Organizers: Danish Network for Cultural Memory Studies & Network for Migration and Culture

Date: 6 – 7 December 2012

Venues: University of Copenhagen & Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj

Deadline for applications: 1 st May 2012

The increasingly complex relationship between the local and the global, ‘the near’ and ‘the far away’, has emerged as one of the defining characteristics of contemporary societies. With globalization’s increased mobility of people and speed of information exchange, and the cultural encounters resulting from it, traditional essentializing and stabilizing definitions of terms such as ‘home’, ‘belonging’, ‘place’, ‘identity’ and ‘memory’ have long become problematic and more adequate understandings of these conceptions are much sought after.

Date and venue: 5-6 March 2013,  University of Illinois

Deadline for applications: 20th April, 2012

Organizers: Program in Jewish Culture and Society and the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Research Group  Pathways of Law in Ethno-Religiously Mixed Societies, funded by the German Research Foundation at Leipzig University

Research in urban history of Eastern Europe – as anywhere else in the world  – focuses on cities, namely the metropolis.  Yet until the beginning of the twentieth century, small urban communities were the principal habitat of the vast majority of people in Eastern Europe. Surprisingly little is known about  the political and social universe of small towns. Without privileging a single national history or question, the symposium  examines, on a microscopic scale, power dynamics, values, belief systems, and everyday interactions from the early modern period until the beginning of the twentieth century. From this perspective, we hope to challenge established grand narratives  of historical development and organization.  We especially welcome proposals that  zero in on the mentalities, communal  structures and  organization, and the functions and dysfunctions of small town life in a comparative framework.

Keynote lecture: Timothy Snyder of Yale University.

Date: 5th-6th October 2012

Organizers: Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University and Centre for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), Nanyang Technological University

Deadline for applications: 16th April 2012

Memory studies has emerged as a growing field of research in recent years, attracting scholars from various countries in diverse disciplines. The introduction of the new media has augmented the zeal for memory-making practices in different societies around the world. The Internet and participatory tools of Web 2.0 has contributed to the upsurge in user-generated content.  Much of these contents are generated through narratives, stories, pictures and even videos, which also provide a remarkable possibility in fostering and facilitating the production of memories and histories. Furthermore, the Internet’s capability for information storage and sharing has afforded people platforms to impart their recollections of the past.  As such, the intersections involving new media, memory and history are attracting academic interest from scholars in Sociology, Geography, History, Communication, Cultural Studies and Information Studies, who are drawing upon various theoretical and methodological approaches in examining the juxtaposition between new media, memories and histories.

Guest editors:
Ludmila Cojocari, ProMemoria Institute of Social History, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova & Jennifer R. Cash, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Salle, Germany

Deadline for abstracts: 6th April, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS
As historical studies have shown, the socialist state attempted to mobilise citizens to make new nations, as well as construct of socialist modernities, through festive culture. More than just a means “to bring cultural and social enlightenment to the people” (Petrone 2000), public holidays were opportunities “to temporarily empower the participants by drawing them into the network of Soviet existence” (Chatterjee 2002). Amid often violent transformations and rapid changes, the celebratory discourse was intended to provide relaxation, entertainment, education and ideologisation, and was expected to improve quality of life, industrial productivity, state legitimacy, and national and socialist collective identities (Binns 1979, Lane 1981). Despite these efforts, the Communist Party’s ideologues were not able to fully supervise the narratives, symbols and images perceived and selected by collective conscience from the official rhetoric they created and, subsequently, articulated by the social memory of several generations. Sometimes the entrepreneurs of festive culture pursued aims that were clearly at odds with official state intentions, but, as Yurchak (2007) has shown, even key agents of social change were not always aware of the potential effects of their actions.

Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen/ Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna is offering multiple fellowships for students and young and visiting scholars. We would like to draw Your attention to some of fellowships offered: