CFP: Unionize the Science: Agency and Infrastructures of Knowledge in Eurasia, 20th–21st Centuries

 Unionize the Science: Agency and Infrastructures of Knowledge in Eurasia, 20th–21st Centuries

International Conference

Yerevan, Armenia | 5–7 November, 2026

The Yerevan Center for International Education (YCIE) is delighted to announce the international conference “Unionize the Science: Agency and Infrastructures of Knowledge in Eurasia, 20th–21st Centuries.” The conference is funded and organized as part of the YCIE Co-Funded Conferences program and will be held in Yerevan, Armenia, November 5–7, 2026.

The conference explores the social agency of science in socialist and post-socialist contexts, with particular attention to the institutional, material, and spatial infrastructures that shaped the production, circulation, and contestation of knowledge. Rather than approaching the history of knowledge through narratives of grand achievement or through images of scientists operating beyond bureaucratic and political structures, this event foregrounds science as a domain of action embedded in broader relations between state, society, economy, and culture.

We welcome proposals from historians of science, STS scholars, historians of late socialism, sociologists, anthropologists of knowledge, and researchers from related fields. The conference aims to create an interdisciplinary forum for examining how scientific knowledge was produced, institutionalised, circulated, and redefined across Eurasian contexts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Yerevan offers an especially compelling setting for this discussion. In the late Soviet period, the Armenian SSR was a major scientific hub, and today Yerevan remains a site where scientific institutions, infrastructures, and memories continue to be reinterpreted and publicly contested.

We particularly encourage proposals addressing themes such as:

Geographies of knowledge: technopoles, clusters, and scientific cities;

Research infrastructures and the materiality of science;

Big science projects and their publics, including nuclear and space programmes, cybernetics, and computer networks.

Innovations, from grassroots initiatives to state regulation;

Knowledge and technology transfers across socialist and post-socialist worlds;

Scientific Institutes and Universities as third spaces;

Science and technology heritage in Central Eurasia;

Political economy of knowledge production;

Cultural representations of science;

Science and technology heritage in Central Eurasia;

Big science projects and their publics, including nuclear and space programmes, cybernetics, and computer networks.

Funding and Organization 

The conference is funded by the Yerevan Center for International Education (YCIE). 

Organizing Committee: Dr. Mikhail Piskunov, Dr. Timofey Rakov, and Dr. Alexander Fokin.

Submission Guidelines

All materials must be submitted in English.

All submissions must be made online via the electronic form; email submissions will not be accepted.

Deadline: August 2, 2026

Notification of acceptance: By September 2, 2026

To apply, please submit the following via the electronic form below:

Your paper abstract (maximum 1,500 characters, including spaces)

Your CV in PDF format

Working language: English

Format: In-person event only

Travel and Accommodation

Travel and accommodation costs are the responsibility of participants.

YCIE will provide a limited number of accommodation grants for the duration of the conference upon request. Please note that only one hotel room can be provided per co-authored paper. Accommodation decisions will be communicated along with the conference selection results.

There is no registration fee.

For any inquiries, please contact: timofey.rakov@gmail.com