10th annual conference ‘Constructing ‘the Soviet’? Political consciousness, everyday practices and new identities’

European University at Saint Petersburg (EUSP) invites students and postgraduate students to take part in the 10^th annual conference ‘Constructing ‘the Soviet’? Political consciousness, everyday practices and new identities’ to be held on April 22-23, 2016.

The conference aims to create a unified international platform to allow students and doctoral researchers discuss issues of the Soviet history, to develop research contacts, and to search for new approaches in research. Young scholars from across Russia and from abroad get the opportunity to discuss various aspects of the Soviet everyday life, politics, economy, and arts. Well-known historians, anthropologists, sociologists and experts on language studies are to comment on conference presentations and deliver lectures.

Topics put forward for discussion:

The imperial history of the USSR: colonial practices, national policy, centre-periphery relationships;
Memory the Soviet way versus memory of the Soviet: representations of the past in narratives - from oral history to memoirs;
The power of science and the science of power: technocracy in the USSR;
Soviet wars forgotten: the USSR in local conflicts of the 20^th century;
Production and reception of Soviet aesthetics: knowledge, pedagogy, arts;
Migration, evacuation, deportation as factors of the USSR economic and social history;
The ‘moral image of the builder of communism’: the accepted and tabooed behaviour of Soviet man;
Socialist ideas within and beyond the USSR;
‘A sound mind in a sound body’: biopolitics in the USSR;
Sovietization of the space: transformation of the material and social environment in Soviet settlements;
Soviet conservatism, reformism and revolutionism;
Forms of religiosity and atheism in the USSR.

Senior students and doctoral researchers specializing in the social sciences and the humanities are welcome to take part in the conference. Only in-person participation is possible. Conference’s working languages are Russian and English.

By the start of the conference, a collection of selected abstracts will have been published.

More information is available on the EUSP website (in Russian).