Europe. Authoritarian and populist regimes (ab)use history for present-day divisive purposes, such as winning a national election (Poland) or mobilising people for war (Russia). Against this trend, numerous local and transnational initiatives – including education-centred NGOs or international historical commissions – strive to underline history’s multi-perspectivity and its reconciliatory potential. This panel explores how difficult, contested histories are framed in textbooks and curricula across Central and Eastern Europe. How do international organisations, such as the European Union, EuroClio, or the Polish-German Textbook Commission, bridge competing narratives on the past? To what extent do transnational educational initiatives come into conflict with the priorities of national governments and regulators? How is the teaching of history affected by geopolitical events (such as the fall of the Iron Curtain), by territorial changes (such as the dissolution of the USSR), and by population movements (such as the influx of Ukrainian refugees into the EU in 2022)? What parallels do debates about education in Central and Eastern Europe have with those present in other parts of the world? Can the experiences with decolonisation and reconciliation in other countries inform educational practices and policymaking in the region? Papers in this panel cover a range of countries in Central and Eastern Europe (and beyond) and draw on literature and methods from diverse fields, including history, education, and literary studies. They are united by their sensitivity to the emotionally- and politically-charged nature of history teaching, but also by a cautious optimism about education’s reconciliatory potential.
Policies and practices of the information wars
Hungarian state- and nation-building experiences exported to the Balkans, Anatolia and Central Asia (19th-21st centuries)
The study of the global export of European state- and nation-building experiences from a historiographical perspective is essentially limited to the transatlantic world. Little research has examined the aspirations of Eastern European nations and nation-states in a global context. The relevant Hungarian, Czech (Slovak), Polish, etc. ambitions, however, have had a strong influence on the reform movements of many African, Latin American or Asian countries from the mid-19th century to the present.
What is unique about the export of Hungarian nation- and state-building experience is that, it is based on a former empire-building tradition and an empire-building ideology. At the turn of the century, the Hungarian political elite attempted (1896-1918) to formally organize the Kingdom of Hungary into an empire within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian dualist system, and to create an informal empire beyond the borders of the state, based on the ideology of Turanism, in the Balkans and, under fortunate conditions, in Anatolia and Turkic Central Asia. Although this experiment failed, Turanism survived the fall of the Danube Monarchy and created the ideological basis for the export of Hungarian nation- and state-building experiences to Central Asia that continue today.
This interdisciplinary panel aims to demonstrate how some of the engineers of the Hungarian nation and nation-state participated in the nation-building processes of Bosnia and Albania, modern Turkey, Central Asia and Mongolia.
Human rights in Eastern Europe: historical and comparative perspectives
How we can use the past to better understand the future? To what extent do shared experiences of totalitarianism matter in conceptualising human rights? The speakers in this panel explore the different ways human rights developed in the region of Eastern Europe and Russia to cast new light on the unprecedented human rights mobilisation in five countries of Eastern Europe – Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Russia – whose citizens until recently brought more than fifty per cent of all the claims to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).
Research Data Quality in Times of War: New Challenges, Questions, and Solutions
The full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine has fundamental consequences for conducting empirical research on the whole region. Access to the field is possible only to a limited extent, scientific cooperation is restricted, the validity of public opinion polls is questioned, terminologies and concepts need revision, and methods have to be adjusted, to name but a few challenges. This has severe consequences for the quality of research data, and thus, scientific work and knowledge production.
The participants of this panel address the (new) problems related to data quality: from gaining access to potential respondents, to comparability of data before and after the Russian invasion, or validity of public opinion polls under circumstances of large migration waves (as in Ukraine) or increasing repression of free thought (as in Russia).
As a potential solution, that combines a research data repository specifically designed for area studies on Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, with a discussion platform that brings together scholars that discuss such issues of research data quality, Discuss Data (www.discuss-data.net) will be presented in this panel.
Panelists:
Marnie Howlett, University of Oxford:
"Methods vs. Ethics When Researching War"
Eduard Klein, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen:
“The potential of Discuss Data for research data management and discussion platform for data quality”
Volodymyr Paniotto, Kyiv International Institute of Sociology:
“Methods for data quality assessment in surveys during the war in Ukraine and Russia”
Michael Rochlitz, University of Oxford:
"Conducting Public Opinion Survey in Russia: Data Quality, Practical Issues and Examples of Recent Research"
Joseph Brodsky's Legacy and Brodsky Studies
The panel will discuss the legacy of the Nobel Prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky (1940-96) and the emergence of Brodsky studies. In 2024, a volume entitled JOSEPH BRODSKY AND MODERN RUSSIAN CULTURE edited by Joe Andrew, Katharine Hodgson, Robert Reid and Alexandra Smith will be published by Brill. This volume will contain a range of articles focused on Brodsky's writing and his legacy as well as on the role played by Valentina Polukhina in the creation of what we now call Brodsky Studies. Polukhina's impact on Brodsky scholarship will be assessed in two contributions to this panel, which are based on the chapters of the forthcoming volume. The third paper will focus on Brodsky's work and question the dominant interpretation of Brodsky as an a-political poet.
The EU (2) – war, power, and influence
Russian domestic politics (3) – governance and the state
Re-Imagining Decolonisation in the Baltic Region: Memory Politics, Identities, and Epistemologies
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has revived scholarly interest in the concept of “decoloniality” in the Baltic context no less than elsewhere. This attention aims to amplify voices that were suppressed during periods of Russian imperial and Soviet domination. Despite a growing number of critical takes on the entangled coloniality of power in postsocialist Baltic region (Annus 2018; Dzenovska 2013, 2018), populist decolonising efforts seem to paradoxically foster isolation and subordination of certain voices and positionalities in the name of liberation. This, however, prioritises universal, rather than pluriversal modes of existence (Mignolo 2018) and overlooks the rich array of knowledges, positionalities, experiences, and emotions involved in the making of a subject (Cariño 2017).
Given this context, we argue for a critical reassessment of the decolonising trajectories in the Baltic states. This involves acknowledging the diverse subjective positions concerning the roles of the coloniser and the colonised, as well as considering social experiences and cultural identities. Following Mignolo’s (2018) argument against a one-size-fits-all approach to decoloniality, this panel seeks to critically deconstruct and reimagine current trends of decolonisation in the Baltic region. Contributions to the panel will offer varied perspectives on methodologically navigating the region’s entangled histories, complex power relations, and both emerging and enduring social hierarchies which perpetuate the existence of the zones of being and nonbeing for its diverse populations. Specifically, the panel will focus on memory studies and the national politics of belonging; identity and the power dynamics of representation; epistemic uncertainty and injustice.
Impacts of the war in Ukraine on Russian energy sector and climate policy
Russia's war in Ukraine has dramatically reduced Russia's western markets for fossil fuels. As a result, Russia is looking for new markets especially in Asia, however, transport logistics as well as profitability of exports eastwards complicate the task. Oil is under the western price cap and fewer tankers are available. Gazprom's lucrative gas exports to Europe have largely ended and liquified natural gas (LNG) is emerging as a more viable option to expensive new pipelines, access to technology allowing. The coal sector is rebalancing between regions, the eastern part gaining access to the eastern markets at the expense of more central regions. It remains unclear whether the climate policies of export companies, which had been preparing for the requirements of the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), will be maintained or abandoned. They may be required less on short term as exports to the EU ceased, however, carbon regulatory systems are emerging also in Asia, in particular, China. We will be discussing:
- What are the prospects for Russia in the global fossil fuels markets?
- Are the sanctions against Russia efficient and how could their impact be enhanced?
- What social and regional implications does the European phaseout of Russian fossil fuels have in Russia?
- Are there incentives for climate policies and actions of Russian export companies?
Media, Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
The Mass-Elite Attitude Congruence towards the EU in Eastern Europe
The attitudes towards the European Union (EU) in the new member states from post-communist Europe developed over time both among the public and political elites. Before the accession, the majority of voters in most countries supported the accession, which was reflected in the outcomes of referendums on the topic. Over time, the Euroscepticism of specific segments in the population increased and the international surveys show great variation in the degree of support for the EU. In parallel, many Eurosceptic political parties gained seats in the national parliaments all these countries, while in some cases such parties are in government. In spite of these developments, we know little about whether the voters and politicians share similar critiques towards the EU at the same time. In other words, it is unclear to what extent we witness a convergence of attitudes among the voters and political elites. To address this gap in the literature, this panel gathers papers that analyze the convergence between people’s and politicians / political parties’ attitudes towards the EU in Eastern European countries in the last two decades.
Contesting Identity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Societies
Russia as a "civilisation-state": the role of civilisational and religious discourses in the Kremlin's secular ideology after Feb 2022
Discourses on Russia as a civilization-state became increasingly visible since 2012. Sitting alongside complementary notions of the “Russian World” and “Holy Russia”, civilizationalism simultaneously identifies Russia’s main enemies (the political West, colour revolution, globalised cultural imports,) and offers a version of the Russian nation that incorporates great power nationalism, Orthodoxy, multiculturalism and multipolarity. Previous research has suggested that, while civilizationalism is a unifying idea for certain elite groups in Russia, quantitative analysis reveals it is not dominant in Kremlin discourse. Polling data also suggest civilizational discourse is not of major relevance to the majority of Russians. This panel addresses a range of questions on civilizationalism in contemporary Russia, such as how Kremlin civilizational discourse is adapted for domestic and international audiences and where it resonates in certain constituencies. Also considered is the extent to which Russian civilizational discourse is in a direct relationship with Western notions of civilization in the singular and the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church is studied as a key supplier of civilizational ideology, with a focus on the degree to which this is compatible with the Kremlin’s largely secular sources of legitimacy. Taken together, the paper presentations will also contribute to debates on the nature of Russian neo-imperialism and the degree to which this is fundamentally original or more a retrograde repetition of previous historical trends.
Civil society under pressure
Images of Siberian Exile and the Preservation of Cultural Memory
Hannah Arendt has written “that even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them” (Men in Dark Times, ix). The papers on this panel focus on how Siberian exile was represented and memorialized in Russian and American culture in a variety of media, including memoirs, letters, photography, and ephemeral objects. Expanding upon the pioneering work of Galya Diment, Yuri Slezkine and Mark Bassin, which explores the mythology of Siberia and problematizes its opposing portrayals as a locus of punishment and fear or as a site of freedom and redemption, these authors delve into the way that their subjects experienced and interpreted Siberian exile during the long 19th century. Moreover, the presenters elaborate how their subject’s texts – both the ones they disseminated themselves and those that were constructed for them – played a role in creating a lasting image of Siberia once they were disseminated among the reading public in Russia and abroad.
Art and Culture in the Balkans
Ukraine in Literature and Culture
Saints and Recensions: (Old) Church Slavonic in Diversity
The panel deals with the cultural and linguistic legacy of (Old) Church Slavonic as reflected in the respective records of its national varieties. Some of the questions pertaining to the apostolic activities of Constantine the Philosopher and his brother, including their translation practice and language(s) acquisition, are discussed in connection with both Christian and non-Christian narratives. The acculturation impetus of Constantine and Methodius is projected onto the later linguistic diversity among the Slavic peoples. A special emphasis is placed on the problem of the delimitation of national recensions of Church Slavonic and their linguistic features as ascertained in written records. New approaches to the study of Orthodox Slavic Linguistic Varieties at the Threshold of Modernity are also discussed.
Post-Soviet Russophone Literature 1
The panel aims to advance our understanding of Russophone literature by applying a variety of approaches to analysing texts by Russophone authors from Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Germany, Israel, Latvia and Uzbekistan. As first theorised by Naomi Caffee (2013), Russophone literature is written by authors who are more than Russian-language speakers, who have hybrid identities and multicultural experiences because they have lived and worked in diverse cultures, whether inside or outside Russia. Furthering this concept, Miriam Finkelstein's paper analyses how contemporary Russophone poets attempt to deconstruct the imperial and colonial legacies of the Russian language, often creating their own identifiably local poetic languages. Alessandro Achille focuses on the ‘Ton’kie linii’ school of contemporary Ukrainian poetry to examine its key themes: memory of the Soviet past, occupation, identity, language choice, multilingualism, and literary traditions. Finally, Klavida Smola examines how northern indigenous minorities in Russia, positioned as simultaneously native and Other, have (re)invented the literary canon from perestroika onwards to reflect their culture’s symbiosis of folklore, local beliefs, indigenous-Christian customs and the Soviet ‘master plot’. Together, the papers will contribute to de-centring the existing Russian literary canons and decolonising the works by putting a spotlight on well-established, marginalised and relatively unknown Russophone authors.
Ukrainian National Identity in Literary Texts: Across Languages and Genres
The panel will look into manifestations of the key Ukrainian national markers as well as representation of the search for the national identity in a range of literary texts written by authors who were born and lived in Ukraine. The texts that will be discussed span the period from the 20-30ies of the 20th century to the current year of 2023 – the period which is defined by the decisive political events in the history of Ukraine and recurrent attempts to defend its right for independence. Being written in different languages – Ukrainian, Russian, and English – the texts under analysis present a range of perspectives on the Ukrainian national identity, including its interpretation with the concepts of “Self” and “Other”, belonging, awareness, identification, memory, cultural heritage, preservation and loss. The panellists will examine both wider political, social and cultural contexts in which the selected for the panel literary texts were created and the poetic peculiarities of these texts, revealing the tension between obliterating or distorting Ukrainian cultural heritage and its preservation and rediscovery, and illuminating the interplay between reproducing Ukrainian national identity and recreating it.
Anthropology: Multilingualism and Multiculturalism
The EU (2) – war, power, and influence
Russian domestic politics (3) – governance and the state
Re-Imagining Decolonisation in the Baltic Region: Memory Politics, Identities, and Epistemologies
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has revived scholarly interest in the concept of “decoloniality” in the Baltic context no less than elsewhere. This attention aims to amplify voices that were suppressed during periods of Russian imperial and Soviet domination. Despite a growing number of critical takes on the entangled coloniality of power in postsocialist Baltic region (Annus 2018; Dzenovska 2013, 2018), populist decolonising efforts seem to paradoxically foster isolation and subordination of certain voices and positionalities in the name of liberation. This, however, prioritises universal, rather than pluriversal modes of existence (Mignolo 2018) and overlooks the rich array of knowledges, positionalities, experiences, and emotions involved in the making of a subject (Cariño 2017).
Given this context, we argue for a critical reassessment of the decolonising trajectories in the Baltic states. This involves acknowledging the diverse subjective positions concerning the roles of the coloniser and the colonised, as well as considering social experiences and cultural identities. Following Mignolo’s (2018) argument against a one-size-fits-all approach to decoloniality, this panel seeks to critically deconstruct and reimagine current trends of decolonisation in the Baltic region. Contributions to the panel will offer varied perspectives on methodologically navigating the region’s entangled histories, complex power relations, and both emerging and enduring social hierarchies which perpetuate the existence of the zones of being and nonbeing for its diverse populations. Specifically, the panel will focus on memory studies and the national politics of belonging; identity and the power dynamics of representation; epistemic uncertainty and injustice.
Media, Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
The Mass-Elite Attitude Congruence towards the EU in Eastern Europe
The attitudes towards the European Union (EU) in the new member states from post-communist Europe developed over time both among the public and political elites. Before the accession, the majority of voters in most countries supported the accession, which was reflected in the outcomes of referendums on the topic. Over time, the Euroscepticism of specific segments in the population increased and the international surveys show great variation in the degree of support for the EU. In parallel, many Eurosceptic political parties gained seats in the national parliaments all these countries, while in some cases such parties are in government. In spite of these developments, we know little about whether the voters and politicians share similar critiques towards the EU at the same time. In other words, it is unclear to what extent we witness a convergence of attitudes among the voters and political elites. To address this gap in the literature, this panel gathers papers that analyze the convergence between people’s and politicians / political parties’ attitudes towards the EU in Eastern European countries in the last two decades.
Contesting Identity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Societies
Russia as a "civilisation-state": the role of civilisational and religious discourses in the Kremlin's secular ideology after Feb 2022
Discourses on Russia as a civilization-state became increasingly visible since 2012. Sitting alongside complementary notions of the “Russian World” and “Holy Russia”, civilizationalism simultaneously identifies Russia’s main enemies (the political West, colour revolution, globalised cultural imports,) and offers a version of the Russian nation that incorporates great power nationalism, Orthodoxy, multiculturalism and multipolarity. Previous research has suggested that, while civilizationalism is a unifying idea for certain elite groups in Russia, quantitative analysis reveals it is not dominant in Kremlin discourse. Polling data also suggest civilizational discourse is not of major relevance to the majority of Russians. This panel addresses a range of questions on civilizationalism in contemporary Russia, such as how Kremlin civilizational discourse is adapted for domestic and international audiences and where it resonates in certain constituencies. Also considered is the extent to which Russian civilizational discourse is in a direct relationship with Western notions of civilization in the singular and the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church is studied as a key supplier of civilizational ideology, with a focus on the degree to which this is compatible with the Kremlin’s largely secular sources of legitimacy. Taken together, the paper presentations will also contribute to debates on the nature of Russian neo-imperialism and the degree to which this is fundamentally original or more a retrograde repetition of previous historical trends.
Civil society under pressure
Art and Culture in the Balkans
Ukraine in Literature and Culture
Ukrainian National Identity in Literary Texts: Across Languages and Genres
The panel will look into manifestations of the key Ukrainian national markers as well as representation of the search for the national identity in a range of literary texts written by authors who were born and lived in Ukraine. The texts that will be discussed span the period from the 20-30ies of the 20th century to the current year of 2023 – the period which is defined by the decisive political events in the history of Ukraine and recurrent attempts to defend its right for independence. Being written in different languages – Ukrainian, Russian, and English – the texts under analysis present a range of perspectives on the Ukrainian national identity, including its interpretation with the concepts of “Self” and “Other”, belonging, awareness, identification, memory, cultural heritage, preservation and loss. The panellists will examine both wider political, social and cultural contexts in which the selected for the panel literary texts were created and the poetic peculiarities of these texts, revealing the tension between obliterating or distorting Ukrainian cultural heritage and its preservation and rediscovery, and illuminating the interplay between reproducing Ukrainian national identity and recreating it.
Impacts of the war in Ukraine on Russian energy sector and climate policy
Russia's war in Ukraine has dramatically reduced Russia's western markets for fossil fuels. As a result, Russia is looking for new markets especially in Asia, however, transport logistics as well as profitability of exports eastwards complicate the task. Oil is under the western price cap and fewer tankers are available. Gazprom's lucrative gas exports to Europe have largely ended and liquified natural gas (LNG) is emerging as a more viable option to expensive new pipelines, access to technology allowing. The coal sector is rebalancing between regions, the eastern part gaining access to the eastern markets at the expense of more central regions. It remains unclear whether the climate policies of export companies, which had been preparing for the requirements of the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), will be maintained or abandoned. They may be required less on short term as exports to the EU ceased, however, carbon regulatory systems are emerging also in Asia, in particular, China. We will be discussing:
- What are the prospects for Russia in the global fossil fuels markets?
- Are the sanctions against Russia efficient and how could their impact be enhanced?
- What social and regional implications does the European phaseout of Russian fossil fuels have in Russia?
- Are there incentives for climate policies and actions of Russian export companies?
Images of Siberian Exile and the Preservation of Cultural Memory
Hannah Arendt has written “that even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them” (Men in Dark Times, ix). The papers on this panel focus on how Siberian exile was represented and memorialized in Russian and American culture in a variety of media, including memoirs, letters, photography, and ephemeral objects. Expanding upon the pioneering work of Galya Diment, Yuri Slezkine and Mark Bassin, which explores the mythology of Siberia and problematizes its opposing portrayals as a locus of punishment and fear or as a site of freedom and redemption, these authors delve into the way that their subjects experienced and interpreted Siberian exile during the long 19th century. Moreover, the presenters elaborate how their subject’s texts – both the ones they disseminated themselves and those that were constructed for them – played a role in creating a lasting image of Siberia once they were disseminated among the reading public in Russia and abroad.
Saints and Recensions: (Old) Church Slavonic in Diversity
The panel deals with the cultural and linguistic legacy of (Old) Church Slavonic as reflected in the respective records of its national varieties. Some of the questions pertaining to the apostolic activities of Constantine the Philosopher and his brother, including their translation practice and language(s) acquisition, are discussed in connection with both Christian and non-Christian narratives. The acculturation impetus of Constantine and Methodius is projected onto the later linguistic diversity among the Slavic peoples. A special emphasis is placed on the problem of the delimitation of national recensions of Church Slavonic and their linguistic features as ascertained in written records. New approaches to the study of Orthodox Slavic Linguistic Varieties at the Threshold of Modernity are also discussed.
Post-Soviet Russophone Literature 1
The panel aims to advance our understanding of Russophone literature by applying a variety of approaches to analysing texts by Russophone authors from Ukraine, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Germany, Israel, Latvia and Uzbekistan. As first theorised by Naomi Caffee (2013), Russophone literature is written by authors who are more than Russian-language speakers, who have hybrid identities and multicultural experiences because they have lived and worked in diverse cultures, whether inside or outside Russia. Furthering this concept, Miriam Finkelstein's paper analyses how contemporary Russophone poets attempt to deconstruct the imperial and colonial legacies of the Russian language, often creating their own identifiably local poetic languages. Alessandro Achille focuses on the ‘Ton’kie linii’ school of contemporary Ukrainian poetry to examine its key themes: memory of the Soviet past, occupation, identity, language choice, multilingualism, and literary traditions. Finally, Klavida Smola examines how northern indigenous minorities in Russia, positioned as simultaneously native and Other, have (re)invented the literary canon from perestroika onwards to reflect their culture’s symbiosis of folklore, local beliefs, indigenous-Christian customs and the Soviet ‘master plot’. Together, the papers will contribute to de-centring the existing Russian literary canons and decolonising the works by putting a spotlight on well-established, marginalised and relatively unknown Russophone authors.
Anthropology: Multilingualism and Multiculturalism
Re-Imagining Decolonisation in the Baltic Region: Memory Politics, Identities, and Epistemologies
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has revived scholarly interest in the concept of “decoloniality” in the Baltic context no less than elsewhere. This attention aims to amplify voices that were suppressed during periods of Russian imperial and Soviet domination. Despite a growing number of critical takes on the entangled coloniality of power in postsocialist Baltic region (Annus 2018; Dzenovska 2013, 2018), populist decolonising efforts seem to paradoxically foster isolation and subordination of certain voices and positionalities in the name of liberation. This, however, prioritises universal, rather than pluriversal modes of existence (Mignolo 2018) and overlooks the rich array of knowledges, positionalities, experiences, and emotions involved in the making of a subject (Cariño 2017).
Given this context, we argue for a critical reassessment of the decolonising trajectories in the Baltic states. This involves acknowledging the diverse subjective positions concerning the roles of the coloniser and the colonised, as well as considering social experiences and cultural identities. Following Mignolo’s (2018) argument against a one-size-fits-all approach to decoloniality, this panel seeks to critically deconstruct and reimagine current trends of decolonisation in the Baltic region. Contributions to the panel will offer varied perspectives on methodologically navigating the region’s entangled histories, complex power relations, and both emerging and enduring social hierarchies which perpetuate the existence of the zones of being and nonbeing for its diverse populations. Specifically, the panel will focus on memory studies and the national politics of belonging; identity and the power dynamics of representation; epistemic uncertainty and injustice.
Media, Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
The Mass-Elite Attitude Congruence towards the EU in Eastern Europe
The attitudes towards the European Union (EU) in the new member states from post-communist Europe developed over time both among the public and political elites. Before the accession, the majority of voters in most countries supported the accession, which was reflected in the outcomes of referendums on the topic. Over time, the Euroscepticism of specific segments in the population increased and the international surveys show great variation in the degree of support for the EU. In parallel, many Eurosceptic political parties gained seats in the national parliaments all these countries, while in some cases such parties are in government. In spite of these developments, we know little about whether the voters and politicians share similar critiques towards the EU at the same time. In other words, it is unclear to what extent we witness a convergence of attitudes among the voters and political elites. To address this gap in the literature, this panel gathers papers that analyze the convergence between people’s and politicians / political parties’ attitudes towards the EU in Eastern European countries in the last two decades.
Contesting Identity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Societies
Russia as a "civilisation-state": the role of civilisational and religious discourses in the Kremlin's secular ideology after Feb 2022
Discourses on Russia as a civilization-state became increasingly visible since 2012. Sitting alongside complementary notions of the “Russian World” and “Holy Russia”, civilizationalism simultaneously identifies Russia’s main enemies (the political West, colour revolution, globalised cultural imports,) and offers a version of the Russian nation that incorporates great power nationalism, Orthodoxy, multiculturalism and multipolarity. Previous research has suggested that, while civilizationalism is a unifying idea for certain elite groups in Russia, quantitative analysis reveals it is not dominant in Kremlin discourse. Polling data also suggest civilizational discourse is not of major relevance to the majority of Russians. This panel addresses a range of questions on civilizationalism in contemporary Russia, such as how Kremlin civilizational discourse is adapted for domestic and international audiences and where it resonates in certain constituencies. Also considered is the extent to which Russian civilizational discourse is in a direct relationship with Western notions of civilization in the singular and the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church is studied as a key supplier of civilizational ideology, with a focus on the degree to which this is compatible with the Kremlin’s largely secular sources of legitimacy. Taken together, the paper presentations will also contribute to debates on the nature of Russian neo-imperialism and the degree to which this is fundamentally original or more a retrograde repetition of previous historical trends.
Civil society under pressure
Art and Culture in the Balkans
Ukrainian National Identity in Literary Texts: Across Languages and Genres
The panel will look into manifestations of the key Ukrainian national markers as well as representation of the search for the national identity in a range of literary texts written by authors who were born and lived in Ukraine. The texts that will be discussed span the period from the 20-30ies of the 20th century to the current year of 2023 – the period which is defined by the decisive political events in the history of Ukraine and recurrent attempts to defend its right for independence. Being written in different languages – Ukrainian, Russian, and English – the texts under analysis present a range of perspectives on the Ukrainian national identity, including its interpretation with the concepts of “Self” and “Other”, belonging, awareness, identification, memory, cultural heritage, preservation and loss. The panellists will examine both wider political, social and cultural contexts in which the selected for the panel literary texts were created and the poetic peculiarities of these texts, revealing the tension between obliterating or distorting Ukrainian cultural heritage and its preservation and rediscovery, and illuminating the interplay between reproducing Ukrainian national identity and recreating it.
Impacts of the war in Ukraine on Russian energy sector and climate policy
Russia's war in Ukraine has dramatically reduced Russia's western markets for fossil fuels. As a result, Russia is looking for new markets especially in Asia, however, transport logistics as well as profitability of exports eastwards complicate the task. Oil is under the western price cap and fewer tankers are available. Gazprom's lucrative gas exports to Europe have largely ended and liquified natural gas (LNG) is emerging as a more viable option to expensive new pipelines, access to technology allowing. The coal sector is rebalancing between regions, the eastern part gaining access to the eastern markets at the expense of more central regions. It remains unclear whether the climate policies of export companies, which had been preparing for the requirements of the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), will be maintained or abandoned. They may be required less on short term as exports to the EU ceased, however, carbon regulatory systems are emerging also in Asia, in particular, China. We will be discussing:
- What are the prospects for Russia in the global fossil fuels markets?
- Are the sanctions against Russia efficient and how could their impact be enhanced?
- What social and regional implications does the European phaseout of Russian fossil fuels have in Russia?
- Are there incentives for climate policies and actions of Russian export companies?
Images of Siberian Exile and the Preservation of Cultural Memory
Hannah Arendt has written “that even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them” (Men in Dark Times, ix). The papers on this panel focus on how Siberian exile was represented and memorialized in Russian and American culture in a variety of media, including memoirs, letters, photography, and ephemeral objects. Expanding upon the pioneering work of Galya Diment, Yuri Slezkine and Mark Bassin, which explores the mythology of Siberia and problematizes its opposing portrayals as a locus of punishment and fear or as a site of freedom and redemption, these authors delve into the way that their subjects experienced and interpreted Siberian exile during the long 19th century. Moreover, the presenters elaborate how their subject’s texts – both the ones they disseminated themselves and those that were constructed for them – played a role in creating a lasting image of Siberia once they were disseminated among the reading public in Russia and abroad.
Saints and Recensions: (Old) Church Slavonic in Diversity
The panel deals with the cultural and linguistic legacy of (Old) Church Slavonic as reflected in the respective records of its national varieties. Some of the questions pertaining to the apostolic activities of Constantine the Philosopher and his brother, including their translation practice and language(s) acquisition, are discussed in connection with both Christian and non-Christian narratives. The acculturation impetus of Constantine and Methodius is projected onto the later linguistic diversity among the Slavic peoples. A special emphasis is placed on the problem of the delimitation of national recensions of Church Slavonic and their linguistic features as ascertained in written records. New approaches to the study of Orthodox Slavic Linguistic Varieties at the Threshold of Modernity are also discussed.
Anthropology: Multilingualism and Multiculturalism
Media, Cultural and Intellectual Freedom in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
Contesting Identity in Soviet and Post-Soviet Societies
Russia as a "civilisation-state": the role of civilisational and religious discourses in the Kremlin's secular ideology after Feb 2022
Discourses on Russia as a civilization-state became increasingly visible since 2012. Sitting alongside complementary notions of the “Russian World” and “Holy Russia”, civilizationalism simultaneously identifies Russia’s main enemies (the political West, colour revolution, globalised cultural imports,) and offers a version of the Russian nation that incorporates great power nationalism, Orthodoxy, multiculturalism and multipolarity. Previous research has suggested that, while civilizationalism is a unifying idea for certain elite groups in Russia, quantitative analysis reveals it is not dominant in Kremlin discourse. Polling data also suggest civilizational discourse is not of major relevance to the majority of Russians. This panel addresses a range of questions on civilizationalism in contemporary Russia, such as how Kremlin civilizational discourse is adapted for domestic and international audiences and where it resonates in certain constituencies. Also considered is the extent to which Russian civilizational discourse is in a direct relationship with Western notions of civilization in the singular and the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church is studied as a key supplier of civilizational ideology, with a focus on the degree to which this is compatible with the Kremlin’s largely secular sources of legitimacy. Taken together, the paper presentations will also contribute to debates on the nature of Russian neo-imperialism and the degree to which this is fundamentally original or more a retrograde repetition of previous historical trends.
Art and Culture in the Balkans
Ukraine in Literature and Culture
Saints and Recensions: (Old) Church Slavonic in Diversity
The panel deals with the cultural and linguistic legacy of (Old) Church Slavonic as reflected in the respective records of its national varieties. Some of the questions pertaining to the apostolic activities of Constantine the Philosopher and his brother, including their translation practice and language(s) acquisition, are discussed in connection with both Christian and non-Christian narratives. The acculturation impetus of Constantine and Methodius is projected onto the later linguistic diversity among the Slavic peoples. A special emphasis is placed on the problem of the delimitation of national recensions of Church Slavonic and their linguistic features as ascertained in written records. New approaches to the study of Orthodox Slavic Linguistic Varieties at the Threshold of Modernity are also discussed.
Ukrainian National Identity in Literary Texts: Across Languages and Genres
The panel will look into manifestations of the key Ukrainian national markers as well as representation of the search for the national identity in a range of literary texts written by authors who were born and lived in Ukraine. The texts that will be discussed span the period from the 20-30ies of the 20th century to the current year of 2023 – the period which is defined by the decisive political events in the history of Ukraine and recurrent attempts to defend its right for independence. Being written in different languages – Ukrainian, Russian, and English – the texts under analysis present a range of perspectives on the Ukrainian national identity, including its interpretation with the concepts of “Self” and “Other”, belonging, awareness, identification, memory, cultural heritage, preservation and loss. The panellists will examine both wider political, social and cultural contexts in which the selected for the panel literary texts were created and the poetic peculiarities of these texts, revealing the tension between obliterating or distorting Ukrainian cultural heritage and its preservation and rediscovery, and illuminating the interplay between reproducing Ukrainian national identity and recreating it.
The Russia-Ukraine War and the Evolving Security Dilemmas in Central and Eastern Europe
The panel is an attempt at showing how the actions of contemporary Russia on the international arena aim at restoring the status quo ante, as shown in the example of the war with Ukraine. In the 1990s, we witnessed a weakening of the international position of Russia – the successor to the USSR. In the 21st century, on the other hand, Russia’s policy towards its neighbors, and in the future, perhaps towards more distant countries as well, has become aggressively driven by imperialistic goals. In order to tackle the research problem effectively, the following questions will be discussed: What will be the outcome of the revisionism for Ukraine, Europe, and Russia itself? Does the Russo-Ukrainian war constitute the end of the post-Cold-War cooperation period between Russia and the West? Is the conflict around Ukraine a symbolic end of the post-Cold-War world order? What is a future of world order? Is Ukraine a hostage in the game between Russia and the West? Is the armed conflict destroying Russia’s plot for the reintegration of the post-Soviet space which pivots around Ukraine?
Chaos or Control: Russian Politics in Wartime
An examination of the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on Russian domestic politics. The three proposed papers will examine various aspects of this. Beginning with an analysis of current practices of conflict management and the evolution of relations with corporate actors, the panel will move on to examine the resilience of centre-regional relations in wartime. The third paper looks at the dynamics of foreign policy in the war, and their effect on decision-making at home.
Networks of power, networks of sociability: Epistolary sources on the Russian history in the 18th century.
Kelsey Rubin-Detlev's recent monography, dedicated to the epistolary of Catherine II, well shows three approaches to letters - “as literary texts, as items that circulate as a part of a social practice, and as sites of self-fashioning.” The first of the planned communications is devoted precisely to correspondence as a social practice, which allows us to trace the friendship of an aristocrat who was part of the inner circle of Catherine II with a lower-ranking nobleman who advanced thanks to his support. It is much more difficult to characterize the correspondence between Catherine II and Field Marshal Münich - not intended for publication, it undoubtedly allowed one of the participants of this correspondence to create an image of themselves as an experienced and effective servant of the Empire. The correspondence dedicated to the preparation of the meeting between Catherine II and King Stanislaw II August is on the border between private and official correspondence and allows us to restore the closely intertwined networks of political elites of Russian Empire and Poland-Lithuania.
An important aspect of the correspondence is its connection with the transculturality of the Russian elites. Münnich und Catherine II – both natives of the northern German principalities - wrote to each other not in German, but in French, however, this French was deprived of the gloss and perfectionism that the Empress sought in correspondence with the Philosophers ( her letters for this correspondence were carefully corrected by a courtier, who spoke even better French). French was also the language of correspondence between Catherine II and her former favorite, who became the Polish king Stanislaw August II
Rethinking binaries in the pre-modern Slavonic world: politics, space and faith
This panel aims to reconsider various binaries that have often characterised study of the pre-modern Slavonic world: between ‘faith’ and ‘faithlessness’ among Latin conceptions of the Slavs’ religious practice; between formal and informal notions of early Rus’ canon law; between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in medieval Novgorod; and between different forms of Mongol agent in Rus’.
Intertwining questions of power, territory and religion, the papers seek to challenge underlying assumptions about the nature of both spiritual expression and political change. Amplifying each presenter’s individual focus, as a whole the panel adopts a transhistorical approach, to highlight how the assumptions underpinning historiographical binaries recur across periods and regions. In this vein, we aim to encourage new lines of enquiry – to revisit the complexities of early Slavonic history not simply for their own sake, but to conceive of a more nuanced interplay of politics, space and faith.
The First World War as Incubator of State Formations in Eastern an Southeastern Europe: Knowledge - Experts - Entaglements
For a long time, Eastern and South-eastern Europe was divided under different imperial spheres of influence. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, that began in the second half of the 19th century, a process of political renegotiation and reconfiguration started. Within, outside and in between these Empires, discourses over nations as well as federal or anarchistic visions were discussed. But it was not until the last years of First World War that this process picked up pace. Only in the face of their military defeat, a political landscape without empires became thinkable in Eastern and South-eastern Europe.
While the new borders were found mostly during military conflicts that continued until the 1920s, the newly formed states where highly depended on narratives to justify their territorial claims against others. Knowledge therefore became a decisive tool in diplomatic interactions. The role of knowledge was long studied mainly from the perspective of the Western war parties. In the course of the preparations of the Peace Conference, Expert Commissions like the famous American „Inquiry“ were founded and produced handbooks, maps, and statements. The story, how this material was or wasn’t considered during the Peace Conference was already told in detail.
The aim of the Panel is therefore twofold: On the one hand, we would like to stress the agency of actors from Eastern Europe in shaping Western policy making and public opinion concerning possible state formations in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, would like to trace the phenomenon of knowledge-based diplomacy further back into the 19th century. Thus, our panel will contribute to an understanding of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in its various entanglements with other parts of Europe and the world in a long chronological perspective. Furthermore, the papers will explore the sometimes-thin line between knowledge and propaganda, respectively expertise and activism, and discuss their contribution to processes of state and nation building.
Forging Political Identities through Protest and Resistance
Conceptions of Trauma and Mental Distress in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
This panel explores medical, scientific and cultural approaches to mental trauma, neurosis and hysteria in Russia and the Soviet Union from the 1880s to the late Stalin period. The papers bring to light the distinct understandings of the traumatic mind that emerged in late Imperial Russia and the USSR, examining how social and cultural contexts shape understandings of mental disorder and treatment. The three papers will discuss: the historical construction of traumatic symptoms such as the diagnosis of ‘Siberian hysteria’ in late Imperial Russia; the lived experience of psychological trauma in specific medical institutions (e.g. the Ukrainian Republican Neurosurgical and Neuropsychiatric Hospital); and finally, the dialogue between Soviet filmmakers and medical professionals in representing neurotic conditions on the screen.
Citizenship and social identities in the context of war
The Era of the Cold War: Crisis, Conflict and International Collaboration
Art History and Aesthetics
Slavonic Languages in Politics and (New) Media
Russia-Ukraine War: music and sculpture
Post-Soviet Russophone Literature 2
The second panel in a stream dedicated to Russophone literatures and cultures aims to explore a wide range of theoretical approaches to the study of cultural production in the Russian language. Addressing texts and films by authors and filmmakers from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan as well as from different regions of Russia through the lens of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, identity and genre studies, the panel looks to deepen and further complicate our understanding of the notion of Russophonia. It will thus help expand the knowledge of postcolonial Russian-language cultures, introduce new methods of analysis, and hereby contribute to de-centering the existing Russian literary canons.
Soviet Literature and Culture
Parties and elections
Cartography as a propaganda tool for nation- and empire-building in Eastern Europe
Cartography, and in particular ethnic mapping, has been one of the most important propaganda tools since the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, to put pressure on different social strata and political and economic interest groups by political actors. By producing (pseudo)knowledge and (pseudo)information the main aim of this pressure is to mobilise the institutions of the state through various social groups for the purposes of nation state- or empire-building or simply maintaining power by "gerrymandering". A vivid example of this today is the way the Russian state authorities are removing the name of Ukraine from historical maps and retroactively declaring the former inhabitants of Ukrainian territories as Russian.
However, the purpose of these maps is not always misinformation; there are many examples how the institutionalisation of modern geography made it possible to produce the first ethnic maps that allowed the state or the outside world to learn about the actual ethnic characteristics of a given area. The aim of this panel is to illustrate, through concrete examples, the development of ethnic cartography in Eastern Europe from the early 19th century to the present day (including its declared and secret goals – „How to lie with maps”), and how, step by step, this originally scientific discipline has become an important tool of state (war) propaganda.
Anthropology: Contested Memory and Narratives
The Russia-Ukraine War and the Evolving Security Dilemmas in Central and Eastern Europe
The panel is an attempt at showing how the actions of contemporary Russia on the international arena aim at restoring the status quo ante, as shown in the example of the war with Ukraine. In the 1990s, we witnessed a weakening of the international position of Russia – the successor to the USSR. In the 21st century, on the other hand, Russia’s policy towards its neighbors, and in the future, perhaps towards more distant countries as well, has become aggressively driven by imperialistic goals. In order to tackle the research problem effectively, the following questions will be discussed: What will be the outcome of the revisionism for Ukraine, Europe, and Russia itself? Does the Russo-Ukrainian war constitute the end of the post-Cold-War cooperation period between Russia and the West? Is the conflict around Ukraine a symbolic end of the post-Cold-War world order? What is a future of world order? Is Ukraine a hostage in the game between Russia and the West? Is the armed conflict destroying Russia’s plot for the reintegration of the post-Soviet space which pivots around Ukraine?
Chaos or Control: Russian Politics in Wartime
An examination of the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on Russian domestic politics. The three proposed papers will examine various aspects of this. Beginning with an analysis of current practices of conflict management and the evolution of relations with corporate actors, the panel will move on to examine the resilience of centre-regional relations in wartime. The third paper looks at the dynamics of foreign policy in the war, and their effect on decision-making at home.
Networks of power, networks of sociability: Epistolary sources on the Russian history in the 18th century.
Kelsey Rubin-Detlev's recent monography, dedicated to the epistolary of Catherine II, well shows three approaches to letters - “as literary texts, as items that circulate as a part of a social practice, and as sites of self-fashioning.” The first of the planned communications is devoted precisely to correspondence as a social practice, which allows us to trace the friendship of an aristocrat who was part of the inner circle of Catherine II with a lower-ranking nobleman who advanced thanks to his support. It is much more difficult to characterize the correspondence between Catherine II and Field Marshal Münich - not intended for publication, it undoubtedly allowed one of the participants of this correspondence to create an image of themselves as an experienced and effective servant of the Empire. The correspondence dedicated to the preparation of the meeting between Catherine II and King Stanislaw II August is on the border between private and official correspondence and allows us to restore the closely intertwined networks of political elites of Russian Empire and Poland-Lithuania.
An important aspect of the correspondence is its connection with the transculturality of the Russian elites. Münnich und Catherine II – both natives of the northern German principalities - wrote to each other not in German, but in French, however, this French was deprived of the gloss and perfectionism that the Empress sought in correspondence with the Philosophers ( her letters for this correspondence were carefully corrected by a courtier, who spoke even better French). French was also the language of correspondence between Catherine II and her former favorite, who became the Polish king Stanislaw August II
Rethinking binaries in the pre-modern Slavonic world: politics, space and faith
This panel aims to reconsider various binaries that have often characterised study of the pre-modern Slavonic world: between ‘faith’ and ‘faithlessness’ among Latin conceptions of the Slavs’ religious practice; between formal and informal notions of early Rus’ canon law; between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in medieval Novgorod; and between different forms of Mongol agent in Rus’.
Intertwining questions of power, territory and religion, the papers seek to challenge underlying assumptions about the nature of both spiritual expression and political change. Amplifying each presenter’s individual focus, as a whole the panel adopts a transhistorical approach, to highlight how the assumptions underpinning historiographical binaries recur across periods and regions. In this vein, we aim to encourage new lines of enquiry – to revisit the complexities of early Slavonic history not simply for their own sake, but to conceive of a more nuanced interplay of politics, space and faith.
Forging Political Identities through Protest and Resistance
Conceptions of Trauma and Mental Distress in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
This panel explores medical, scientific and cultural approaches to mental trauma, neurosis and hysteria in Russia and the Soviet Union from the 1880s to the late Stalin period. The papers bring to light the distinct understandings of the traumatic mind that emerged in late Imperial Russia and the USSR, examining how social and cultural contexts shape understandings of mental disorder and treatment. The three papers will discuss: the historical construction of traumatic symptoms such as the diagnosis of ‘Siberian hysteria’ in late Imperial Russia; the lived experience of psychological trauma in specific medical institutions (e.g. the Ukrainian Republican Neurosurgical and Neuropsychiatric Hospital); and finally, the dialogue between Soviet filmmakers and medical professionals in representing neurotic conditions on the screen.
Citizenship and social identities in the context of war
The Era of the Cold War: Crisis, Conflict and International Collaboration
Art History and Aesthetics
Slavonic Languages in Politics and (New) Media
Russia-Ukraine War: music and sculpture
Soviet Literature and Culture
Parties and elections
Anthropology: Contested Memory and Narratives
The First World War as Incubator of State Formations in Eastern an Southeastern Europe: Knowledge - Experts - Entaglements
For a long time, Eastern and South-eastern Europe was divided under different imperial spheres of influence. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, that began in the second half of the 19th century, a process of political renegotiation and reconfiguration started. Within, outside and in between these Empires, discourses over nations as well as federal or anarchistic visions were discussed. But it was not until the last years of First World War that this process picked up pace. Only in the face of their military defeat, a political landscape without empires became thinkable in Eastern and South-eastern Europe.
While the new borders were found mostly during military conflicts that continued until the 1920s, the newly formed states where highly depended on narratives to justify their territorial claims against others. Knowledge therefore became a decisive tool in diplomatic interactions. The role of knowledge was long studied mainly from the perspective of the Western war parties. In the course of the preparations of the Peace Conference, Expert Commissions like the famous American „Inquiry“ were founded and produced handbooks, maps, and statements. The story, how this material was or wasn’t considered during the Peace Conference was already told in detail.
The aim of the Panel is therefore twofold: On the one hand, we would like to stress the agency of actors from Eastern Europe in shaping Western policy making and public opinion concerning possible state formations in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, would like to trace the phenomenon of knowledge-based diplomacy further back into the 19th century. Thus, our panel will contribute to an understanding of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in its various entanglements with other parts of Europe and the world in a long chronological perspective. Furthermore, the papers will explore the sometimes-thin line between knowledge and propaganda, respectively expertise and activism, and discuss their contribution to processes of state and nation building.
Post-Soviet Russophone Literature 2
The second panel in a stream dedicated to Russophone literatures and cultures aims to explore a wide range of theoretical approaches to the study of cultural production in the Russian language. Addressing texts and films by authors and filmmakers from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan as well as from different regions of Russia through the lens of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, identity and genre studies, the panel looks to deepen and further complicate our understanding of the notion of Russophonia. It will thus help expand the knowledge of postcolonial Russian-language cultures, introduce new methods of analysis, and hereby contribute to de-centering the existing Russian literary canons.
Cartography as a propaganda tool for nation- and empire-building in Eastern Europe
Cartography, and in particular ethnic mapping, has been one of the most important propaganda tools since the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, to put pressure on different social strata and political and economic interest groups by political actors. By producing (pseudo)knowledge and (pseudo)information the main aim of this pressure is to mobilise the institutions of the state through various social groups for the purposes of nation state- or empire-building or simply maintaining power by "gerrymandering". A vivid example of this today is the way the Russian state authorities are removing the name of Ukraine from historical maps and retroactively declaring the former inhabitants of Ukrainian territories as Russian.
However, the purpose of these maps is not always misinformation; there are many examples how the institutionalisation of modern geography made it possible to produce the first ethnic maps that allowed the state or the outside world to learn about the actual ethnic characteristics of a given area. The aim of this panel is to illustrate, through concrete examples, the development of ethnic cartography in Eastern Europe from the early 19th century to the present day (including its declared and secret goals – „How to lie with maps”), and how, step by step, this originally scientific discipline has become an important tool of state (war) propaganda.
The Russia-Ukraine War and the Evolving Security Dilemmas in Central and Eastern Europe
The panel is an attempt at showing how the actions of contemporary Russia on the international arena aim at restoring the status quo ante, as shown in the example of the war with Ukraine. In the 1990s, we witnessed a weakening of the international position of Russia – the successor to the USSR. In the 21st century, on the other hand, Russia’s policy towards its neighbors, and in the future, perhaps towards more distant countries as well, has become aggressively driven by imperialistic goals. In order to tackle the research problem effectively, the following questions will be discussed: What will be the outcome of the revisionism for Ukraine, Europe, and Russia itself? Does the Russo-Ukrainian war constitute the end of the post-Cold-War cooperation period between Russia and the West? Is the conflict around Ukraine a symbolic end of the post-Cold-War world order? What is a future of world order? Is Ukraine a hostage in the game between Russia and the West? Is the armed conflict destroying Russia’s plot for the reintegration of the post-Soviet space which pivots around Ukraine?
Chaos or Control: Russian Politics in Wartime
An examination of the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war on Russian domestic politics. The three proposed papers will examine various aspects of this. Beginning with an analysis of current practices of conflict management and the evolution of relations with corporate actors, the panel will move on to examine the resilience of centre-regional relations in wartime. The third paper looks at the dynamics of foreign policy in the war, and their effect on decision-making at home.
Networks of power, networks of sociability: Epistolary sources on the Russian history in the 18th century.
Kelsey Rubin-Detlev's recent monography, dedicated to the epistolary of Catherine II, well shows three approaches to letters - “as literary texts, as items that circulate as a part of a social practice, and as sites of self-fashioning.” The first of the planned communications is devoted precisely to correspondence as a social practice, which allows us to trace the friendship of an aristocrat who was part of the inner circle of Catherine II with a lower-ranking nobleman who advanced thanks to his support. It is much more difficult to characterize the correspondence between Catherine II and Field Marshal Münich - not intended for publication, it undoubtedly allowed one of the participants of this correspondence to create an image of themselves as an experienced and effective servant of the Empire. The correspondence dedicated to the preparation of the meeting between Catherine II and King Stanislaw II August is on the border between private and official correspondence and allows us to restore the closely intertwined networks of political elites of Russian Empire and Poland-Lithuania.
An important aspect of the correspondence is its connection with the transculturality of the Russian elites. Münnich und Catherine II – both natives of the northern German principalities - wrote to each other not in German, but in French, however, this French was deprived of the gloss and perfectionism that the Empress sought in correspondence with the Philosophers ( her letters for this correspondence were carefully corrected by a courtier, who spoke even better French). French was also the language of correspondence between Catherine II and her former favorite, who became the Polish king Stanislaw August II
Rethinking binaries in the pre-modern Slavonic world: politics, space and faith
This panel aims to reconsider various binaries that have often characterised study of the pre-modern Slavonic world: between ‘faith’ and ‘faithlessness’ among Latin conceptions of the Slavs’ religious practice; between formal and informal notions of early Rus’ canon law; between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in medieval Novgorod; and between different forms of Mongol agent in Rus’.
Intertwining questions of power, territory and religion, the papers seek to challenge underlying assumptions about the nature of both spiritual expression and political change. Amplifying each presenter’s individual focus, as a whole the panel adopts a transhistorical approach, to highlight how the assumptions underpinning historiographical binaries recur across periods and regions. In this vein, we aim to encourage new lines of enquiry – to revisit the complexities of early Slavonic history not simply for their own sake, but to conceive of a more nuanced interplay of politics, space and faith.
Forging Political Identities through Protest and Resistance
Conceptions of Trauma and Mental Distress in Late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
This panel explores medical, scientific and cultural approaches to mental trauma, neurosis and hysteria in Russia and the Soviet Union from the 1880s to the late Stalin period. The papers bring to light the distinct understandings of the traumatic mind that emerged in late Imperial Russia and the USSR, examining how social and cultural contexts shape understandings of mental disorder and treatment. The three papers will discuss: the historical construction of traumatic symptoms such as the diagnosis of ‘Siberian hysteria’ in late Imperial Russia; the lived experience of psychological trauma in specific medical institutions (e.g. the Ukrainian Republican Neurosurgical and Neuropsychiatric Hospital); and finally, the dialogue between Soviet filmmakers and medical professionals in representing neurotic conditions on the screen.
Citizenship and social identities in the context of war
The Era of the Cold War: Crisis, Conflict and International Collaboration
Art History and Aesthetics
Slavonic Languages in Politics and (New) Media
Russia-Ukraine War: music and sculpture
Soviet Literature and Culture
Parties and elections
Anthropology: Contested Memory and Narratives
The First World War as Incubator of State Formations in Eastern an Southeastern Europe: Knowledge - Experts - Entaglements
For a long time, Eastern and South-eastern Europe was divided under different imperial spheres of influence. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, that began in the second half of the 19th century, a process of political renegotiation and reconfiguration started. Within, outside and in between these Empires, discourses over nations as well as federal or anarchistic visions were discussed. But it was not until the last years of First World War that this process picked up pace. Only in the face of their military defeat, a political landscape without empires became thinkable in Eastern and South-eastern Europe.
While the new borders were found mostly during military conflicts that continued until the 1920s, the newly formed states where highly depended on narratives to justify their territorial claims against others. Knowledge therefore became a decisive tool in diplomatic interactions. The role of knowledge was long studied mainly from the perspective of the Western war parties. In the course of the preparations of the Peace Conference, Expert Commissions like the famous American „Inquiry“ were founded and produced handbooks, maps, and statements. The story, how this material was or wasn’t considered during the Peace Conference was already told in detail.
The aim of the Panel is therefore twofold: On the one hand, we would like to stress the agency of actors from Eastern Europe in shaping Western policy making and public opinion concerning possible state formations in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, would like to trace the phenomenon of knowledge-based diplomacy further back into the 19th century. Thus, our panel will contribute to an understanding of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe in its various entanglements with other parts of Europe and the world in a long chronological perspective. Furthermore, the papers will explore the sometimes-thin line between knowledge and propaganda, respectively expertise and activism, and discuss their contribution to processes of state and nation building.
Post-Soviet Russophone Literature 2
The second panel in a stream dedicated to Russophone literatures and cultures aims to explore a wide range of theoretical approaches to the study of cultural production in the Russian language. Addressing texts and films by authors and filmmakers from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan as well as from different regions of Russia through the lens of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, identity and genre studies, the panel looks to deepen and further complicate our understanding of the notion of Russophonia. It will thus help expand the knowledge of postcolonial Russian-language cultures, introduce new methods of analysis, and hereby contribute to de-centering the existing Russian literary canons.
Cartography as a propaganda tool for nation- and empire-building in Eastern Europe
Cartography, and in particular ethnic mapping, has been one of the most important propaganda tools since the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, to put pressure on different social strata and political and economic interest groups by political actors. By producing (pseudo)knowledge and (pseudo)information the main aim of this pressure is to mobilise the institutions of the state through various social groups for the purposes of nation state- or empire-building or simply maintaining power by "gerrymandering". A vivid example of this today is the way the Russian state authorities are removing the name of Ukraine from historical maps and retroactively declaring the former inhabitants of Ukrainian territories as Russian.
However, the purpose of these maps is not always misinformation; there are many examples how the institutionalisation of modern geography made it possible to produce the first ethnic maps that allowed the state or the outside world to learn about the actual ethnic characteristics of a given area. The aim of this panel is to illustrate, through concrete examples, the development of ethnic cartography in Eastern Europe from the early 19th century to the present day (including its declared and secret goals – „How to lie with maps”), and how, step by step, this originally scientific discipline has become an important tool of state (war) propaganda.
Rethinking binaries in the pre-modern Slavonic world: politics, space and faith
This panel aims to reconsider various binaries that have often characterised study of the pre-modern Slavonic world: between ‘faith’ and ‘faithlessness’ among Latin conceptions of the Slavs’ religious practice; between formal and informal notions of early Rus’ canon law; between the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in medieval Novgorod; and between different forms of Mongol agent in Rus’.
Intertwining questions of power, territory and religion, the papers seek to challenge underlying assumptions about the nature of both spiritual expression and political change. Amplifying each presenter’s individual focus, as a whole the panel adopts a transhistorical approach, to highlight how the assumptions underpinning historiographical binaries recur across periods and regions. In this vein, we aim to encourage new lines of enquiry – to revisit the complexities of early Slavonic history not simply for their own sake, but to conceive of a more nuanced interplay of politics, space and faith.
Citizenship and social identities in the context of war
Art History and Aesthetics
Russia-Ukraine War: music and sculpture
Soviet Literature and Culture
Parties and elections
Anthropology: Contested Memory and Narratives
Citizenship and social identities in the context of war
China and Taiwan – foreign policy, support, and influence
Britain and Eastern Europe from the Victorians to the Cold War
Telegram and political communication
The Second World War in Eastern and Southeastern Europe
Transformation of Second World War Memory after the Russian Aggression
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014, has caused significant anxiety among the countries of the post-Soviet and post-socialist region due to the changing geopolitical situation and the increasing degree of ontological insecurity. Since the Russian Federation has often justified its hybrid war against Ukraine and the open military invasion launched by the Russian armed forces on 24 February 2022, on (pseudo)historical grounds, this has inevitably affected the historical policies of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Against this background, the contributors will discuss the various uses of the elements of historical politics in their own countries (Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine) in relation to the changing cultural landscape of memory in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Since this war has intensified the debate on the preservation of Soviet monuments in situ in post-Soviet countries, the panel will also focus on the issue of reconceptualising the Second World War memory sites and the demolition of Soviet-era military monuments.
Particular attention will be also given to the exploitation of the memory, symbolism, and rhetoric related to the Second World War used in Russian propaganda and in the counter-propaganda efforts of the opposing countries in the region. Furthermore, the panel participants will further their discussion by comparing the developments in the politics of history in relation to domestic political trends in the analysed countries.
The impact of war and autocratic regime on knowledge production in Russia
The spread of post-truth in its populist use and the wide-scale propaganda during the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine sharply exacerbated the fundamental dilemma of the Academia and scientific work as such: the dilemma between ‘pursuing the objective truth’ and the positionality of a scholar; between research results reliability and responsibility for personal words and actions. The challenge of this choice is crucial in social sciences and humanities.
Dramatic political events, severe ideological pressure from the state and increasing censorship are deeply affecting the scientific, educational and public aspects of the life of Academia. They urge to resist the ideological pressure, to establish reliable methods and approaches, to make clearer self-reflection, to be aware of previously half-hidden value biases, to search for forms of adequate transfer of knowledge to students, to uphold the scientific truth, to resist to lies and propaganda in the public sphere. One way or another, it is necessary to rethink the very concepts of academic truth, objectivity and neutrality, if possible, their preservation, but with the rejection of their distanced, value-free interpretation.
Participants of the panel will discuss both general theoretical issues related to the problem of "science as a profession" in its today understanding and specific situations when dramatic political events and military conflicts affect research in a particular discipline and area, leading to a reassessment of approaches, methods and research strategies, as well as specific practices of public engagement of the Academia and related splits within it.
Uncovering 'Forgotten Histories' through Popular Literature
The Struggle for the Past: History, Heritage and Historiography
Constructing Ukrainian Cultural Identity
Gender and feminism: regional approaches
Languages in Contact: Slavonic Languages and English
Russian Theatre and Performance
Transnational and Multilingual Cultural Exchange
Ukraine – policy and politics
Russia-Ukraine War: prose and poetry
Anthropology: Epistemology and Knowledge Production
China and Taiwan – foreign policy, support, and influence
Britain and Eastern Europe from the Victorians to the Cold War
Telegram and political communication
The Second World War in Eastern and Southeastern Europe
Transformation of Second World War Memory after the Russian Aggression
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014, has caused significant anxiety among the countries of the post-Soviet and post-socialist region due to the changing geopolitical situation and the increasing degree of ontological insecurity. Since the Russian Federation has often justified its hybrid war against Ukraine and the open military invasion launched by the Russian armed forces on 24 February 2022, on (pseudo)historical grounds, this has inevitably affected the historical policies of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Against this background, the contributors will discuss the various uses of the elements of historical politics in their own countries (Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine) in relation to the changing cultural landscape of memory in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Since this war has intensified the debate on the preservation of Soviet monuments in situ in post-Soviet countries, the panel will also focus on the issue of reconceptualising the Second World War memory sites and the demolition of Soviet-era military monuments.
Particular attention will be also given to the exploitation of the memory, symbolism, and rhetoric related to the Second World War used in Russian propaganda and in the counter-propaganda efforts of the opposing countries in the region. Furthermore, the panel participants will further their discussion by comparing the developments in the politics of history in relation to domestic political trends in the analysed countries.
The impact of war and autocratic regime on knowledge production in Russia
The spread of post-truth in its populist use and the wide-scale propaganda during the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine sharply exacerbated the fundamental dilemma of the Academia and scientific work as such: the dilemma between ‘pursuing the objective truth’ and the positionality of a scholar; between research results reliability and responsibility for personal words and actions. The challenge of this choice is crucial in social sciences and humanities.
Dramatic political events, severe ideological pressure from the state and increasing censorship are deeply affecting the scientific, educational and public aspects of the life of Academia. They urge to resist the ideological pressure, to establish reliable methods and approaches, to make clearer self-reflection, to be aware of previously half-hidden value biases, to search for forms of adequate transfer of knowledge to students, to uphold the scientific truth, to resist to lies and propaganda in the public sphere. One way or another, it is necessary to rethink the very concepts of academic truth, objectivity and neutrality, if possible, their preservation, but with the rejection of their distanced, value-free interpretation.
Participants of the panel will discuss both general theoretical issues related to the problem of "science as a profession" in its today understanding and specific situations when dramatic political events and military conflicts affect research in a particular discipline and area, leading to a reassessment of approaches, methods and research strategies, as well as specific practices of public engagement of the Academia and related splits within it.
Uncovering 'Forgotten Histories' through Popular Literature
The Struggle for the Past: History, Heritage and Historiography
Constructing Ukrainian Cultural Identity
Gender and feminism: regional approaches
Russian Theatre and Performance
Transnational and Multilingual Cultural Exchange
Ukraine – policy and politics
Languages in Contact: Slavonic Languages and English
Russia-Ukraine War: prose and poetry
Anthropology: Epistemology and Knowledge Production
China and Taiwan – foreign policy, support, and influence
Britain and Eastern Europe from the Victorians to the Cold War
Telegram and political communication
The Second World War in Eastern and Southeastern Europe
Transformation of Second World War Memory after the Russian Aggression
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014, has caused significant anxiety among the countries of the post-Soviet and post-socialist region due to the changing geopolitical situation and the increasing degree of ontological insecurity. Since the Russian Federation has often justified its hybrid war against Ukraine and the open military invasion launched by the Russian armed forces on 24 February 2022, on (pseudo)historical grounds, this has inevitably affected the historical policies of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Against this background, the contributors will discuss the various uses of the elements of historical politics in their own countries (Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine) in relation to the changing cultural landscape of memory in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Since this war has intensified the debate on the preservation of Soviet monuments in situ in post-Soviet countries, the panel will also focus on the issue of reconceptualising the Second World War memory sites and the demolition of Soviet-era military monuments.
Particular attention will be also given to the exploitation of the memory, symbolism, and rhetoric related to the Second World War used in Russian propaganda and in the counter-propaganda efforts of the opposing countries in the region. Furthermore, the panel participants will further their discussion by comparing the developments in the politics of history in relation to domestic political trends in the analysed countries.
The impact of war and autocratic regime on knowledge production in Russia
The spread of post-truth in its populist use and the wide-scale propaganda during the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine sharply exacerbated the fundamental dilemma of the Academia and scientific work as such: the dilemma between ‘pursuing the objective truth’ and the positionality of a scholar; between research results reliability and responsibility for personal words and actions. The challenge of this choice is crucial in social sciences and humanities.
Dramatic political events, severe ideological pressure from the state and increasing censorship are deeply affecting the scientific, educational and public aspects of the life of Academia. They urge to resist the ideological pressure, to establish reliable methods and approaches, to make clearer self-reflection, to be aware of previously half-hidden value biases, to search for forms of adequate transfer of knowledge to students, to uphold the scientific truth, to resist to lies and propaganda in the public sphere. One way or another, it is necessary to rethink the very concepts of academic truth, objectivity and neutrality, if possible, their preservation, but with the rejection of their distanced, value-free interpretation.
Participants of the panel will discuss both general theoretical issues related to the problem of "science as a profession" in its today understanding and specific situations when dramatic political events and military conflicts affect research in a particular discipline and area, leading to a reassessment of approaches, methods and research strategies, as well as specific practices of public engagement of the Academia and related splits within it.
Uncovering 'Forgotten Histories' through Popular Literature
The Struggle for the Past: History, Heritage and Historiography
Gender and feminism: regional approaches
Russian Theatre and Performance
Transnational and Multilingual Cultural Exchange
Ukraine – policy and politics
Languages in Contact: Slavonic Languages and English
Russia-Ukraine War: prose and poetry
Anthropology: Epistemology and Knowledge Production
Britain and Eastern Europe from the Victorians to the Cold War
Transformation of Second World War Memory after the Russian Aggression
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014, has caused significant anxiety among the countries of the post-Soviet and post-socialist region due to the changing geopolitical situation and the increasing degree of ontological insecurity. Since the Russian Federation has often justified its hybrid war against Ukraine and the open military invasion launched by the Russian armed forces on 24 February 2022, on (pseudo)historical grounds, this has inevitably affected the historical policies of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
Against this background, the contributors will discuss the various uses of the elements of historical politics in their own countries (Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine) in relation to the changing cultural landscape of memory in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Since this war has intensified the debate on the preservation of Soviet monuments in situ in post-Soviet countries, the panel will also focus on the issue of reconceptualising the Second World War memory sites and the demolition of Soviet-era military monuments.
Particular attention will be also given to the exploitation of the memory, symbolism, and rhetoric related to the Second World War used in Russian propaganda and in the counter-propaganda efforts of the opposing countries in the region. Furthermore, the panel participants will further their discussion by comparing the developments in the politics of history in relation to domestic political trends in the analysed countries.
The impact of war and autocratic regime on knowledge production in Russia
The spread of post-truth in its populist use and the wide-scale propaganda during the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine sharply exacerbated the fundamental dilemma of the Academia and scientific work as such: the dilemma between ‘pursuing the objective truth’ and the positionality of a scholar; between research results reliability and responsibility for personal words and actions. The challenge of this choice is crucial in social sciences and humanities.
Dramatic political events, severe ideological pressure from the state and increasing censorship are deeply affecting the scientific, educational and public aspects of the life of Academia. They urge to resist the ideological pressure, to establish reliable methods and approaches, to make clearer self-reflection, to be aware of previously half-hidden value biases, to search for forms of adequate transfer of knowledge to students, to uphold the scientific truth, to resist to lies and propaganda in the public sphere. One way or another, it is necessary to rethink the very concepts of academic truth, objectivity and neutrality, if possible, their preservation, but with the rejection of their distanced, value-free interpretation.
Participants of the panel will discuss both general theoretical issues related to the problem of "science as a profession" in its today understanding and specific situations when dramatic political events and military conflicts affect research in a particular discipline and area, leading to a reassessment of approaches, methods and research strategies, as well as specific practices of public engagement of the Academia and related splits within it.
The Struggle for the Past: History, Heritage and Historiography
Constructing Ukrainian Cultural Identity
Gender and feminism: regional approaches
Russian Theatre and Performance
Ukraine – policy and politics
The impact of war and autocratic regime on knowledge production in Russia
The spread of post-truth in its populist use and the wide-scale propaganda during the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine sharply exacerbated the fundamental dilemma of the Academia and scientific work as such: the dilemma between ‘pursuing the objective truth’ and the positionality of a scholar; between research results reliability and responsibility for personal words and actions. The challenge of this choice is crucial in social sciences and humanities.
Dramatic political events, severe ideological pressure from the state and increasing censorship are deeply affecting the scientific, educational and public aspects of the life of Academia. They urge to resist the ideological pressure, to establish reliable methods and approaches, to make clearer self-reflection, to be aware of previously half-hidden value biases, to search for forms of adequate transfer of knowledge to students, to uphold the scientific truth, to resist to lies and propaganda in the public sphere. One way or another, it is necessary to rethink the very concepts of academic truth, objectivity and neutrality, if possible, their preservation, but with the rejection of their distanced, value-free interpretation.
Participants of the panel will discuss both general theoretical issues related to the problem of "science as a profession" in its today understanding and specific situations when dramatic political events and military conflicts affect research in a particular discipline and area, leading to a reassessment of approaches, methods and research strategies, as well as specific practices of public engagement of the Academia and related splits within it.
The Struggle for the Past: History, Heritage and Historiography
Plenary Session
East-West Cooperation in Science and Technology 1: Nuclear Diplomacy, Communication and Technological Sovereignty
Environmental Peacebuilding through the Length War against Ukraine
East-West Cooperation in Science and Technology 2: Technology and Science Diplomacy
Plenary session 2
East-West Cooperation in Science and Technology 3: East-East and East-South Relations
Film Screening and discussion - Wardens’ Gardens by Dmitry Omelchenko
The Wardens’ Gardens is a documentary film made by the European Research Council advance grant project GULAGECHOES (no 788448). Originally, the project planned a film about the treament of ethnic minorities in Russian correctional colonies but with the Russian war on Ukraine that had to be dropped. Instead, we shifted the focus of the film to one of the project case study regions, Georgia. The Wardens’ Gardens is based in the town of Khoni in Imereti, western Georgia. In the post-Stalin era, it was chosen as the location of five correctional labour colonies providing forced labour for cotton production. The colonies were closed after Georgia gained its independence. Today, many of the prison personnel and some former prisoners still live in the town. In the film, former officers and guards talk about their work in the labour colonies in the late Soviet period, and about the people they marched out to the cotton plantations daily, their relationship with the Moscow centre and with the Vory-v-Zakony (Thieves-in -Law), and they reflect on their lives in Khoni since 1991. The film is unique in three respects: it gives an insight into the late Soviet “gulag” about which very little is known, other than what was happening to political prisoners under article 70; secondly, it fills an important gap in knowledge about the people who worked as prison officers in the Soviet penal system; thirdly, and perhaps most important given the call since February 22nd 2024 to decolonise Russian and East European studies, it give an insight into how an apparently unified Soviet prison system was mediated by culture and had its own history that was very different from in the Russian centre – we learn, for example, that the greatest fear prisoners incarcerated in Georgia had was of being sent for regime violation to a colony in the Russian mainland where life was far more difficult.
The interviews were taken by members of the GULAGECHOES team Costanza Curro and Vakhtang Kekoshvili. It will be introduced at the conference by GULAGECHOES PI, Judith Pallot.
East-West Cooperation in Science and Technology 4: The Role of Science Diplomacy In a Modern World
Besieged by the Future 6: Undefined, Unspeakable, Unpredictable. Concluding discussion
Russia’s war on Ukraine 2
Authoritarian backsliding and forms of resistance 2
