Symposium

Call for Paper for the 2020 Annual Soyuz Symposium

It is a great pleasure to announce the call for papers for:

“Sovereignty”: The 2020 Annual Soyuz Symposium

Higher School of Economics

St Petersburg, Russia

May 28-30, 2020

Deadline: February 1, 2020

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge) and Jeanne Kormina (HSE St Petersburg)

We live in a world of newly competitive reassertions of sovereignty in geopolitical and regional arenas, and in new regimes of security within and beyond national borders. These assertions are no longer grounded in competitive yet universalist models of modernity, such as socialist, welfare state and neoliberal. Some are increasingly indifferent to such distinctions, as in China’s geopolitical projects. Others, from USA to Russia, work through claims to cultural and political exceptionalism. Yet others also perpetually redraw the line between politics and religion, bringing thereby to light a strong nexus between sovereignty and the modern state’s entitlement to define and regulate religion (cf. the Islamic State).

These transformations prompt questions, first, about the range of these sovereignties and their respective subjects, and, second, about theoretical conceptualisation of these multiple and contested forms. Recent resurgence of research interests in sovereignty have been inspired by the scholarship of Agamben and Schmitt who highlight its specific European legacies of Roman law and classical Greek distinctions of bios and zoe. How do new assertions of sovereignty challenge sovereignty’s and international law’s classic Eurocentric foundations? What kinds of political distancing from Europe/the EU do these assertions of sovereignty constitute both from outside Western Europe (Russia and the USA) and within it (Hungary, Poland and the UK)? Conversely, what is taken at face value about these European legacies when they are emulated in the aspirations of the EU ascent and claims to Europeanness from Ukraine and Georgia to the states of the former Yugoslavia? What are spaces from where we engage with these concepts critically? How do these concepts circulate in complex landscapes of interrogation, imitation and disconnection which are simultaneously political and analytical? Given that our conceptualisation often takes ideal-typical form, how do we account for topographies of actually existing sovereignties that cut across different types of power and rule over different kinds of subjects, bodies and populations? Why might the very notions of “type” and “kind” be here problematic?

The 2020 Annual Soyuz Symposium will address these questions by drawing on current research in anthropology and related disciplines such as history, political philosophy and interdisciplinary area studies. We invite ethnographically grounded as well as theoretical papers that chart idioms of sovereignty across the post-Soviet global space. How are they shaped by the history of post-socialist transformations — such as legacies of the former Soviet states’ break-down throughout the 1990s and their resurgence in the 2000s? What are these idioms of sovereignty and rule? How are they articulated and constituted domestically in relationship to their subject populations, bodies and social spaces, and internationally? How do they reshape the concepts of nation and belonging including their currently rising far right versions? What happens when these regimes of sovereignty come into conflict or extend into territories such as Syria, Africa and Latin America? What is “territory” for these forms and idioms of sovereignty? How do they draw on region’s imperial legacies (e.g. Russian and Ottoman)? How do they work through the categories of the secular and the religious? What are these sovereignties’ new scales and arenas? What is digital sovereignty in cyber-warfare and big data, or “sexual sovereignty” that guides rights of sexual minorities and the Russian-US relations in the sphere of international adoption? How are these new arenas visible in transnational border control regimes, such as the EU; transnational infrastructural projects, such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative; and relations between central states, sub-national regions, or corporate and NGO actors? In what ways, if at all, are these forms of sovereignty neoliberal? How one can interpret their ubiquitous reliance on subcontracting, delegating and outsourcing services, social obligations, and even violence?

Pease submit paper title and abstract (up to 500 words-long) together with your name, affiliation and contact address to <nssorinchaikov@hse.ru> by February 1, 2020. We expect to make paper selections by February 10th.

Keynote addresses:

Caroline Humphrey (University of Cambridge) “States of Exception” in the Russian Far East

Jeanne Kormina (HSE St Petersburg) Nicholas II body remains in Post-Soviet Russian sovereignty

Symposium organisers:

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (HSE St Petersburg), Soyuz Convener <nssorinchaikov@hse.ru>

Usman Boron (University of Toronto), Soyuz Programming Coordinator <usmon.boron@mail.utoronto.ca>

Taras Fedirko (University of Cambridge), Soyuz Book Review Editor, <tf338@cam.ac.uk>

 

Past Symposia

1992  Symposium on Soviet Cultural Studies, Columbia University (pre-Soyuz founding symposium)

1993  Symposium on Soviet and Post-Soviet Cultural Studies, Columbia University (pre-Soyuz)

1994  Symposium at Columbia University (pre-Soyuz)

1995  “Soyuz: Soviet and Post-Soviet Cultural Studies,” Columbia University (the year of Soyuz’s official founding)

1996

1997

1998  Soyuz: Post-Communist Cultural Studies Symposium: “Out of the Ruins: Cultural Negotiation in the Soviet Aftermath,” Columbia University

1999  Soyuz: Post-Communist Cultural Studies Symposium: “Peripheral Visions: Views from the Margins,” Indiana University Bloomington

2000  Soyuz: Post-Communist Cultural Studies Symposium: “Views from Within: Ethnographic Perspective on Post-Communist Culture and Society,” Columbia University

2001  Soyuz Post-Communist Cultural Studies Symposium: “From the ‘Internationale’ to the Transnational: Repositioning Socialist and Post-Socialist Cultures,” University of California Berkeley

2002  “New Directions in Postsocialist Studies,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

2003  Ethnographies of Postsocialism,” University of Massachusetts, Amherst

2004 Memory and the Present in Postsocialist Cultures,” Reed College

2005  Post Post Socialism,” Indiana University Bloomington

2006  “Walls and Bridges: Refiguring ‘Socialist’ and ‘Postsocialist’ Spaces in a Deterritorializing World,” Bryant University

2007  Locating ‘Eurasia’ in Postsocialist Studies: The Geopolitics of Naming,” Princeton University

2008  Contemporary Critical Inquiry through the Lens of Postsocialism,” University of California Berkeley

2009  Global Socialisms and Postsocialisms,” Yale University

2010  Old and New Discourses and Ideologies of Power: Postsocialist Perspectives,” Northwestern University

2011  New Postsocialist Ontologies and Politics,” University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

2012  Affections/Afflictions/Afterlives,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

2013  Authoritarianism and Beyond: Lessons from Postsocialism,” Columbia University

2014  “The Topos of Justice,” Miami University of Ohio

2015  “Shifting Territories: Historical Legacies and Social Change,” University of Washington

2016  Politics of Difference: Migration, Nation, Postsocialist Left and Right?,” University of Chicago

2017  “Embracing Confusion and Questioning Clarity: On Matters of Method in Postsocialist Studies,” Indiana University Bloomington

2018New Stages? Postsocialisms, Postliberalisms, and Performances,” Yale University

2019Beyond the Soviet Slot: Race, Indegeneity, and Identity,” University of Pittsburgh

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The Soyuz Research Network for Postsocialist Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary forum for exchanging work based on field research in postsocialist countries, ranging from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Soyuz is an interest group in the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and an official unit of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). The Soyuz symposium has met annually since 1991 and offers an opportunity for scholars to interact in a more personal setting.