CfP: The effect of Perestroika

International Academic Conference – Europe 2015.

The effect of Perestroika: regimes and risks of polyphonic knowledge

For graduate and undergraduate students

European Humanities University – Vilnius, Lithuania
May 15-16, 2015
Deadline for submitting abstracts: March 15, 2015

By 2015, 30 years have passed since the beginning of transformations which have come to be known as Perestroika. It is also the year of the 25th anniversary of Lithuania’s independence and the 10th anniversary of EHU’s reestablishment in Vilnius. On the occasion of this triple anniversary, the organizers of the European Humanities University’s annual student conference are inviting undergraduate and graduate students majoring in various social sciences and humanities to join in an interdisciplinary discussion of Perestroika and its effects, interpreted broadly.

We invite you to examine Perestroika not only as a specific historical event which has radically transformed the present-day political and discursive landscapes, but also as a powerful conceptual resource for interdisciplinary work with changes being made to social constructs and practices under conditions of the collapse of one symbolic order and the formation of many.

From this perspective, we offer to discuss how knowledge is transformed under the influence of new technologies (communicative, cultural, scientific), how regimes of polyphony of the knowledgeable ones are connected to the democratization of traditional institutions (education, religion, laws), how the polyphony is realized through space (public, urban, virtual), and to what extent the new orders of decentralized knowledge production allow to articulate the experience of diverse social groups, including the marginal ones. Speaking of the effects of Perestroika, we invite to discuss the old/new rhetoric and intellectual affects, the change of status of theory and the knowledge economies, centrifugalism and rigidity, footprints and wounds, academic imagination and resistance, loyalties and discursive communities, new institutionalizations and deformed networks, media interventions and visualizations, interpretive frames and background practices, policies and technologies involved in creating and maintaining the present-day polyphony.

Thirty – twenty five – ten years after, the transformed and transforming worlds do not seem much simpler. Contemplating this complexification, we offer to take into account not only regimes and gains but also the risks of decentralization and polyphony, including the disenchantment of the reformers and political apathy of citizens, geopolitical instability and distrust in theory, memory wars, and the new Ice Age.
Eligible topics

Contemporary social theory: perspectives in the situation of conceptual polyphony
History at the turn of epochs: challenges of the past / diversity of the future
Gender turn in social knowledge: different research strategies and forms of interpreting the sociality
Reconstructing the knowledge: big data, analytical platforms, visualization and other challenges of digital humanities
Popularization of urbanism and new professional identities
“Perestroika” and design: was there “perestroika” in design?
Processes of “perestroika” in political and economic relations in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states
Place of the historical heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in today’s Eastern Europe
Results of public administration reforms and new challenges for effective implementation of public policy in countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states
Development perspectives of private law in the European Union and CIS countries
Constitutionalism and legal instruments of human rights protection in Central and Eastern European states
Right to oblivion: social and legal practices and mechanisms of constructing the post-Soviet rupture
Religion and processes of modernization in Eastern Europe
Practical psychology in post-Soviet region: peculiarities of genealogy and development perspectives
Modes of working with heritage: shift of paradigms
Social challenges of today’s biotechnologies
Science and technology ± bright future
Art before and after perestroika
Media culture: technological and social “perestroika”
Cinema in the context of digital culture: technology, esthetics and new receptive practices
New look: vision as a cultural technology
Soviet project between construction and reconstruction (perestroika)

Guidelines for submission
Undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to submit abstracts.
Please submit the online application here no later than March 15, 2015. Participation in the conference is free of charge (no registration fee), but submitted abstracts will be reviewed and selected.
Only selected applicants will be invited to participate. Successful applicants will be notified of acceptance by April 2, 2015.

The conference languages: English, Belarusian, and Russian.
A collection of conference papers will be published.

Visa Support: Students requiring visa support are to indicate their passport data in the application form. Visas are issued free of charge.

Accommodation: Accommodation is provided to all the participants free of charge for the period of the conference (May 15–16).
Organizer
European Humanities University
Information & contacts
European Humanities University
e-mail: studentconference@ehu.lt

Author: admin

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