Call for Papers: Cultural Resistance: From Imperial Russia to Post-Soviet States

The concept of cultural resistance has become integral to sociological, political, and cultural studies. Emerging after the "youth revolutions" of the late 1960s (the "long year 1968"), this concept encompasses practices, artistic works, and initiatives aimed at revising or deconstructing established social hierarchies, challenging hegemonic "common sense" and dominant tastes, and confronting neo-fascist and right-wing populist movements as sociocultural forces.

Cultural resistance creates a unified framework for understanding both the politicization of cultural practices (poetry readings, exhibitions) and the aestheticization of political actions (performative political speech, political movements developing subcultural characteristics).

While this concept was initially developed through examples from Western states and their colonies, it has only recently been applied to earlier historical periods. The Center for the Study of Russian Culture at Amherst College invites scholars to explore how this concept might illuminate social and cultural history of Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and post-Soviet states. This conference will examine the prospects and limitations of applying the concept of cultural resistance to the history of the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet countries. We welcome researchers from diverse disciplines including literary studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, education, and of theater, music, and film studies.

We propose to discuss the following range of issues at the conference:

• Actors of cultural resistance: individuals and groups, mechanisms of group formation, struggle for visibility and political representation.
• Methods and strategies of cultural resistance. Types of resistance and subversion: public, semi-public, underground, internal ("for the drawer"). Languages of description and self-description, the role of "traditional" and new media, the role of humanities and social sciences in legitimizing certain forms and places of cultural resistance.
• Places of cultural resistance – real and virtual. In what geographical spaces/topographical locations was cultural resistance possible? What were the institutional "sites" of cultural resistance: magazine editorial offices, websites, clubs, or other "assemblage points"? What real or imagined communities (in Benedict Anderson's terminology) might have formed around these institutional "sites"?
• Regional differences in the strategies and intensity of cultural resistance, horizontal interaction between "points of resistance" independent of (or using) the imperial center.
• The diversity of cultural resistance programs and agendas.
• Does cultural resistance always entail the emergence of innovative practices or initiatives?

Conference Details

• Place: Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
• Dates: March 28-29, 2026

Submission Information

To participate, please send the following to mmayofis@amherst.edu:

• Name, institutional affiliation, city, and email
• Tentative paper title
• Abstract (maximum 300 words)
• Brief CV highlighting publications relevant to the conference theme

Deadline for conference proposals: September 1, 2025

The official working language of the conference is English.

Travel and Accommodation Support:

We are pleased to provide full travel expenses and three nights of accommodation for all invited participants. These arrangements will be handled directly by the conference organizers.

CFP: “The Imperial Plow: Settler Colonialism in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union,” Yale

Deadline: November 7, 2022

Conference at Yale University, May 1-2, 2023 (New Haven, Connecticut)

Organizers: Edyta Bojanowska and Claire Roosien, Yale University

The familiar icon of Russian imperial expansion is the violent nineteenth-century conquest of the exotic mountainous region of the Caucasus. The imperial pen – of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and others – has eagerly followed the imperial bayonet to the Caucasus. Yet the imperial plow was no less a tool of conquest than the pen or the bayonet. This conference aims to shift scholarly attention away from the high drama of military conquest to the understudied processes of settler colonization and to their cultural echoes in the Russian and Soviet empires. More than anything else, it is the activities of the Russian and Soviet agricultural settler that ultimately bound various non-Russian peripheral regions to the social and cultural imaginaries of “Russia” and established enduring forms of imperial control. The idea of settler colonization came to be viewed as Russia’s manifest destiny: its mission to settle “empty” spaces, binding them to the Russian core in the process. The Slavic settler became the key Kulturträger of Russia’s civilizing mission, especially in the east and south.

We propose to examine the cultural and ideological forces that worked to legitimize settler colonialism as a peaceful and superior mode of expansion, and to challenge the notion that it was supposedly neither colonial nor particularly exploitative. In doing so, we hope to engage the emerging field of settler colonial studies, which theorizes settler colonies as distinct colonial formations possessing unique structural features, legitimation strategies, and discursive tropes. As the durable polities of Russia, the United States, or Australia show, these tropes and strategies make the settler colonial societies of continental empires particularly resistant to decolonization. Could the field of Russian and Eurasian studies, somewhat skeptical of postcolonial paradigms, find settler colonial ones to have greater relevance and explanatory power? Can the many supposed idiosyncrasies of Russian colonialism be in fact due to the preponderance of the settler colonial model in the formation of the Russian empire? What can scholars of Eurasia learn from comparative research on settler colonialism elsewhere?

Given the centrality of land as a geographic space and a material resource in settler colonial situations, we plan to engage the eco-critical turn in postcolonial studies. In what ways did settler colonialism destroy not only local cultures but also nature? Disparate forms of land use by nomads and settlers, changes in soil and hydrology caused by intensive agriculture, nuclear and chemical pollution – we ask how these ecological dimensions shaped settler colonies in material ways. We also wish to consider the impact of settler colonialism on indigenous people. What physical, spatial, legal, administrative, cultural, and symbolic means were used to eliminate or displace indigenous people in order to take their land? Along with the mythologizing of the settlers, we wish to explore the pathologizing of the nomads. To what extent are sedentarization campaigns forms of biopolitical violence that paved the way to removals? And how did artists and intellectuals – Russian and Soviet, metropolitan and indigenous – conceive both of those who wielded the imperial plow, and those who stood in its way?

This will be a multidisciplinary international conference. We welcome proposals from a variety of disciplines, including scholars of literature and culture, including visual culture, historians, and anthropologists. The end goal is to facilitate a cross-disciplinary dialogue, solidify this incipient area of inquiry, and to involve emerging young scholars who bring new perspective to this topic. As an outcome of the conference proceedings, we hope to organize a special issue of Slavic Review or an edited volume. Travel to New Haven, CT and accommodation will be covered for all participants.

Paper proposals (300-400 words) and short CVs should be submitted by November 7 to the following portal: https://forms.gle/UhDZzJsgK5fCkNuj6

Please direct any questions about the conference to Claire Roosien (claire.roosien@yale.edu).

Job: 4-Year Associate Professorship in Russian/Post-Soviet Politics, Hokkaido University

Deadline: October 30, 2022

The Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University invites applications for a full-time position of Specially Appointed Associate Professor (non-tenured, four-year contract) in Post-Soviet politics with a focus on Russia, beginning on April 1, 2023.

The applicant must hold a PhD degree and a near-native level of English and Russian proficiency. After employment, the applicant should acquire basic knowledge of the Japanese language.

The applicant will:
- strive to achieve outstanding results in the above-mentioned research field;
- contribute to the joint usage/research activities of the Center, including the promotion of interdisciplinary and international research collaborations;
- teach courses and advise students and junior researchers;
- contribute to the Center's publishing and public relations activities;
- participate in other activities of the Center.

All application materials must be received online or by email at the Center by October 30, 2022.
For details see:
https://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/applications/20220804.pdf

For inquiries, please contact the director of the Center, Professor Motoki Nomachi, mnomachi@slav.hokudai.ac.jp

CFP: UIUC Environmental Humanities Conference 2022

 Deadline: February 15, 2022

Shifting Grounds: Changing Models of Nature in the Former Soviet Sphere  

2022 Slavic Graduate Student Association Conference  

April 15-16, 2022  

Urbana, IL  

  

Update: Due to the on-going complications of COVID-19 the SGSA has decided to move the conference online.  

The Slavic Graduate Students Association (SGSA) in conjunction with the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Russian East European and Eurasian Center, and the History Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign invites submissions of presentation proposals from scholars across disciplines to this year’s conference, titled “Shifting Grounds: Changing Models of Nature in the Former Soviet Sphere.” We invite all professors, graduate students, and professionals to submit papers related to our topic for consideration.   

This interdisciplinary conference is intended to explore the movement of disparate models of nature as they circulate through and coalesce into larger ideas about Post-Soviet and Eurasian existence. Political models of nature found in Soviet ecology hold continued relevance in our current age: any study of Eurasian histories or culture reveals itself as cut through by long environmental and geographic shifts—the plainest example being the pairing of colonization and conquest with large-scale terraforming projects. In the early days of the Soviet Union, an ascent public ecological consciousness allowed for the development of environmental conservation laws as early as 1928. Just a decade later, geologist Vladimir Vernadsky would popularize the concept of the noosphere in natural science, theorizing the mutual relationship between human cognition and earth’s systems as a “sphere of reason” in his seminal work Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon. Presently, environmental activism is once again resurgent in the FSU. The emergence of grassroots protest groups and interregional “green coalitions,” has heightened public awareness regarding regional inequalities, with emphasis being placed on the continued exploitation of indigenous lands by governmental and corporate interests. As climate change and environmental injustice takes a toll on Northern indigenous populations, how can we synthesize these historical threads and point towards new models of Post-Soviet ecologies?  

We are also excited to announce that our keynote speaker for this conference is Dr. Pey-Yi Chu, associate professor of History, from Pomona College. Dr. Chu specializes in the history of science and the environmental history of Russian and the Soviet Union. In her latest book The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science, Dr. Chu maps out the history of scientific inquiries of permafrost and how it contributed to modern environmental discourse.   

Relevant topics might include:  

● Histories of Soviet terraforming and environmental policies  

● Indigenous ecologies  

● Climate fictions and the production of history  

● Ecological and cultural conflicts of green industrialization  

● National identity in the Anthropocene  

● Histories and legacies of science and technology in the Soviet Union  

● Climate change and human geography in the FSU  

● Environmentally induced labor movement and migration  

● Reconciliation of theory and practice in historical and contemporary ecological conservation  

● Literary representations of nonhuman timescales and ecological collapse  

● Eschatological climate language and its political uses  

● Environmental heritage and fictions of state   

If you would like to participate, please submit an abstract (up to 350 words) and the title of your paper to (briany5@illinois.edu or alexkarsavin@gmail.com). The deadline for submitting abstracts is February 15th, 2022. Participants will be notified by February 28th. The conference will take place on Zoom on April 15-16.

For any further questions do not hesitate to email us at either briany5@illinois.edu or alexkarsavin@gmail.com. 

CFP: Socialist Constitutionalism and Diversity Management since the 1970s

Deadline: October 15, 2021

by Ivan Sablin

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Conference: CFP: Socialist Constitutionalism and Diversity Management since the 1970s

Organizers: Ivan Sablin & Matthias Koenig (Heidelberg University)

Date & Venue: 12-13 May 2022, Heidelberg / Germany

Disciplines: history, sociology, political science, and law

 

This conference aims to explore the role of constitutions and parliaments for diversity management and political community-building in socialist single-party regimes in Europe and Asia since the 1970s. Even though in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and other socialist states the various branches of power were taken over by extraconstitutional organizations – the ruling socialist or communist parties – nominal constitutions and parliaments remained in place in all single-party regimes. This meant that these institutions, novel to most Eurasian contexts, were seen as necessary for legitimizing the parties’ programs and policies, both domestically and internationally. While scholars have studied socialist constitutionalism and its impact on the evolution of socio-economic human rights, its significance for the management of diversity, related to nationality (ethnicity), language, religion, gender, urban/rural differences, occupation, and class, has remained understudied. The conference seeks to stimulate new cross-disciplinary collaboration between historians, sociologists, political scientists, and legal scholars working on the governance of social and cultural diversity in state socialist contexts.

 

In terms of region, the conference will abandon a Eurocentric outlook, providing the much-needed comparison between Eastern Europe and East Asia by scrutinizing the constitutional and parliamentary aspects of diversity management in the Soviet Union (especially its Asian parts), China, Yugoslavia, and other state socialist contexts. In terms of the period, the conference will start with the wave of the new socialist constitutions adopted in China (1972), Yugoslavia (1974), and the USSR (1976–1978) on national and subnational levels, in order to trace continuities and discontinuities in socialist and post-socialist constitutionalism, parliamentarianism and the management of diversity after 1990. Furthermore, the conference will discuss transnational legal dynamics by studying how socialist states sought to influence legal norms both in their informal dependencies and satellites and in international institutions, such as the United Nations.

 

We invite papers addressing socialist constitutionalism by focusing on the following questions: How was diversity in its multiple dimensions presented in written constitutions and how was diversity management reflected in state institutions, in particular in parliaments, federal arrangements, and forms of autonomy? Why did diversity management become an important feature in legal and political practices, for instance, in parliamentary bodies, courts, and within the ruling parties? How important were the constitutional aspects of diversity management in bilateral relations between socialist states, as well as in international legal fora such as the United Nations’ human rights regime? Why did legislation on diversity management outlive state socialism in some contexts, but not in others? How does the socialist legacy of managing diversity relate to the recent resurgence of exclusionary nationalism?

 

Paper proposals should contain an abstract (250 words max.) and an extended outline (about 2000 words). They should be ENTPAR.Heidelberg@gmail.com. Deadline for submission is 15 October 2021. If accepted for conference participation, authors will be expected to submit a fully developed paper by 15 April 2022. Travel and accommodation will be fully covered.