Article Prize

***2019  SOYUZ ARTICLE PRIZE ANNUAL COMPETITION ***

Soyuz is accepting submissions for its annual competition for the best article related to the culture, history, politics of postsocialism by a junior scholar. This prize recognizes significant contributions to the advancement of scholarly understandings of postsocialism, broadly defined.

Articles published in 2018 and 2019 by a scholar who has earned a PhD within the past six years (2013 or later) are eligible. Scholars from any discipline with any geographic area of interest are encouraged to apply.

Submissions should be sent electronically to SecretarySoyuz@gmail.com no later than October 1, 2019 by midnight.

Please include “Soyuz Article Prize” in the subject line.

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Soyuz’s annual article prize recognizes an outstanding article in postsocialist studies published by a junior scholar in the preceding year.

The 2018 Soyuz Article Prize went to Lilia Topouzova for “Re-inventing Socialist Eastern Europe: Gendered Representations of the Communist Experience in Post-Communist Cinema,” published in Gender & History in July 2018. In this beautifully written article, Topouzova presents the story of Julia Ruzhgeva, an infamous guard at a forced-labor camp who stood trial and became iconic of the horrors of state socialist violence. By interweaving historical analysis with documentary film-making with Ruzhgeva herself, as well as her daughter and former boss at the forced-labor camp, Topouzova presents an empirically rich case study that explores hard questions about how to remember, narrate, and make sense of traumatic national near-pasts. The writing is wonderfully compelling. Topouzova weaves the intimacies of Ruzhgeva’s life (or, rather, narrative attempts at constructing this complex and indeterminate past) with the themes of gender and state violence in socialist Bulgaria in ways that are engrossing—and troubling. The effect is stunning and wholly original, adding to the power of the story that Topouzova tells about storytelling. One of the most significant contributions of the article is to push us to think of narrative and the multi-sensory power of film as working together in efforts to counter dichotomies such “socialist vs. postsocialist,” or “individual agency vs. structural conditions that limit or induce agency.” With its focus on the memory of the gulag and female perpetrators of state socialist violence, the article forges a creative, interdisciplinary approach to issues that are very difficult to tackle. It has clear implications both for postsocialist studies and for interdisciplinary understandings of issues to which postsocialist studies can contribute: agency, memory, representations of the past, the multiplicities of history, and silence. In sum, in this article Topouzova demonstrates vast historiographical knowledge, uncommon sophistication of argument, and creativity in her methodology and writing, for all of which we are pleased to award her this prize.

Honorable Mentions went to Tamta Khalvashi for “The Horizons of Medea: Economies and Cosmologies of Dispossession in Georgia,” published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI) in 2018

and

Ivan Rajković for “For an Anthropology of the Demoralized: State Pay, Mock-Labour, and Unfreedom in a Serbian Firm,” which appeared in JRAI in 2017.

Congratulations!

 

2017

The winner was Dr. Madgalena E. Stawkowski for her article “‘I Am a Radioactive Mutant:’ Emergent Biological Subjectivities at Kazakhstan’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site,” which appeared in American Ethnologist: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12269/abstract

Honorable mentions went to:

Dr. Lily Chumley, for “Seeing Strange: Chinese Aesthetics in a Foreign World,” published in Anthropological Quarterly: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/613675/pdf

and

Dr. Emily Channell-Justice, for “‘We’re Not Just Sandwiches:’ Europe, Nation, and Feminist (Im)Possibilities on Ukraine’s Maidan,” which appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/689639

 

2016

The inaugural article prize was awarded to Dr. Inna Leykin for “Rodologia: Genealogy as Therapy in Post Soviet Russia,” which appeared in Ethos: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/etho.12078/abstract

Receiving honorable mentions were:

Dr. Tatiana Chudakova, for her Medical Anthropology Quarterly article “Caring for Strangers: Aging, Traditional Medicine, and Collective Care in Post-socialist Russia:” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maq.12276/full
and
Dr. Liene Ozolina-Fitzgerald, for her article “A State of Limbo: The Politics of Waiting in Neo-Liberal Latvia,” which appeared in the British Journal of Sociology: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12204/abstract