Deadline- December 1, 2012
Countries/Region-Russia, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Eurasia
Program in Law and Public Affairs & Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies invites papers to the conference Complaints: Cultures of Grievance in Eastern Europe and Eurasia which will be held on March 8-9, 2013, the conference is being organized by Program in Law and Public Affairs; Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies Princeton University.the conference will bring together an international and interdisciplinary group of researchers.
Complaints are one way that the powerless and the dispossessed communicate their disagreement, dissatisfaction, and resentment to the powerful and the dominant. As a legal genre, a communication tool, and a narrative structure, complaints have a long history in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, from the peasants’ petitions to the Russian tsar to the dissidents’ letters to the party committees and from the complaint books in Soviet grocery stores to denunciation reports to the secret police. This conference plans to examine the genre of complaints in the public culture of Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
In his After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin, John Borneman reminded us that legal petitions in East Germany were in fact a form of legal privilege, a politically legitimized framework of public discourse that “allowed the citizenry a licit means of responding to and interrogating the economic and political structure.” Nancy Ries in her Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Pertestroika pointed out another important aspect of complaints: their formulaic structure and repetitive reproduction turn them into “ritualized discourses” through which realms of politics, economics, and law are navigated and negotiated.
Eligibility-
Proposals from scholars in a range of disciplines including law, history, anthropology, sociology, politics, philosophy, psychology, art and literary criticism that would explore the ways through which frustrations and discontent were expressed in Eastern Europe and Eurasia and that would examine what happened to those grievances. In particular, organization is interested in interdisciplinary studies that trace the emergence and development of cultures of grievances – those ritualized discourses in which responses to the authorities are merged with their interrogation.
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