Translating, Reclaiming, and Creating Concepts for Research

We invite early-career scholars of the humanities in Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic Sea region, and Central Asia to participate in a two-day workshop aimed at developing and complicating our conceptual vocabulary.

How can scholars working on Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic Sea region, and Central Asia make their work intelligible within international academia without sacrificing the specificity of their contexts? Too often, research on the region is expected to “translate itself” into a vocabulary shaped elsewhere. Concepts developed in Western academia are treated as universally applicable, while local categories, intellectual traditions, and forms of experience remain invisible or are dismissed as too particular. Researchers are thus confronted with a difficult choice: adapt their work to an established conceptual lexicon or risk being rendered unintelligible.

This workshop invites early-career scholars to reflect critically on this dilemma. We seek contributions that address questions of conceptual translation, epistemic inequality, and methodological innovation in research on Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic Sea region, Central Asia, and Scandinavia. In this, we would like to expand on discussions on the region in the global context that have been very productively initiated by, e.g., scholars of the RUTA Association. This workshop responds to the ongoing need for continued presence and advocacy within the Western-dominated academia, which requires developing tools for increased “readability” of our work, without sacrificing the specificity of our contexts in favour of recognisable buzzwords.

We welcome contributions from the fields of history (especially early modern history), literary and cultural studies, intellectual history, translation studies, and interdisciplinary humanities. The workshop is aimed at researchers of and especially from the Baltic Sea region, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Scandinavia. We especially encourage applications from scholars whose work has been shaped by experiences of intellectual marginality, disciplinary border-crossing, or multilingual research practice.

Possible themes include, but are not limited to the following questions:
- Which concepts travel easily across contexts, and which resist translation? How can such “translation” be aided or supplemented in those cases?
- What happens when Western conceptual frameworks are applied to the region?
- How can scholars introduce concepts rooted in local intellectual traditions into international debates?
- What are the methodological and political implications of translating (or refusing to translate) key categories?
- How can we build a more plural and less hierarchical academic vocabulary?

The workshop is aimed to serve as a platform for collaboration, resulting in a publication of a special issue on the conceptual and methodological issues in focus in a peer-reviewed journal.

The workshop will include a roundtable with invited expert speakers and discussions devoted to publication planning. Workshop participants will be asked to prepare a short presentation (10–15 minutes) and to circulate a brief text beforehand.


This workshop is funded by the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES).

Organisers have a limited budget to cover travel costs and hotel accommodation for one night for participants travelling from outside of Stockholm. If you require more support to be able to attend the workshop, please indicate this when filling out the application form.


To apply, please fill out the form below, including:

(1) a short author bio (100 words);

(2) an abstract of the proposed contribution (300 words);

(3) a brief statement (max. 100 words) addressing how your research relates to issues of conceptual translation.

Deadline for applications: May 25
Notification of acceptance: By the beginning of July


If you have any questions, please contact the workshop organisers:

- Dr Mariia (Masha) Semashyna at mariia.semashyna@sh.se

- Dr Emese Bálint at emese.balint@msinst.org