CFP: “Life Cycles under Socialist Regimes: Managing Gender Relations, Aging, and Health”

 The Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, invites paper proposals for the Workshop “Life Cycles under Socialist Regimes: Managing Gender Relations, Aging, and Health,” to be held on February 16, 2027, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

State socialism, as a political and economic system, was one of the major innovations of the twentieth century and became a global phenomenon in its latter half, with socialist regimes emerging across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. State socialism can be understood as a political regime characterized by single-party government, directed modernization under systemic governmentality, and the predominance of state property. From the 1950s onward, socialist governance increasingly embraced the notion that political, economic, and social lives could be organized and governed as closed systems. With the “scientific and technological revolution” integrated into the ideology as a new stage on the path to communism, the accumulation and application of knowledge became a central function of state socialist regimes, while holistic, systemic governmentality turned into a key feature of the ideology. The workshop will explore how socialist states sought to manage human life cycles through scientific knowledge, administrative practices, and institutional interventions. Focusing on gender relations, aging, and health, it will examine these fields as central dimensions of socialist biopolitics and as sites where broader models of governance and technocratic management were developed. Bringing together perspectives from conceptual, institutional, and political history as well as the social sciences, the workshop will investigate how socialist regimes attempted to organize social reproduction, welfare, health, and individual life trajectories between the 1950s and 1991. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the development and implementation of official policies concerning family, gender, demographic change, health, and aging; group and individual responses to official policies; the role of scientific research and expert communities in shaping socialist governance; international cooperation and the circulation of knowledge, expertise, and technologies; and the communication of scientific knowledge to broader publics. We are particularly interested in approaches that examine how scientific and technological visions influenced understandings of the human body, social reproduction, and socialist futures, including the role of techno-optimism, popular science, and the intersections between science fact and science fiction. The workshop will situate these developments within a global and comparative framework, paying particular attention to the circulation of ideas, institutions, and practices beyond national boundaries.

The workshop is part of the project Socialist Management in a Global Context: Technocratic Developments in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, 1955–1991, sponsored by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARIS). It is part of a series of four workshops, the results of which will be published together. The selection of papers will, hence, be based on their quality and coherence. Submissions addressing developments outside the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia are explicitly encouraged.

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a short biography to PD Dr. Ivan Sablin (ivan.sablin@inz.si) by September 15, 2026. Notifications of acceptance are expected by the end of October. Invited participants will be expected to submit drafts of up to 7,000 words by February 1, 2027. The organizers will be able to provide accommodation to the participants but cannot cover their travel costs. See less