conference

Agenda * Abstracts * Conference details

“Critical Spaces of Hope: Locating Postsocialism and the Future in post-Yugoslav Anthropology” aims to deprovincialize the anthropology of the former Yugoslavia by putting it in long overdue conversation with the study of postsocialism.  It does so by bringing together an international group of junior anthropologists engaged in ongoing post-Yugoslav field research and senior anthropologists known for their work on postsocialist transformation.
    The conference also endeavors to chart new theoretical terrain through a focus on postsocialist, post-conflict conceptualizations of hope by critically reconsidering the social life, and perhaps afterlife, of modernist teleologies and twentieth century utopias in the wake of their apparent abandonment and violent dismemberment. In examining post-Yugoslav transformations through the lenses of postsocialism and hope, the conference also brings a forward-looking orientation to the study of Balkan societies that are often viewed as stuck in the past.  Indeed, as a focus on hope forces us to critically reconsider temporality and historicity in social transformation, a key dimension of our strategy is precisely the analysis of the transformation of transformation. We thus seek to study socialism and its transformation in the Balkans, and we aim to create space, ethnographically, conceptually and politically, for hope in a part of the world where it has recently been in short supply.
    Finally, in foregrounding the intersection of postsocialist and post-conflict processes, as well as their theoretical challenges, the conference intends to draw out the wider relevance of post-Yugoslav anthropology and create new conversations among scholars of the region and beyond it.

*All sessions are free and open to the public, and will be held at The Center for the Study of Languages at the The University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL

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