CALL FOR PAPERS

Welcome to submit your proposals for the 10th CBEES Annual Conference:

Shaping Futures: The Baltics and Eastern Europe in the World

The 10th CBEES Annual Conference offers a time of retrospection and a time of new imaginings – a time to think about how the future can be (re)constructed. We are living through profound changes and upheaval. Reconfigurations of geographical, social, political, conceptual, and aesthetic boundaries and relations are taking shape. The present seems dominated by violence and destruction, and the world appears to be seriously, perhaps irreparably, damaged.
Nevertheless, in this situation, can we think of ways of reconstruction? When we critically interrogate the present, we find a range of political, social, and cultural connectivities and frictions, as well as different modes of relating to the past. Can we then imagine and understand reconstruction not as a return to the past in its imagined determinations, but as an opening towards the new, the unknown? How would this reshape our relation to the past?
Trying to make sense of the multiple uncertainties in the present that have been brought about by violent historical change, we want to make an effort to think the future. This is a challenge that requires courage.

We welcome applications for panels, roundtables, and individual paper presentations from different disciplines, on topics related to the Baltics and Eastern Europe.
The application deadline is 15 August 2024, 23:59 (Swedish time - CEST).

Topics can include but are not limited to the following:

• The unmaking and making of centres and peripheries; the role and place of the Baltics and Eastern Europe in the world
• New and old imperialistic ambitions to redraw geographical and ideological maps and temporalities
• Movements towards and away from transnationalism and transversalism
• After deconstruction? Critical humanities and the post-critical turn
• Displacement, exile and migration
• The everyday of uncertainty and violence and their lived experience
• Cultural heritage – lost, remembered, forgotten, commemorated, restored
• The shaping of urban space: construction – destruction – (re)construction
• The age of the anthropocene - climate change, sustainability and other challenges
• Resistance and the (re)claiming of dignities, rights and freedoms
• Sustaining democracy and equality (and its gendered dimensions)
• Fear, hope and the politics of emotions
• Artistic and literary voices speaking to the past, present and future

CBEES Annual Conference is free of charge, and CBEES offers accommodation for up to two nights to the presenters at the conference.

If you have any questions, please let us know via confcbees@sh.se.