Neoliberalism Panels for ASEEES, New Orleans, November 2011‏

Over the last two decades, neoliberalism has arguably been the dominant historical force in the former Second World. And yet within Slavic Studies, it has received only a fraction of the scholarly attention it deserves. Building upon the work of this year's summer school on neoliberalization and the crises of capital held at the Central European University (http://www.sun.ceu.hu/02-courses/course-sites/neoliber/index-neoliber.php), at ASEEES 2012 Rosen would like to organize several panels that seek to account for some of the region's recent history through the prism of neoliberalism. A similar announcement is going to history, sociology/ anthropology, and possibly political science list-servers, hopefully making this endeavor a truly interdisciplinary one. For scholars of culture in particular, it would be interesting to examine not only neoliberalism's consequences for post-socialist cultural production (film, literature, and other arts) and social relations but also its relationship with such familiar topics as late-socialist dissidence, human rights, and others. djagalov@fas.harvard.edu

2012 Annual SOYUZ Symposium: Affections/Afflictions/Afterlives, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 23-24 March 2012‏

SOYUZ, the Post-Communist Cultural Studies Interest group, invites
paper proposals for its 2012 meeting. The symposium has met annually
since 1991, and is an intimate forum where scholars (from graduate
students to senior faculty) from across the world can exchange ideas.

The 2012 symposium will ponder the sentiments, the failures, and the
successes around making do with those ongoing, productive connections
that are afforded by infrastructures and procedures conceived during
(or in response to) socialism.

How to speak about what lives "after" without abjecting the "remains"?
Topical foci might draw upon themes current in the humanities and
social sciences: biopolitics and biopowers (for instance, bricolage in
ways of dealing with affliction, means of training the body, etc.);
knowledge-making or sentiment-forming (e.g. recombination of
religious, ethnic-folk, scientific, poetic ideologies and resources);
material and narrative repurposing; modes of redistribution or
(re)portioning of entitlements.

The 2012 symposium will feature a keynote address by Judith Farquhar,
Max Palevsky Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences and
Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.

SOYUZ began in 1991 as a regionally focused group responding to the
fall of the Soviet and socialist states. Since then, it has broadened
to include scholars working in any region touched by socialism, by the
oppositions of socialism to capitalism, or by those phenomena formerly
known as "post-socialist." The 2012 conference organizing committee
includes University of Michigan anthropologists working across regions
where socialism has figured in important ways: Kelly Askew (Tanzania),
Anya Bernstein (Buryatia), Krisztina Fehervary (Hungary), Alaina Lemon
(Russia, Romani diaspora), Erik Meuggler (China), Damani Partridge
(Germany).

Presentations may work in any discipline (anthropology, history,
sociology, literary criticism and film studies, etc.) and may focus on
any aspect of social life (religion, politics, kinship, sexuality,
exchange, performance, etc.). At the same time, papers must strive to
combine ethnographic evidence with theory.

We hope to make a limited number of travel subsidies available to
graduate students as well as to presenters from outside the United
States.

The deadline for abstracts is December 15, 2011

Please send abstracts of 250 words by email to: amlemon@umich.edu

Please include your full name, paper title, and academic affiliation,
and please write "SOYUZ 2012" in the subject line. Papers will be
selected and notifications made by January 15, 2012.