Affections/Afflictions/Afterlives

Conference venue: Ann Arbor, MI (USA)
Period: Mar. 23 - 24, 2012
Deadline for submitting abstracts: Dec. 15, 2011

SOYUZ, the Post-Communist Cultural Studies Interest group at the University of Michigan, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
1080 South University Ave., Suite 3668
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106
tel.: 001.734.764.0351
fax: 001.734.763.4765
e-mail: amlemon@umich.edu