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.

Keynote Lecture

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė | Making (Scientific) Predictions, Shaping Futures in the Anthropocene

• 28 November 2024
• 14.00-15.00
• Format: On-site/online webcasting (see the registration button below)

In this talk, I will ask to what extent scientific predictions can shape futures in the context of economic and environmental decline. Drawing on several distinct examples where Soviet scientists forecasted the decline and collapse of the Soviet economy and society in the 1960s-80s, I will discuss the relation between the data, computer-based modelling and predictive expertise as they are mobilised to drive political change. I will particularly focus on the late Soviet version of the Anthropocene as a critical idea, which was proposed in the 1980s, to consider the power and limitations of scientific predictions.

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė External link. Länk till annan webbplats.is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University London. Her research revolves around the sociology of scientific expertise and public policy, and the sociology of culture, particularly cultural policy, heritage and creative industries.

Her last book, entitled "The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science External link. Länk till annan webbplats." (Cornell University Press, 2023), explores the politics and epistemology of scientific predictions and their use in public policy.

The application deadline was 15 August 2024. Unfortunately, we cannot accept late submissions.

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.