[Bilimsel Haber] CONF./CFP- Soyuz Symposium: Authoritarianism and Beyond?, Columbia U., Mar. 22-23, 2013

[Gonul Pultar]

CONF./CFP- Soyuz Symposium: Authoritarianism & Beyond?, Columbia U., 
Mar. 22-23

Posted by: Susanne Cohen <smcohen at uchicago.edu>




Call for Papers

2013 Annual Soyuz Symposium
"Authoritarianism and Beyond? Lessons from Postsocialist Societies"

Harriman Institute, Columbia University, New York, March 22-23, 2013



Theme:

Authoritarianism has become the common denominator for political
regimes of many contemporary postsocialist societies. Authoritarianism
highlights strong presidential authority, lack of democratic
succession of rule and insufficient public representation. Within this
analytic, authoritarianism is the opposite of liberal democracy,
deficient in terms of active civil society and critical public sphere,
and plagued by state-led oppression and violence.

The 2013 SOYUZ symposium invites papers that would extend interpretive
work on authoritarianism beyond this dualistic framework. We solicit
field-research-based presentations that explore political and social
processes in postsocialist societies in ways to complicate this
top-down understanding of the state-society relationship. What kinds
of alternative analytical frameworks are there to approach these
processes? What kind of interpretation might the understanding of
politics drawing, for example, on Foucault or Agamben offer to this
conversation? Overall, we seek to extend the scope of this symposium
beyond the concerns of postsocialist societies and to explore
analytical limits and possibilities of the term authoritarianism itself.


Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
  - working through/making sense of authoritarian pasts
  - specters of the state
  - agencies of state: law, the military, borders, and taxation
  - the role of media and cultural production
  - conjuncture of capitalism and authoritarianism
  - non-state authoritarianism
  - neoliberalism as a type of authoritarianism


SOYUZ, the 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. The
Symposium has met annually since 1991 and offers an opportunity for
scholars to interact in a more personal setting.


The deadline for abstracts is: December 15, 2012.  Please send
abstracts of 250 words by email to Zhanara Nauruzbayeva
(zn2123 at columbia.edu). Please include your full name, paper title, and
academic affiliation, and write "SOYUZ 2013" in the subject line.
Papers will be selected and notifications made by January 15, 2013.




Distrib. by: Central-Eurasia-L - Announcement List for Central Eurasian 
Studies