Call for panelists: Designing Progress: Arts, Sciences, and the State in Twentieth-Century CESEE, Call for panelists for a section at ASEEES 2026 in Chicago, November 12-15, 2026 (https://aseees.org/convention/2026-annual-convention/).
The history of the 'Long 20th Century' in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (CESEE) is often recounted through the prism of shifting borders and ideological ruptures. However, one consistent theme emerges throughout these decades: an unwavering belief in the transformative power of scientific rationality. From post-1918 reconstruction to technocratic dreams in the 1960s, science was not just an area of study, but also a guarantor of progress and a cornerstone of state legitimacy. At the same time, periods of political upheaval and reconstruction unsettled traditional borders within knowledge regimes and systems, allowing novel forms of cooperation and interchange to emerge. Notably, the prospect of becoming architects of modernity brought artists and scientists together in this period, as they cooperated and competed for epistemic primacy. While this history is mostly written from the perspective of the influence of new scientific discoveries on the arts, we posit that the exchange was frequently mutual and produced durable results, albeit sometimes only allowing exchange within short-lived 'trading zones'. It is these cross-fertilisations, collaborations and exchanges that our panel will focus on.
The panel will explore the evolving relationship between broadly defined sciences and arts, and the state, from interwar national experiments to post-war socialist transformations. Our aim is to examine how science — ranging from social physics and hygiene to cybernetics and nuclear physics — interacted with various artistic and literary fields. We are particularly interested in situations in which scientists and artists worked together, and in the interactions that occurred in these interdisciplinary spaces.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- artistic-scientific collaborations in pursuit of efficiency, from interwar industrial management to the 1960s' fascination with systems theory and automated governance (architecture, urbanism, psychotechnics, etc.);
- architecture for science, from laboratory design to "big science" infrastructures (university campuses, "science cities", nuclear research facilities, etc.);
- imagining the future at the intersection of art, literature and science;
- interdisciplinary projects for the betterment of the state and its citizens (e.g. lifestyle planning, urbanism and aesthetics).
- Arts, sciences and state security (e.g. camouflage research, propaganda and medical visual communication);
- Propagandistic exhibitions of science (e.g. hygiene and space exploration);
- Artists as scientists and scientists as artists.
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