CONF./CFP- 2008 Soyuz Annual Meeting: Contemporary Critical Inquiry Through the Lens of Postsocialism, Apr. 24-27, 2008, Berkeley

Distrib. by: Central-Eurasia-L - Announcement List for Central Eurasian Studies

CONF./CFP- 2008 Soyuz Annual Meeting: Critical Inquiry/Postsocialism, Apr. 2008

Posted by: Alexei Yurchak <yurchak@berkeley.edu>

CALL FOR PAPERS

2008 Soyuz Annual Meeting
University of California, Berkeley
April 24-27, 2008

THEME:

"Contemporary Critical Inquiry Through the Lens of Postsocialism"

The disintegration of Soviet and Eastern European socialisms not only
ushered in rapid and overwhelming transformations in the former socialist
lifeworlds, but also engendered the emergence of the problem-space of
"postsocialism" that spans well beyond the boundaries of the former
socialist states. In this year's Soyuz conference, we would like to
consider: how can theoretical insights gained in our critical engagements
with postsocialism shed new light on questions central to contemporary
anthropology and critical social inquiry more broadly.

For example, how might our inquiry of postsocialism illuminate:
* current global configurations of liberalism and neoliberalism,
democracy and neo-conservatism, sovereignty and citizenship, biopower
and international law, religion and secularism, risk and security,
global capitalism and labor outsourcing?

* complex parallels between late socialist and late capitalist social
formations at the level of institutions, practices, sentiments,
knowledge, subjectivity, aesthetics?

* current postcolonial engagements (considering that the ideological
opposition capitalism/socialism, in relation to which postcolonial
criticism emerged, is now in the past)?

We are now inviting submissions for the conference. The selected papers will
interrogate the relevance of the theoretical insights gained in engagements
with postsocialism for other contexts, areas and problems of contemporary
world. They will consider the implications of postsocialism, both as a
historical formation and as a problem-space, for the problems interrogated
in contemporary anthropology and social inquiry.

The conference organizing committee:

Alexei Yurchak (UC Berkeley)
Dominic Boyer (Cornell)
Dace Dzenovska (UC Berkeley)
Larisa Kurtovich (UC Berkeley)
Alex Beliaev (UC Berkeley)
Nina Aron (UC Berkeley)

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2008.
Please send submissions electronically (preferable) to: yurchak@berkeley.edu

Or by mail to:

Alexei Yurchak
232 Kroeber Hall
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720

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