Gregor Feindt: Baťas Menschen. Rationalisierung, social engineering und Differenzierung in der tschechoslowakischen Unternehmensstadt Zlín, 1918–1948.

Gregor Feindt: Baťas Menschen. Rationalisierung, social engineering und Differenzierung in der tschechoslowakischen Unternehmensstadt Zlín, 1918–1948. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2026. ISBN: 978-3-666-37109-7

OA: https://www.vr-elibrary.de/doi/pdf/10.13109/9783666371097

Baťas Menschen

Das Schuhunternehmen Baťa produzierte in Zlín preisgünstige Schuhe für den Weltmarkt – und leistungsfähige Menschen. Baťa lockte seine Beschäftigten mit einem Leben in Wohlstand, mit modernen Annehmlichkeiten und einem Ausblick in die weite Welt – und drang weit in ihren Alltag ein. Dabei übertrug das Unternehmen das in der Produktion eingeübte Prinzip der Rationalisierung auf die Personalverwaltung und den Alltag in Zlín, formte seine Belegschaft und differenzierte sie. Die Arbeit analysiert Sozialreform und Personalpolitik im Schuhunternehmen Baťa und stellt die Beschäftigten der Schuhfabrik in den Mittelpunkt, von der Ausbildung an der Werkbank über die Karrieren erfolgreicher Männer und einiger weniger Frauen bis hin zum Privat- und Familienleben. Dabei verfolgt das Buch die Entwicklung und Überformung des Sozialexperiments von seinen Anfängen in der Habsburgermonarchie über die demokratische Tschechoslowakei bis zur deutschen Herrschaft im Zweiten Weltkrieg und den Anfängen des Staatssozialismus.

Karin Reichenbach: Archäologie im Kontext deutsch-polnischer Beziehungsgeschichte

Karin Reichenbach: Archäologie im Kontext deutsch-polnischer Beziehungsgeschichte. Forschungsstrukturen und Deutungsdiskurse der niederschlesischen Burgwallforschung im 20. Jahrhundert. Dresden: Sandstein 2025. ISBN: 978-3-95498-885-3.

OA: https://www.sandstein-kultur.de//openaccess/FGKoeM63.pdf

Die Burgwallforschung in Niederschlesien erzählt mehr als nur die Geschichte vor- und frühgeschichtlicher Befestigungen – sie spiegelt ein Jahrhundert politischer Umbrüche, nationaler Konflikte und wissenschaftlicher Antagonismen. Die Studie untersucht archäologische Infrastrukturen und Deutungsdiskurse in einer lange Zeit umstrittenen Grenzregion und zeigt, wie das Ausgraben und Forschen in den deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen des 20. Jahrhunderts verhaftet war. Anhand der institutionellen Entwicklungen, der prägenden Akteure und zentralen Forschungsprogramme wird die Entfaltung der Burgwallarchäologie von ihren systematischen Anfängen bis 1970 nachvollzogen. Darauf aufbauend, legt die Analyse der Deutungen von Wallanlagen diskursive Muster frei, in denen Ansprüche auf die konfliktbeladene Grenze stets widerhallten. Sie offenbaren, wie eng archäologische Deutungen und nationale Geschichtspolitik verflochten waren – vom Postulat germanischer Kontinuität und Überlegenheit in der Zwischenkriegszeit bis zur slawisch-polnischen Rückeroberungserzählung nach 1945. So wird die Burgwallarchäologie zu einem Spiegel der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungsgeschichte – und zugleich zu einem Fallbeispiel für die Bedingtheit historischer Erkenntnis. Ein Buch über Archäologie, Politik und die Verantwortlichkeit wissenschaftlicher Forschung im Spannungsfeld nationaler Narrative.

Online event: Pollution and sanitizing: Imperial environmental policy, legislation and everyday life

 Online event: Pollution and sanitizing: Imperial environmental policy, legislation and everyday life

Feb 26 (Thu), 14:00–16:00 (CET)

Anna Mazanik presents her book Sanitizing Moscow. Waste, Animals, and Urban Health in Late Imperial Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, Oct 2025)

Andrei Vinogradov presents his forthcoming book Cleaning the Empire. Industrial pollution and birth of Russia's environmental policy (CEU Press, Fall 2026)

organizer and chair: Anastasia Fedotova (St Petersburg)

Anna Mazanik is an environmental and medical historian of Russia and a research fellow at the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe. Born in Moscow, she has studied in Russia, Hungary, Germany, and the US. She holds a PhD in history from Central European University.

Sanitizing Moscow presents an environmental history of public health reforms in late imperial Moscow between 1870 and 1917. It explores the relationship between Russia’s urban modernization and the more-than-human environment in the context of the major social and political changes, triggered by the liberal reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, and the transnational rise of scientific medicine and sanitary technologies.

Andrey Vinogradov is an environmental historian whose research focuses on industrial pollution, climate change, and their social consequences in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig.

The rapid industrial growth that marked post-reform Russia pushed society toward an awareness of the environmental consequences of economic development. Challenging the entrenched view that industrial pollution and technological disasters first entered the political agenda as a result of Soviet forced industrialization, Andrei Vinogradov shows that environmental policy began to take shape much earlier, in conflicts between pre-revolutionary factory owners, peasants, city dumas, and ministerial officials in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Oil slicks on the Volga, toxic effluents from textile mills, and waste from sugar factories became forces that reshaped legislation and transformed the views of officials and the public on the environment.

Please register to get the Zoom link: https://forms.gle/qf41S5xPoSEbmhD48

The Zoom link will be sent before the meeting

Vnoučková, Kateřina: Okno příležitosti: Životní prostředí a přeshraniční vztahy na březích Dyje 1984–1995 [Window of Opportunity: Environment and Cross-Border Relations on the Banks of the Dyje River, 1984–1995].

 Vnoučková, Kateřina: Okno příležitosti: Životní prostředí a přeshraniční vztahy na březích Dyje 1984–1995 [Window of Opportunity: Environment and Cross-Border Relations on the Banks of the Dyje River, 1984–1995]. Karolinum 2026. ISBN: 978-80-246-6154-4

Životní prostředí spojuje – a to i přes uzavřenou hranici. Globální uvolnění napětí mezi Východem a Západem otevřelo na konci 80. let okno příležitosti pro regionální výměnu mezi jižní Moravou a Dolním Rakouskem a propojené životní prostředí nabídlo platformu pro spolupráci při obnově venkova, v ochraně přírody a při řešení znečištění. Kniha poukazuje na klíčovou roli lokálních aktérů, na kontinuitu vývoje před rokem 1989 a po něm i na důvody, proč se intenzivní spolupráce počátku 90. let nerozvinula v trvalé propojení regionů. Rozšiřuje transnacionální dějiny pozdního socialismu a transformace o regionální a environmentální perspektivu.

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Epistemic Passages: Knowledge in Translation, 9–11 September 2026 in Prague

(Deadline extended to 28. February 2026)  The board of the Society for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (GWMT) invites you to the 2026 annual conference in cooperation with the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University and the Prague department of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO).

The conference will take place 9–11 September 2026 in Prague and will focus on the theme:

Epistemic Passages: Knowledge in Translation

Taking the opportunity of convening in a city that over centuries experienced has the positive as well as the negative aspects of the encounter of different cultures, confessions, ideologies, or nations, the GWMT annual conference will focus on scholarly translation practices and their consequences. While translation is usually associated with so-called natural languages, our conference will extend beyond this to include knowledge moving across time, space, ideologies, religions and confessions, technical and media environments or between scholars and laypeople.

We want to focus on the dynamics of knowledge in transit and its interrelations with the settings it traverses and/or newly creates as it travels. How does knowledge become rewritten and reconceptualized to new contexts after years of being forgotten in dusky libraries? How does it change when it is appropriated into new confessional, social or ideological contexts? How does it change while travelling from discipline to discipline (as, e.g. from medicine to the humanities or vice versa)? How do scholars rewrite the knowledge of laypeople – and how do non-academics transform academic knowledge into one that is accessible for them and their networks? How does (academic) knowledge change when it is applied into practice? How is translation of knowledge technically mediated and informed?

Not only practices, but also specific understandings of translation are consequential. Assumed universality of scholarly knowledge, that only changed its attire while in transit, with facts or theories supposedly travelling without changing their content through languages, cultures, or disciplinary dialects, has long informed the politics of science’s propagation and popularisation, prioritising the academic content of communicated science over its potential to be understood by the non-academic public. Various linear models of how knowledge travels across languages and cultures underlie the modernisation-theory-based approaches to the “spread” and “communication” of science, linking thus science’s history with its present.

Therefore, the conference equally asks about the different modes of understanding translation and scholarly thinking about translation (termed ‘translation knowledge’ by Lieven D’hulst and Yves Gambier) and their repercussions. Which different ‘translation knowledges’ exist in different disciplines and how do they change over time? Which different vocabularies of translation exist, and how do they resonate with those in other fields and disciplines? Which consequences do different ‘translation knowledges’ have for the understanding of science in science-reflexive disciplines (philosophy, history, sociology of science, etc.)? How do changes of ‘translation knowledge’ impact the politics of science, science communication, discussions on technology acceptance, or the involvement of laypeople into the knowledge production labelled as citizen science? Which new conceptual or technical tools are developed, or old tools adjusted, to accommodate the changes to ‘translation knowledge’?

We welcome applications for entire panels as well as individual contributions. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in length. Sections consist of either four presentations or three presentations with commentary and last 120 minutes, including discussion. Applications for round-tables – a discussion-oriented format focusing on a common theme, consisting of up to five speakers and a moderator, allowing at least 60 minutes for general discussion – are explicitly encouraged. Please submit abstracts of approximately half a page in length using our submission form. For sections, a short introduction to the section should be submitted in addition to the abstracts of the individual presentations. If of equal quality, sections that span academic generations will be given preference. While the preference will be given to the applications that relate to the overall topic, we will accept applications on all topics of history of medicine, science, and technology.

Languages of the conference will be English and German.

Please submit proposals by 15 February 2026, using the online submission form on the GWMT website (www.gwmt.de). Please note: This is an in-person conference; exceptions are only possible for accessibility purposes.

Text and Image: Essential Problems in Art History, Том 2 № 20 (2025): The Soviet Utopia Through the Prism of Art History (in Ukrainian)

 Текст і образ: Актуальні проблеми історії мистецтва / Text and Image: Essential Problems in Art History, Том 2 № 20 (2025): Радянська утопія крізь призму історії мистецтва [The Soviet Utopia Through the Prism of Art History]

OA: https://txim.history.knu.ua/uk/issue/view/519/460

SOVIET UTOPIA THROUGH THE LENS OF ART HISTORY

Казакевич Г. Радянська технологічна утопія і аматорська фотографія в Україні:

погляд з перспективи соціальної історії технологій

Kazakevych G. Soviet Technological Utopianism and Amateur Photography in Ukraine:

A Social History of Technology Perspective.................................................................................... 5

Конта Р. Музика вільного світу в поневоленій країні:

переосмислення акустичного середовища в Українській РСР

Konta R. Music of the Free World in an Unfree Country:

Reassessing Acoustic Environment in Ukrainian SSR....................................................................15

Левченко І. Руїна у просторі радянської техноутопії:

дефініції, функції та розширення поняття

Levchenko I. Ruin in the Realm of Soviet Techno-Utopia:

Definitions, Functions, and the Expansion of the Concept................................................................27

Адамська І. Технологічні утопії XX століття:

методологічний і тематичний аспекти дослідження.

Огляд конференції «Переосмислення техноутопій поза бінарністю Схід-Захід.

Творці, уможливлювачі та користувачі» (25-27 червня 2025, Базель)

Adamska I. Technological Utopias of the 20th Century:

Methodological and Thematic Aspects of Research.

Conference Review of «Understanding Techno-Utopias Across the East-West Divide:

Creators, Enablers, and Audiences » (25-27 June 2025, Basel).................................................................39

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THEORY OF ART

Левицька М. Осередки мистецтвознавчих досліджень у Львові:

трансформації повоєнного десятиліття (1946-1950-ті рр.)

Centres of Art Historical Research in Lviv:

Transformations in the Post-War Decade (1946–1950s)................................................................49

Humanistyka w PRL-u [Humanities in Polish People's republic]

 Humanistyka w PRL-u [Humanities in Polish People's republic]. Thematic issue of Teksty Drugie. Teoria literatury, krytyka, interpretacja 2025.

OPEN ACCESS: https://rcin.org.pl/ibl/dlibra/publication/284353/edition/247608?language=pl#structure 

Wybór zaproponowanego tematu wiąże się z doświadczeniem kryzysu humanistyki we współczesnym świecie społecznym, a także z rolą humanistyki w kulturze, węziej zaś w nauce. O tym, że humanistyka we wszystkich tych obszarach ludzkiego świata jest w kryzysie, nie trzeba przekonywać. Choć od wielu lat prowadzone są badania w ramach krytycznych studiów nad uniwersytetem, głównie w obszarze uniwersytetów zachodnich, to jednak nie dają one nadziei na pozytywne koncepcje humanistyki. Właśnie dlatego warto zgłosić propozycję, by okrężną być może drogą próbować zarysować możliwe oraz zrealizowane wizje polskiej humanistyki powojennej. Wcielane w życie z porażkami, sukcesami lub tylko z częściowo pozytywnymi skutkami koncepcje humanistyki, które ze względu na określone warunki kulturowe i polityczne nie mogły być wdrożone, albo były, lecz zostały zapomniane lub zdewaluowane, a dziś mogłyby się okazać inspirujące ze względu na sposób ich ukształtowania i odziaływania na społeczny obieg wiedzy humanistycznej. \

CFP: Experiences and Perspectives of Female Patients

 CFP: Experiences and Perspectives of Female Patients: Body, Health and Disease across Europe (1450-1750), Trento (Italy), 30.03.2027 - 31.03.2027, Deadline:  30.03.2026

Object: Up to two-day international conference with a view to producing a peer-reviewed special issue with selected papers that will be submitted to the leading academic journal "Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento" / "Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient". The conference will be the concluding event of the research project titled "The Role of Gender in Medical Care. The Case of the Imperial Habsburg Family (16th–17th Centuries)" (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Project num. 101202043; https://gendmedhab.fbk.eu/).

Location and date: Italy, Italian-German Historical Institute of Trento, 30–31 March 2027.

Organizing committee: Alessandra Quaranta and Elena Taddei.

Subject fields: History of Medicine; History of the Body; Gender Studies; History of Knowledge Transfer; Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History; History of Emotions; Early Modern Europe.

Languages of the conference: English, German, and Italian.

In the last thirty years, the nexus between the social history of medicine and gender studies has often yielded studies on female healers. Inquiries into fascinating figures of female medical agents who operated in the medieval and early modern periods have illuminated their engagement in health care within the domestic context and beyond. By dealing with ill bodies, caring for sick family members, administering remedies, and washing and bandaging sores, women developed manual and technical competences, refined specialist know-how in pharmacy production, and observed the effects of materia medica upon the body. Recent historiography has also stressed that nursing was not an exclusively female terrain, thus recalibrating the roles of men and women in medical assistance within the household. The care of sick children was a shared responsibility between both fathers and mothers, who devoted effort, time, and emotion to sick and dying children, took turns sitting at their bedside, and comforted and kept them calm. Men were also involved in the experimentation of home-made medicines and in the compilation of domestic medical manuscripts that recorded the preparation of medicaments.

By contrast, the roles of women as patients and consumers of medical services have represented an under-researched topic thus far. While most works address this theme in general terms, neglecting a gender perspective, a few significant exceptions have been produced. These reconstruct not only pains and suffering of ill women but also their insights into the body and its mechanisms of healing. Building on this relevant but limited literature, the conference aims to amplify the spectrum of women who were confronted with everyday ailments, serious diseases, and the related therapies, interacting with a variety of (male and female) figures, both specialists and non-specialists, in relation to their health status.

The conference will be the occasion to bring to light a broader spectrum of female patients’ voices. These are hard-to-reach witnesses as the principal historical documents available are male-physician centred sources. Medical treatises and the published collections of medical letters and consultations aimed at enhancing the reputation of the author as practitioner and scholar, tending to obscure, undermine, or counterfeit the opinions of patients in general, and those of women in particular. These works were thus filtered by the pen of the writing physicians and their scholarly discourse. Furthermore, the direct witnesses of female patients, which are contained in family letters or recorded in the context of forensic medicine, have to be used with caution, as the way in which women talked about their health issues depended on different factors and circumstances as well as the self-image that women intended to convey according to the relationship with their interlocutors. Female witnesses were influenced by the discrepancy of social status between the women interrogated and the judges within tribunals, the hierarchical family structure of the early modern period, and the rigid social norms related to the physical and intellectual modesty that women were expected to comply with at that time.

Through an exploration of women’s experiences with and understandings of their own healthy and ill bodies, the conference endeavours to illuminate the roles of female patients within medical visits and their ability to influence their dynamics. Specifically, it scrutinizes women’s attitudes towards the attending physicians, their opinions on diagnoses and therapeutics, and their approaches to the (male) traditional conceptualisations of the body, health, and disease, as well as their emotional responses to illness, recovery, and physicians’ decisions. We are especially keen to refer to a wide range of early modern players and contexts. The investigation extends to a variety of socio-cultural settings—hospitals and charity facilities, municipal health boards, criminal or inquisitorial trials, monastic contexts, noble residences, court environments, literary and artistic circles—and focuses on female voices from the diverse European social strata. A comparison with the male perspective is also encouraged.

We welcome contributions focusing on one or more of the themes outlined below (depending on the historical sources utilized) or exploring analogous subjects:

- Female patients and the medical marketplace: which medical practitioners did women turn to and for what pathologies? What criteria did they adopt in their choices? What disputes, quarrels or tensions between female patients and their healers are attested?

- Cross-gender medical visits: what were the interactions between female patients and the attending male physicians and how did their interplay influence the outcomes of medical visits? Did women agree with the diagnostic assessments and therapeutic approaches of medical specialists and how did they respond to these?

- The relationships between female and male family members in regard to health issues: what importance did men attribute to the health of their female family members and to what extent did men contribute to preserve their good health status? Did fathers, brothers, and husbands seek to prevaricate their female family members in the negotiations with the doctors or, rather, did they encourage women to interact with the attending doctors and express their opinions?

- Women facing difficult childbirths and surgical operations.

- Women’s medical cultures, readings, and understandings of the female body and its pathologies, also in comparison with male medical perspectives or male non-professional standpoints.

- The networks of cultural, religious, and scientific relationships by way of which women apprehended medical notions and developed medical interpretations.

- The manner in which diseases were faced by women belonging to noble and wealthy households, ruling families, the lower classes, or religious orders: what were their emotional responses to illness and treatment? What kind of relationship did women have with their ill or enfeebled body?

- The representations and meanings of female physical or mental/spiritual illness in European literary texts, religious works, and visual arts.

- The consideration of illness in social terms: were ill women penalized or stigmatized and why? Was illness a disadvantage for women in terms of social and/or professional integration?

- The identities of women as healers and patients: relationships, potential overlapping or differences between the two roles.

- The topoi of the women’s physical weakness and their consequent precarious health, as historically produced by traditional male medicine, revisited through a female perspective.

Practical details

We are now inviting proposals for 20-minute-long unpublished papers in English, German, or Italian that address one or more of the themes indicated in our argument description, or similar issues, relating to European territories during the period 1450–1750.

Please send your contribution proposal in a single document, including the following details:

- name, surname, and affiliation of the author

- (provisional) title (and subtitle, if applicable) of the contribution

- abstract of the contribution (maximum 1,500 characters, including spaces)

- 5 keywords

- short bio-note (maximum 10 lines)

Please add your Academic curriculum vitae, including a list of the five most significant publications (maximum one page).

Please send one PDF-file by 30 March 2026 to the following email address: femalepatients@fbk.ue. Our responses will be transmitted by 30 May 2026.

Thank you for considering our invitation, and we look forward to the possibility of welcoming you to our conference.

With best regards,

Alessandra Quaranta and Elena Taddei (aquaranta@fbk.eu; elena.taddei@uibk.ac.at)

DEADLINE APPROACHING: Epistemic Passages: Knowledge in Translation, GWMT annual conference

  The board of the Society for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology (GWMT) invites you to the 2026 annual conference in cooperation with the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University and the Prague department of the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO).

The conference will take place 9–11 September 2026 in Prague and will focus on the theme:

Epistemic Passages: Knowledge in Translation

Taking the opportunity of convening in a city that over centuries experienced has the positive as well as the negative aspects of the encounter of different cultures, confessions, ideologies, or nations, the GWMT annual conference will focus on scholarly translation practices and their consequences. While translation is usually associated with so-called natural languages, our conference will extend beyond this to include knowledge moving across time, space, ideologies, religions and confessions, technical and media environments or between scholars and laypeople.

We want to focus on the dynamics of knowledge in transit and its interrelations with the settings it traverses and/or newly creates as it travels. How does knowledge become rewritten and reconceptualized to new contexts after years of being forgotten in dusky libraries? How does it change when it is appropriated into new confessional, social or ideological contexts? How does it change while travelling from discipline to discipline (as, e.g. from medicine to the humanities or vice versa)? How do scholars rewrite the knowledge of laypeople – and how do non-academics transform academic knowledge into one that is accessible for them and their networks? How does (academic) knowledge change when it is applied into practice? How is translation of knowledge technically mediated and informed?

Not only practices, but also specific understandings of translation are consequential. Assumed universality of scholarly knowledge, that only changed its attire while in transit, with facts or theories supposedly travelling without changing their content through languages, cultures, or disciplinary dialects, has long informed the politics of science’s propagation and popularisation, prioritising the academic content of communicated science over its potential to be understood by the non-academic public. Various linear models of how knowledge travels across languages and cultures underlie the modernisation-theory-based approaches to the “spread” and “communication” of science, linking thus science’s history with its present.

Therefore, the conference equally asks about the different modes of understanding translation and scholarly thinking about translation (termed ‘translation knowledge’ by Lieven D’hulst and Yves Gambier) and their repercussions. Which different ‘translation knowledges’ exist in different disciplines and how do they change over time? Which different vocabularies of translation exist, and how do they resonate with those in other fields and disciplines? Which consequences do different ‘translation knowledges’ have for the understanding of science in science-reflexive disciplines (philosophy, history, sociology of science, etc.)? How do changes of ‘translation knowledge’ impact the politics of science, science communication, discussions on technology acceptance, or the involvement of laypeople into the knowledge production labelled as citizen science? Which new conceptual or technical tools are developed, or old tools adjusted, to accommodate the changes to ‘translation knowledge’?

We welcome applications for entire panels as well as individual contributions. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes in length. Sections consist of either four presentations or three presentations with commentary and last 120 minutes, including discussion. Applications for round-tables – a discussion-oriented format focusing on a common theme, consisting of up to five speakers and a moderator, allowing at least 60 minutes for general discussion – are explicitly encouraged. Please submit abstracts of approximately half a page in length using our submission form. For sections, a short introduction to the section should be submitted in addition to the abstracts of the individual presentations. If of equal quality, sections that span academic generations will be given preference. While the preference will be given to the applications that relate to the overall topic, we will accept applications on all topics of history of medicine, science, and technology.

Languages of the conference will be English and German.

Please submit proposals by 15 February 2026, using the online submission form on the GWMT website (www.gwmt.de). Please note: This is an in-person conference; exceptions are only possible for accessibility purposes.

CFP: 2nd edition of Asynchronous Histories Summer School

 Dear Colleagues,

we would like to kindly invite you to the 2nd edition of Asynchronous Histories Summer School which will be held in Warsaw 31 August - 4 September 2026:

 

https://ihpan.edu.pl/en/cfp-asynchronous-histories-summer-school/

 

The Asynchronous Histories Summer School aims to explore regions and moments in history marked by the coexistence of asynchronous sociopolitical tendencies and processes. These conditions often reveal paradoxical outcomes when seemingly well-established actors and mechanisms are put into practice. The absence—or inefficiency—of "The Great Synchronizer," whether imperial order, centralized state apparatus, or the power of capital, has, in various periods and regions, created fertile grounds for blending the old and the new in unequal and unexpected ways.

 

Rather than viewing this coexistence of asynchronicities as a static phenomenon, we understand it as a dynamic and intricate process. In such situations, old forms may act as tools paving the way for new developments, while new forms may consolidate old arrangements, laws, and privileges. This interplay also triggers epistemological challenges, as research tools developed in global centres often fail to yield productive results when applied to these complex settings. This is why it is both challenging and indispensable to abandon normative definitions of phenomena and states of affairs in favour of listening to local actors, whose diversity ultimately calls into question apparently universal models and descriptions of reality—models that, in practice, are deeply rooted in Western centres.

 

In adopting such a perspective, we draw inspiration from several contemporary intellectual currents that seek to develop thinking in this direction. First, Reinhart Koselleck’s concept of multiple temporalities enables us to discern the non-linear character of time in human societies. Second, postcolonial and subaltern narratives continually challenge Western epistemic frameworks that remain incongruent with large parts of the world beyond capitalist centers. Third, alternative conceptions of modernity pave the way for rethinking the modern project as a plural rather than a singular phenomenon.

 

By understanding asynchronicity in such ways, we aim to encourage a rethinking of the past through this powerful umbrella tool. We invite early-career scholars from all areas of the humanities and social sciences to join us in a shared intellectual exploration.

 

Among the distinguished lecturers for the second edition are:

 

Franz Fillafer - Austrian Academy of Sciences

Augusta Dimou – University of Leipzig

Helge Jordheim - University of Oslo

Karen Lauwers - University of Helsinki

Rosario Lopez – University of Málaga

Jani Marjanen – University of Helsinki

Banu Turnaoglu – University of Cambridge, Sabancı University

Oliver Zajac – Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava

Tomasz Zarycki - University of Warsaw

 

Organizing Institutions: 

Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw

The German Historical Institute, Warsaw

The Gabriel Narutowicz Institute of Political Thought, 

 

in partnership with

Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

The History of Concepts Group

 

Organizing Comittee: Anna Gulińska, Bartłomiej Błesznowski, Jan Krakowian, Piotr Kuligowski

 

We welcome submissions from PhD students. Advanced MA students and early career postdocs (up to two years post-defence) are also encouraged to apply.

 

How to Apply?

 

Please submit the following materials by May 31, 2026:

• a short CV (maximum two pages).

• a concise description of your research interests (up to 1,000 words).

Send your application to ahss.warsaw@gmail.com

 

The participation fee is 150 EUR or 650 PLN. In justified cases, this fee may be reduced.

 

CFP: Mathematics & Language: A Historical Perspective workshop

 Join the Mathematics & Language: A Historical Perspective workshop, part of the Math & Society workshop series, in Brno, Czechia, on 4–5 June 2026.

Invited speakers: Amirouche Moktefi (Tallin) and Kateřina Trlifajová (Prague). 

We're inviting abstracts (200–500 words) on topics including  mathematics as language, translations, mathematical practices and cultural, mathematical symbolism, nomography and other outdated disciplines.

Deadline: 1 May 2026

More: https://math-and-society.webnode.page/

CFA: Special Issue: "Popularisation: An Entangled History of Science and Religion"

 Special Issue: "Popularisation: An Entangled History of Science and Religion"

Guest Editors: Dr. Elena Schaa and Annika Kraft

The popularisation of academic knowledge continuously shapes the way we make sense of the societal and natural world. Consequently, the societal function of religion as the main system of meaning-making changed. Since the professionalisation of the sciences (including the humanities and social sciences) in the 19th century, popularisation has made the specialised knowledge produced at diGerent academic institutions and ventures available to a wider audience. For religion, the professionalisation of the sciences has largely been described in terms of secularisation or disenchantment. While much has been written on the replacement of religion including the refutation of such a thesis, little has been said about the many ways science and religion have been and continue to be entangled. Recent research has shed light on the way religion may serve as a medium to make sense of academic knowledge or the lack thereof (Grieser 2015), communicate knowledge (De Cruz 2020, Schrempp 2012), critique science (Schaa 2024), or shape the pursuit of new knowledge (Borrelli 2015). In the case of popularisation religion is both the object of boundary-work and a resource to make scientific knowledge meaningful.

Building on this research, the Special Issue seeks to explore the entangled history of science and religion in the case of science popularisation, by addressing themes such as but not restricted to: [1] religion as a medium for popularisation of academic knowledge, [2] popularisation as a practice of worldview making, and [3] popularisation of academic knowledge shaping the concept of religion/s. We invite historical case studies with diGerent foci on academic disciplines, media, or practices that elucidate/examine popularisation as a key aspect of the entangled history of science and religion. In return, the contributions elucidate popularisation as a key term for science-and-religion studies. The special issue will shed new light on how religion forms the societal role science plays in shaping historical and imagined realities of modern societies through popularisation.

We intend to propose a Special Issue on the topic of ‘popularisation,’ comprising approximately 5-7 contributions in German, English and possibly French or Italian. We welcome contributions that deepen our understanding of the entangled history of science and religion by bringing case studies in conversation with reflection on popularisations. Please send an abstract of up to 300 words along with a brief bio, to Elena Schaa schaae@tcd.ie or Annika Kraft annika.kraft@uni-muenster.de by March 1st 2026 .

We do not yet have a place for the special issue, but we are in conversation with an open-access journal, which will subject all contributions to a double-blind peer review process.

Literature

Asprem, Egil (2016), ‘How Schrödinger’s Cat Became a Zombie. On the Epidemiology of Science-Based Representations in Popular and Religious Contexts.’, In: Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 28, 113-140.

Borrelli, Arianna (2019) ‘Poetic Imagination in Scientific Practice: Grand Unification as Narrative Worldmaking’, In Johannsen, D., Kirsch, A., Kreinarth, J., Narrative Cultures and the Aesthetics of Religion (Leiden: Brill), 314–344.

De Cruz, H. (2020), ‘Awe and Wonder in Scientific Practice: Implications for the Relationship Between Science and Religion’, In: Fuller, M., Evers, D., Runehov, A., Sæther, KW., Michollet, B. (eds) Issues in Science and Theology: Nature – and Beyond, , (Cham: Springer).

Gladigow, Burkhard (1995) ‘Europäische Religionsgeschichte’, In: Kippenberg, H. G., Luchesi, B., Lokale Religionsgeschichte. Marburg: diagonal-Verlag, 21-42.

Grieser, Alexandra (2015), ‘Imaginationen des Nichtwissens: Zur Hubble Space Imagery und den Figurationen des schönen Universums zwischen Wissenschaft, Kunst und Religion’, In Traut, L.

and Wilke, A. (eds), Religion – Imagination – Ästhetik: Vorstellungs- und Sinneswelten in Religion und Kultur, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), 451–486.

Schaa, Elena (2024), A Medium of Cultural Critique and a Framework for Interpretation: Religion in Werner Heisenberg's Popular Writings , (Trinity College Dublin).

Schrempp, G. (2012), The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing , (Montreal, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press).

Experts in Transition: Political Epistemologies of 1980s–2000s East Central Europe

July 9–10, 2026, Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana

Deadline March 15, 2026.

Research on experts and expertise in state socialism has developed, in recent years, from national case studies embedded in overarching accounts of “Cold War expertise,” to transnational histories of knowledge production, to a renewed appreciation for thick descriptions of the political, social, and epistemological contexts of expertise as developed in and for the purposes of socialism. In particular, work in social history and the history of labor, the history of science, and intellectual history has been addressing the role of experts in the political economy and class structure of socialist countries in the region. This has also inspired efforts to revisit the conceptual and theoretical approaches to expertise with the insight of the historical legacies of anti-capitalist political epistemologies from East Central Europe. At the same time, new research has focused on the 1980s and 1990s as part of broader processes of transformation, combining perspectives on the shifts in global capitalism and the development of international expertise with accounts of political, economic, and social change on the semi-peripheries and theories of elite transformation. Taking stock of this scholarship and uniting approaches developed by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project “Trans/Socio: Transnational Sociology and Concepts of Social Expertise in Eastern Europe, 1970s–2000s” (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana) and the project “Political Epistemologies of Central and Eastern Europe” (PECEE), the “Experts in Transition” conference explores expertise at the end of state socialism in East Central Europe from three interconnected perspectives. Focusing on socialist experts, the experts of transition, and expertise after the end of socialism, we examine different understandings of the expert and the role of expertise through periods of transformation.

1. Who were the socialist experts and what were they experts of?

The workshop will inquire into what types of experts and kinds of expertise were engendered by socialism specifically, whether or not historical actors would have described the particular configuration of material determinations, social relations, and images of science that they were engaged in as “socialist expertise.” This involves reconstructing the political epistemologies of the 1980s from a historically grounded understanding of the functioning of socialism at the level of institutions and practices, including in terms of processes of class formation among the intelligentsia. We are interested in how the very role of the expert and the concept of expertise were developed from socialist positions and in relation to Marxist epistemology, and ask what were the state supported, socially recognized, as well as informal types of expertise stemming from the context of state socialism—its economy, politics, and society.

2. Who were the experts of transition? 

The workshop aims to revisit the debate over the role of experts in the late socialist and postsocialist periods by looking beyond economic expertise in the context of the global consolidation of neoliberalism, which has largely dominated research on experts in transition, and turning to social expertise in particular, but not exclusively. By looking at how expertise about social transformations has been constructed in socialism from as early as the 1950s and how it developed politically into the 1980s, the workshop aims to tease out the divergent understandings of social change, social inequality, and social justice already present before the transitions to liberal democracy and market economy in the region. We ask what was the accumulated knowledge regarding the “social costs” of economic and political transformation, and how this knowledge was mobilized over the 1980s and 1990s. This includes discussions about limited social mobility, lack of political engagement among the youth, poverty and social exclusion, or gender inequality, among others. We explore the extent to which these informed policy making in the late socialist and postsocialist periods, and how state expertise was established, challenged, and reconstituted in the process.

3. What happened to expertise on socialism since 1989?

Finally, the workshop is concerned with what became of the expertise specific to socialism after 1989—in terms of individual biographies of experts, the shifting “geographies of expertise” from centers to peripheries, the institutional and non-institutional continuities in cultures of expertise, and the ebb and flow of critical expertise, particularly Marxist. At the same time, it looks at the kind of expertise developed in and for transition. On the one hand, this means recognizing how the political epistemologies engendered by the decades-long practice of socialism endured and were repurposed after socialism, in different configurations, with different framings, and at different speeds across disciplines and topics of expertise. On the other hand, it involves asking how radical rupture was instrumentalized in the 1990s to establish new fields and networks of expertise, in explicit opposition to the political epistemologies of socialism. This includes questions about the transnational embeddedness of experts from the late socialist and postsocialist periods, how epistemic inequality was perceived and negotiated beyond the national contexts, in regional, transregional, and global contexts, and the beginnings of long-standing debates about the role of local and foreign expertise in East Central Europe.

The workshop aims to bring together early career scholars (including PhD students) and established researchers interested in exploring the questions of experts and expertise in transition in East Central Europe along these broadly defined lines. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

-         case studies of individual experts in all areas of science;

-         specific debates around concepts, theory, social, and scientific practice;

-         inequality research during and after socialism.

-         the role of experts and expertise in policy making;

-         the interplay between local, transnational, and international expertise;

-         perspectives on transition as a concept and process up to the early 2000s.

The workshop will take place on July 9–10, 2026, at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana. To apply, please send the title and abstract (up to 500 words) of your proposed presentation, together with a short bio, to adela.hincu@inz.si and pecee.initiative@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is March 15 and the program will be finalized at the beginning of April. Participants without institutional resources will be offered support within the limit of available funding.

The workshop is funded by the European Union through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie research project “Trans/Socio: Transnational Sociology and Concepts of Social Expertise in Eastern Europe, 1970s–2000s” at the Institute of Contemporary History (Ljubljana); the Chair of History of Science, Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Erfurt (Germany); the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture in Eastern Europe (Germany); the Faculty Center for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna (Austria); and the Lumina Quaeruntur fellowship “Images of science” in Czechoslovakia 1918-1945-1968” at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Prague).

Call for Papers: Socialist Techno-Optimism and Governance of Economic Development, 1955–1991

Call for Papers: Socialist Techno-Optimism and Governance of Economic Development, 1955–1991

Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

September 15–16, 2026

The Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University and the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, invite proposals for a dual workshop devoted to two interconnected themes: techno-optimism, understood as positive expectations about the transformative power of science and technology, and knowledge-driven models of economic governance and environmental management under state socialism.

The first part of the workshop examines socialist techno-optimism as a discursive, cultural, and epistemic formation. It explores how expectations surrounding science and technology emerged, circulated, and were contested in official, sanctioned, and unofficial discourses, as well as in popular culture. Socialist techno-optimism was articulated through narratives of the Scientific-Technical Revolution, automation, and computing as symbols of a transformed future, while simultaneously generating skepticism and irony. Particular attention is given to popular science magazines, science fiction, film, television, and visual media that both promoted socialist futurisms and exposed their contradictions. These cultural forms blurred the boundaries between imagination and reality and sustained hopes for technological progress even amid growing systemic disillusionment.

The second part of the workshop addresses socialist technocracy as a key approach to governing economic development between 1955 and 1991 and, increasingly, environmental processes. It treats socialist technocracy as a historically specific alignment of expertise, institutions, and political authority that rendered economic processes legible, measurable, and open to algorithmic governance and management. This part explores the role of planning, cybernetics, environmental management, and consumption policies in strategies of socialist development. Contributions analyze how these approaches informed economic reform and modernization within socialist states, structured development models introduced in the Global South, and connected domestic economic management with international development agendas. By integrating conceptual, institutional, and empirical perspectives, this part of the workshop situates socialist technocracy within Cold War debates on economic development, expertise, and democracy, and highlights its lasting impact on post-socialist political economies and contemporary discussions of technocratic decision making.

The organizers welcome paper proposals that engage these themes from conceptual, institutional, and empirical perspectives, with particular interest in contributions on Asian socialisms, as well as comparative, transnational, and globally connected approaches. Proposals should consist of an abstract of up to 300 words and a short biographical paragraph. Please note that the organizers are unable to cover travel or accommodation costs. Selected papers are planned for publication in a peer-reviewed edited volume. Abstracts and biographical notes should be submitted by February 28, 2026, to ivan.sablin@inz.si.

Augusta Dimou: Contesting Copyright. A History of Intellectual Property in East Central Europe and the Balkans. CEU Press 2026

Augusta Dimou: Contesting Copyright. A History of Intellectual Property in East Central Europe and the Balkans. CEU Press 2026. ISBN 9789633866146

The creative sector, including the cultural industry, is key for today’s economy. Copyright has the capacity to fix the roles and tasks of the actors involved and determine the direction of cash flows within this sector. The study of the evolution of copyright helps understand and adjust the regulation and commercialization of creative labor. Augusta Dimou provides a thoroughly researched, interdisciplinary and comparative study of the historical development of copyright regimes in three countries – Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. She examines the function and significance of copyright in the institutionalization, development, and regulation of modern culture in East Central Europe and the Balkans during the diverse political regimes of the modern era, and at the interface between the various nationalization and globalization processes of the 20th century.

Author

Augusta Dimou

Augusta Dimou specializes in the Modern History of East and Southeast Europe from a comparative, transnational perspective. She is Privatdozentin at the Institute for the Study of Culture of the University of Leipzig and has held academic positions at the University of Ioannina, Humboldt University in Berlin, IOS-Regensburg and GWZO in Leipzig. She has been a fellow at Maison des Sciences de l’ Homme (Paris), IWM (Vienna), FRIAS (Freiburg), CAS (Sofia) and New Europe College (NEC) in Bucharest.

online event: Animals In and Beyond Wartime

 online event: Animals In and Beyond Wartime

How does war shape the lives of animals, ecosystems, and the natural world?

We invite you to consider this question and reflect on life and resilience with leading scholars, including Dr. Tanya Richardson, Dr. Arita Holmberg, Olha Matsko, and Dr. Julia Malitska, as part of the 𝘙𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘜𝘬𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦’𝘴 𝘌𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘰𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵: 𝘞𝘢𝘳, 𝘌𝘤𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘥𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘉𝘦𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘥 international seminar series.

𝗔𝗻𝗶𝗺𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝗜𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗪𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲

𝟭𝟮 𝗙𝗲𝗯𝗿𝘂𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲

𝟭𝟬 𝗮.𝗺. 𝗠𝗦𝗧 (𝗘𝗱𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗼𝗻) / 𝟭𝟮 𝗽.𝗺. 𝗘𝗦𝗧 (𝗧𝗼𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗼) / 𝟭𝟴:𝟬𝟬 𝗖𝗘𝗧 (𝗪𝗮𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘄) / 𝟭𝟵:𝟬𝟬 𝗘𝗘𝗧 (𝗞𝘆𝗶𝘃)

𝗢𝗻𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 | 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗱

Read the discussion abstracts, learn more and register: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/canadian-institute-of-ukrainian-studies/projects/seminar-series-rethinking-ukraines-environment/animals-in-and-beyond-wartime.html

__________

Hosted by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), this international seminar series is a joint initiative of the EnvHistUA Research Group and CIUS, with further support from the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (Södertörn University), Center for Governance and Culture in Europe (University of St. Gallen), and the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH). 

Call for Papers: Subverting Hierarchies through Women’s Intellectual History in Eastern Europe in the Long Twentieth Century

 Call for Papers: Subverting Hierarchies through Women’s Intellectual History in Eastern Europe in the Long Twentieth Century

Call for Papers

for a special journal issue to be submitted to History of European Ideas

Subverting Hierarchies through Women’s Intellectual History in Eastern Europe in the Long Twentieth Century

Editors: Isidora Grubački (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana), Zsófia Lóránd (University of Vienna), Emily Steinhauer (independent scholar)

Call for Papers (download):  WIH CfP (https://inz.si/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/WIH-CfP_final_L.pdf)

In Eastern Europe, the long twentieth century—the period roughly between the 1890s and the 2000s—was marked by struggles for women’s rights, abruptly changing gender regimes, and a maelstrom of diverse as well as often monolithically dominant –isms. In these various contexts, women intervened into various male-centered discourses from a women-centered position, while writing, thinking, and arguing about processes of emancipation, education, (forced) modernization, the break with the traditional rural community, and many other themes which speak not only toward European but global processes too. As a recent collection of texts and contexts from the history of feminism and women’s rights in East Central Europe has shown, women’s interventions in the public sphere encompassed topics including war, sexuality, and the politicization of motherhood, to name only three.[1] Yet, women from Central and Eastern Europe still remain marginal in the fields of European and global intellectual history, falling between the cracks of studies on the Western part of the Northern hemisphere, but also those, still largely male-dominated, of Central and Eastern Europe and even of the Global South. This omission means that the contributions of women from Eastern and Central Europe remain largely absent—not only in relation to the experience of the decades-long emancipation project of real existing socialism, but also in terms of longer-term negotiations with other ideologies such as agrarianism, nationalism, and anarchism, as well as the ways in which identity and belonging have been shaped by migration and shifting borders in this post-imperial space. These dynamics make the region specific and relevant as a region on a global scale.

This special journal issue examines women’s intellectual history in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the long twentieth century. However, rather than merely addressing an existing gap, it seeks to challenge and redefine the field as such by engaging with carefully selected case studies of women’s political thought in the region. The inclusion of women from Central and Eastern Europe into intellectual historical investigations means revisiting the gender of who produces intellectual discourses worthy of attention, from where they can speak, and through which fora (i.e. type of sources) they communicate. In this context, rethinking the methodology of intellectual history from the perspective of Eastern and Central European women can help us think about research in intellectual history beyond the traditionally practiced methods. Even more importantly, this also means thinking beyond traditionally used sources, a call articulated for decades by intellectual historians of women’s thought.

This journal issue identifies and hence engages with two major tasks. Women’s intellectual history must reflect upon the existing power-structures that have shaped the interpretation of material and so canonized some texts and dismissed others, namely on the basis of gender and region. Archival sources must be brought back into the methodological framework of intellectual history. This also means opening up the field to new genres of texts, as well as new understandings of text- and knowledge-production, such as the collaborative processes behind textual genesis. In this context, this collection of articles contributes to the ongoing scholarly effort to challenge the hierarchy of gender while additionally seeking to subvert two enduring hierarchies that have traditionally shaped intellectual history: hierarchies of regions and hierarchies of sources.

We invite papers focusing on women’s thought from / in Eastern and Central Europe (including émigré histories) in the long twentieth century (1890–2000) that engage with methods and approaches from intellectual history and the history of political thought.

Please send proposals, which include an abstract (max. 1 page) with a short bibliography (including references to theory and methods) of your planned paper and a short CV, by April 17, 2026, to the following address: heressee.zeitgeschichte@univie.ac.at

Contributors will receive a longer concept paper which outlines the intellectual scope of the special journal issue as well as further practical guidance. An initial online meeting of all contributors and editors is scheduled for mid-June 2026 and will provide the opportunity to workshop papers before the deadline for finished papers: October 15, 2026.

[1]Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz, eds., Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights: East Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century (Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 2024).

Call for Papers: Socialist Techno-Optimism and Governance of Economic Development, 1955–1991

 Call for Papers: Socialist Techno-Optimism and Governance of Economic Development, 1955–1991

Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

September 15–16, 2026

The Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University and the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana, in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, invite proposals for a dual workshop devoted to two interconnected themes: techno-optimism, understood as positive expectations about the transformative power of science and technology, and knowledge-driven models of economic governance and environmental management under state socialism.

The first part of the workshop examines socialist techno-optimism as a discursive, cultural, and epistemic formation. It explores how expectations surrounding science and technology emerged, circulated, and were contested in official, sanctioned, and unofficial discourses, as well as in popular culture. Socialist techno-optimism was articulated through narratives of the Scientific-Technical Revolution, automation, and computing as symbols of a transformed future, while simultaneously generating skepticism and irony. Particular attention is given to popular science magazines, science fiction, film, television, and visual media that both promoted socialist futurisms and exposed their contradictions. These cultural forms blurred the boundaries between imagination and reality and sustained hopes for technological progress even amid growing systemic disillusionment.

The second part of the workshop addresses socialist technocracy as a key approach to governing economic development between 1955 and 1991 and, increasingly, environmental processes. It treats socialist technocracy as a historically specific alignment of expertise, institutions, and political authority that rendered economic processes legible, measurable, and open to algorithmic governance and management. This part explores the role of planning, cybernetics, environmental management, and consumption policies in strategies of socialist development. Contributions analyze how these approaches informed economic reform and modernization within socialist states, structured development models introduced in the Global South, and connected domestic economic management with international development agendas. By integrating conceptual, institutional, and empirical perspectives, this part of the workshop situates socialist technocracy within Cold War debates on economic development, expertise, and democracy, and highlights its lasting impact on post-socialist political economies and contemporary discussions of technocratic decision making.

The organizers welcome paper proposals that engage these themes from conceptual, institutional, and empirical perspectives, with particular interest in contributions on Asian socialisms, as well as comparative, transnational, and globally connected approaches. Proposals should consist of an abstract of up to 300 words and a short biographical paragraph. Please note that the organizers are unable to cover travel or accommodation costs. Selected papers are planned for publication in a peer-reviewed edited volume. Abstracts and biographical notes should be submitted by February 28, 2026, to ivan.sablin@inz.si.