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Confronting
Cold War Conformity - Peace and Protest Cultures in Europe,
1945-1989
Conference Date: August 18-25, 2008.
Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.
The year of 2008 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Prague
Spring, the French May events, as well as numerous other protest
movements which attempted to bring about domestic change and
transform the geopolitical confines of the Cold War. Due to
this occasion, the Marie-Curie-Conference and Training Courses
on “European Protest Movements since 1945” invite
applications for an international summer school in Prague
on European peace and protest cultures from 1945-1989.
We will
take the anniversary and the historical location as an opportunity
to discuss the contributions of protest movements to processes
of political participation and transformations of culture
and value systems in European societies from an interdisciplinary
perspective. Our goal is to examine the variety of political,
social, cultural and aesthetical forms of protest and social
dissent by including all sides of the political spectrum.
Particular emphasis will be laid on the impact of peace and
protest cultures for the development of a European transnational
civil society and for the international diffusion of alternative
lifestyles and cultural practices.
Though
mainly focusing on the years of the Cold War, our aim is also
to analyze the influence of longer historical trajectories
reaching into the first half of the century, as well as to
make the connection to more recent forms of social dissent
and protest phenomena in the era of the internet. By bringing
together innovative approaches to phenomena of social change,
protest movements and cultures of dissent in Europe during
the Cold War from a variety of disciplines, the summer school
wants to offer a more comprehensive view of historical and
cultural transformations in the 20th century.
Although
the conference language will mainly be English, we also invite
proposals in Czech, French, Spanish, Dutch, German and Polish,
if a short summary in English is provided.
FURTHER
QUESTIONS OR SUGGESTIONS: mail@protest-research.eu
Dr. Martin
Klimke
University
of Heidelberg
Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA)
Curt
und Heidemarie Engelhorn Palais
Hauptstr. 120
69117 Heidelberg
Germany
Phone:
+49-6221-54 3710/3714
Fax: +49-6221-54 3719
Email:
mail@protest-research.eu
Visit the website at http://www.protest-research.eu
Posted: December 14, 2007.
Decision-Making in the Cold War
Conference Date: September 3-5, 2008.
Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Germany
Starting
point of the conference is the assumption that the Cold War
had a substantial influence on the configurations and apparatuses
of power developed by all political actors involved, an influence
that in part survived the end of the bloc confrontation in
the late 1980s. In the course of four decades, specific mechanisms
and procedures of political decision-making that met the needs
of the period emerged. The precise nature of these mechanisms
as well as their similarities and differences within each
bloc and beyond the boundaries of the two systems will be
the focal point of this conference.
At the
conference, we would like to discuss these aspects on the
basis of case studies or longitudinal historical analysis,
thereby addressing a wide spectrum of topics, which might
include such themes as the study of decisions on armament
projects; the analysis of doctrines, strategies, and negotiating
practices; consideration of the psychology of power in relation
to "group-think" or evaluation of the effects of
rivaling interests within the bureaucracy.
With respect
to the two hegemonial actors, the United States and the USSR,
the following issues would seem especially relevant: In the
case of the US, the "policy of secrecy" and the
formation of an "imperial presidency" to which it
was linked. The latter refers to the extension, indeed, over-extension
of the executive’s political and administrative powers
and thus a process in which the constitutional division of
powers was restructured to the disadvantage of the legislative
and judicative and the advantage of a self-referential national
security elite.
In the case of the USSR, not only the classic actors (Politburo,
Central Committee, military leadership, and intelligence services)
should be examined, but also informal leadership circles (e.g.
the foreign policy commission of the Politburo, the Information
Committee within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the Vos’merka,
a circle of Stalin’s closest confidants, which existed
besides the Politburo in the early 1950s).
The conference
language is English.
The Hamburg
Institute for Social Research will reimburse necessary travel
expenses (second class train fare or economy class air fare
for long-distance travel) as well as providing accommodations
and meals during the conference for all invited participants.
Dierk Walter
Hamburger Institut fuer Sozialforschung
Mittelweg 36
20148 Hamburg
GERMANY
Phone: 0049-40-414097-62
Email: dierk.walter@his-online.de
Posted:
January 25, 2008.
Imaging War: Intergenerational Perspectives
Conference Date: September 3-7, 2008.
Sweden
This conference will explore what various cultures are saying
to each other and how organised knowledge systems, scenarios
and stories are used to legitimate or deconstruct new paradigms
on war and its consequences.
We have
entered a time of highly technological warfare, where over
half of the world’s research and development is now
military and an ongoing revolution in military affairs (RMA)
is changing the rules and weapons that will be used to define
our common futures in a global society. Yet most of the public
are getting their information on the implications of these
developments, not from learned scientific or technological
treatise but from the media, film, literature, computer games
and simulations. The way that war is imaged varies considerably
between artists, scientists, urban geographers, media theorists
and indeed between generations.
Given
the controversies which form our daily news about the “War
on Terror” and the projected need to give up our traditional
human rights and civil liberties, it is essential that we
understand the role of the war imagers and their critics.
There are many lenses to tell the story, including political,
PR and weapons procurement; media journalism (which leaves
out as much as it includes), games, stories, and literature.
This conference will explore what these various cultures are
saying to each other and how organised knowledge systems,
scenarios and stories are used to legitimate or deconstruct
new paradigms on war and its consequences.
The conference
seeks to explore dissonance and common ground between the
image builders and the image consumers; the weapons manufacturers
and the story tellers; the politicians and the children. Given
its timeliness and originality, we anticipate a wide audience
for such an event and are seeking to include as many of the
relevant dimensions of the topic as possible. We also wish
to encourage different generations to participate.
Abstracts
for papers, posters, screenings and performances on the following
topics are particularly welcome, however abstracts related
to the themes of the conference are also welcome: Selling
Modern Warfare Technologies and Strategies, Screening War,
War games, Deconstructing the Technology of War, War and the
Media, Intergenerational Perspectives.
The conference
will take place at Vadstena Klosterhotel, located in a lovely
natural setting on the shores of beautiful lake Vättern,
offering comfortable accommodation in a historic environment.
During the Middle Ages, Vadstena was the location of a catholic
monastery for monks and nuns of the Birgittine order and nowadays
the conference center and hotel is largely located in the
same medieval buildings that were once the monastery.
Anne Blondeel-Oman
Email: ablondeel@esf.org
Visit the website at http://www.esf.org/activities/esf-conferences/details/confdetail258.html?conf=258&year=2008/
Posted:
May 28, 2008.
Reconsidering
Conflict, Terror and Resolution
Conference Date: September 11-12, 2008.
United Kingdom
various levels: past-present; private-public; local-global.
In doing so it aims to reach across disciplinary barriers
by bringing together more than forty speakers from the whole
of the social sciences spectrum, including politics, history,
law, sociology and psychology. Such a holistic analysis will
provoke, stimulate and question contemporary thought, while
advocating the need for joint efforts to address common challenges.
Panels include: Narratives of Conflict, Cultural Reconciliation,
Reporting Conflict, Divided Cities and Sectarianism, Just
War, and the ‘War on Terror’, among others.
Where: University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, U.K. When: September
11 & 12, 2008
Conference
programme and registration form are available on the website:
http://intelevents.athollsweb.co.uk/scar/index.php
Celia Lloyd
University of Strathclyde
Tel: +44 (0) 1786 820 254
Fax: +44 (0)1786 201 052
Email:
scar@intel-events.co.uk
Visit the website at http://intelevents.athollsweb.co.uk/scar/index.php
Posted:
July 8, 2008
Towards
a History of Humanitarian Intervention
Conference Date: September 19, 2008.
United Kingdom
This colloquium will bring together scholars to discuss papers
on the history of humanitarian intervention. At present, most
considerations of the problem of how to protect human rights
in the international community are substantially or wholly
contemporary in focus; the lack of a broader historical context
is a major flaw. This colloquium will investigate the hypothesis
that at the dawn of modernity, when the law of nations was
formulated, states often did use or threaten force against
other states which ill-treated minority populations, and that
at least some contemporary theorists specifically justified
such actions in terms of the law of nations. It will further
examine whether the history of the modern state system as
it developed after Westphalia (1648) provides precedents,
in rhetoric and reality, for ‘humanitarian interventions’.
The main focus will be on charting the evolution of the concept
through intellectual history and the history of international
relations up to 1980, starting in the Early Modern Period,
which is likely to emerge as a time of ‘incubation’,
when notions of the common interest of ‘Christendom’
provided a starting point for doctrines that subsequently
evolved and mutated via ‘humanity’ into the ideas
of ‘international community’ current today.
Such an enterprise must, of course, beware the pitfalls of
anachronism and teleology; and it may well be that papers
will not so much generate a historical lineage for ‘humanitarian
intervention’ as identify the diverse strands which
later fused to make the modern concept of ‘humanitarian
intervention’. However, this colloquium will greatly
aid in the process of reconceptualizing interventions ‘in
the cause of humanity’, by bringing together historians
of different periods and regions, highlighting the different
ways interventions have been regarded throughout history,
and the different intentions and views of the international
system that have explicitly or implicitly been attached to
interventions.
Brendan Simms
Peterhouse
Cambridge CB2 1RD
++ (0)1223-338234
Email:
bps11@cam.ac.uk
Posted:
May 28, 2008.
After Empire? Rethinking the Post in
the Postcolonial
Conference Date: September 26-27, 2008
University of Leeds
For historians, watersheds are an inescapable tool. To think
in terms of continuity and change, scholars cannot help but
look for ruptures and breaks, turning points and defining
moments. But a time-frame demands a beginning and an end.
The validity of origins or beginnings has now been challenged.
But what of ‘end’?
This conference
will provide a space in which to critically rethink the notion
of an ‘end’ of empire. Just how meaningful is
it to separate historical time into colonial and postcolonial
chapters? And more importantly, how meaningful might it be
to think without them? This is not simply to repeat the neo-colonial
refrain. Rather, our intention is to reappraise what colonialism
was, how it was undone, the forms in which it may have continued
to exist and ways by which it may be challenged once more.
Web
Site: After Empire?
Posted: June 19, 2008.
Divided
Dreamworlds - The Cultural Cold War in East and West
Conference Date: September 26-27, 2008.
Netherlands
On Friday 26 and Saturday 27 September 2008, the Roosevelt
Study Center (RSC, Middelburg), the Dutch Institute for War
Documentation (NIOD, Amsterdam) and the Research Institute
for History and Culture (OGC, Utrecht) organize a conference
in Utrecht (The Netherlands) on ‘Divided Dreamworlds
- The Cultural Cold War in East and West’.
In recent
years there has been increasing scholarly attention given
to the ‘Cultural Cold War’. In general terms this
phrase is used to refer to the ideological struggle between
the US and Soviet blocs following the Second World War, and
how this struggle was conducted with ‘cultural arguments’
in East and West. This trend has broadened our understanding
of the political relevance of Cold War cultural manifestations,
but it has also raised questions concerning the value of the
Cold War, and its implicit East-West divide, as a valid periodisation
for examining cultural history. Some scholars have argued
that a full understanding of cultural activity can only take
place if a longue durée analysis is used which takes
into account developments long before the Second World War.
Others have focused on the similar mission of East and West
within their ideological contest to claim the heritage of
universal Enlightenment rationality, leading to the potential
for a cross-bloc comparative analysis of common cultural themes.
To be
sure, the Cold War, as a unique ideological contest between
East and West, remains a very significant backdrop to the
cultural history of the 1945-1990 period. In this context,
cultural activity played a crucial role in shaping the meta-narrative
of both blocs. This was done either actively, by those who
consciously engaged their art or intellectual output with
the political environment, or passively, through the co-optation
of cultural forms for political purposes. Culture became the
sign through which the ideology of the Cold War was represented
and understood in society at large, and contributed significantly
to the process of ‘mobilisation’: the concentration
of energies in the service of countering external as well
as domestic threats.
Susan
Buck-Morss offers an ideal starting point for investigating
these insights with her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The
Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press: Cambridge
MA, 2000). In this work she portrays the mass-utopian experiments
of American-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism as
two paths that led from the same industrial modernity. Both
systems claimed exclusive access to happiness, optimal social
organisation, and the end of scarcity. Both systems promoted
a dreamworld of messages, images, and artefacts to transmit
their inevitable triumph to a mass audience abroad, co-opting
along the way all possible means and media to do so. By using
this perspective, the hindrance of a high/low culture division
dissolves into a general analysis of how all cultural forms
were drawn into and utilised by the competing dreamworld meta-narratives.
After all, high culture relied on mass media and a mass audience
for its impact to be registered.
This conference
seeks to explore the ways in which the Cold War heightened
the contest between these cultural dreamworlds of East and
West while at the same time exposing their structural similarities.
The conference encourages papers on other cultural agents
who were active in this field but escaped (or tried to escape)
the rigid East-West divide. This will allow a greater appreciation
for the many actors involved and the multifarious agendas
and ideals that were being expressed within, through, and
around the norms of bloc politics.
The conference
aims to build on the results of the April 2007 conference
‘European Cold War Cultures’, organized by the
Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) in Potsdam,
which specifically focused on European cultural identities
in the context of the Cold War.
Joes Segal
Department of History and Art History
University of Utrecht
3512 BS Utrecht
The Netherlands
Email: joes.segal@let.uu.nl
Posted:
December 14, 2007.
The
Baltic States under Stalinist Rule
Conference Date: October 18-19, 2008.
Tartu, Estonia
The independent Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
were occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. The
scope of the seminar will encompass both the Sovietization
begun in 1940, following the occupation and annexation of
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and the post-Second World
War period to the mid-1950’s. The aim of the workshop
is to bring together scholars from the Baltic States and elsewhere
to discuss different aspects of Stalinist rule in the three
countries.
The workshop
is organized by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic
Studies (AABS), the Nordost-Institut in Lüneburg, Germany,
and the University of Tartu, Estonia.
Please
send your proposal for a paper (250-300 words) and a short
CV no later than 1 May 2008, by e-mail, to Dr. Olaf Mertelsmann
(omertelsmann@?yahoo.co.uk).
Kontakt:
Olaf Mertelsmann
Lossi 3-419
50090 Tartu
Estonia
omertelsmann@yahoo.co.uk
Posted:
May 12, 2008.
May 1968 and Historians
Conference Date: October 23, 2008
Paris, France
This colloquium, based on the spoken experiences of a particular
group: aims to explore the legacy of May 68, on research tools,
historical renewing, and knowledge transmitting schemes. By
analyzing the content of these testimonies, either recorded
biographies or, for some, filmed, we hope to understand the
retrospective discourses made by “Intellectuals”
about this series of events and their impact on reputedly
decisive breaks.
We will
explore in depth the phenomenons of socialization, on both
individual and collective levels, how the social imaginaries
cling to certain figures or generational groups, the convergences
between historian and political interpretations, the changes
instilled in the universities and higher education, the social
codes that define perception and appropriation of social sciences
in the seventies.
Agnes Callu
Email:
agnès.callu@culture.gouv.fr
Visit the website at http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/mai68/
Posted:
June 19, 2008
The
Soviet Public during Perestroika (1985-1991)
Conference Date: November 13-15, 2008.
Moscow, Russia
Social consciousness in the Soviet Union underwent a rapid
transformation in the mid-1980s.
The government and party leadership’s “Glasnost'”
had created a critical public which soon took on a life of
its own. Changes to the rules of communication also transformed
political practice. A committed media succeeded in both effectively
discrediting the communist dictatorship within a very short
period of time and in raising the issues of a new and more
humane and rational political and social order.
The conference
(to be held at the German Historical Institute in Moscow,
13-15 November 2008) therefore invites participants to sum
up the current status of research into the public in Russian-speaking
countries and to discuss the prospects for future research
into its role throughout contemporary history.
The historical
preconditions of this transformation of consciousness should
also be investigated. What conclusions about the political
culture of the preceding decades can be drawn from Soviet
citizens’ attitudes and behaviour in the years from
1985-1991 ?
Lorenz Erren
Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau
c/o INION
Nachimovskij Pr. 51/21
RF-117418 Moskva
+7 499 744 4562
Email: lorenz.erren@dhi-moskau.org
Visit the website at http://www.dhi-moskau.org
March 13, 2008.
Secret
Weapon or Victims of the Cold War: Central and Eastern European
Political Emigres
Conference Date: November 20-21, 2008.
Lublin, Poland
The 20th Century, plagued by two world wars, witnessing the
rivalry between the world of democracy and the world of totalitarianism,
also brought the biggest migrations in modern history. Movements
dictated by political reasons were an important part of those
migrations. Political migrations affected especially East-Central
Europe from where, firstly as a result of the Second World
War, about 30 million people emigrated, and later most of
them permanently stayed outside their home countries. Next
waves of emigrants like those after 1956, 1968 and 1980–81
joined them before the iron curtain fell. On the other hand
many emigrants did not withstand the hardships of exile and
made decisions to return. Political émigrés
became an important factor exploited by both sides of the
Cold War conflict.
The opening
of secret archives of communist security services in 1990s
brought about a breakthrough in the research on the history
of East-Central European political émigrés.
Thus the activities of communist security services directed
against political émigrés will be the central
topic of an international conference organised by the Institute
of National Remembrance in Lublin, Poland from 20th to 21st
November 2008. The conference will be structured in 4 parts
– we envisage 21 papers and a panel discussion. The
conference will proceed in English and Polish with consecutive
interpretation.
For more
information, or to receive a conference registration form,
please contact Dr Slawomir Lukasiewicz at:
slawomir.lukasiewicz@ipn.gov.pl
or
Dr Slawomir
Lukasiewicz
Institute of National Remembrance – Lublin Branch
Public Education Section
ul. Szewska 2
20-086 Lublin
fax: +48.81.53.63.462
Additional
information:
http://www.ipn.gov.pl
Posted:
March 13, 2008.
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