NEP4Dissent widely represented at 2019 ASEEES Convention in San Francisco

The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) holds its Annual Convention on 23–26 November 2019 in San Francisco (USA). This international forum makes possible a broad exchange of information and ideas, stimulating further work and sustaining the intellectual vitality of the field.

NEP4Dissent COST Action will be represented by a number of its participants presenting their research and participating in discussions. A special roundtable session will be held where recent NEP4Dissent multi-authored report on the current state of research on oppositional cultures in Eastern Europe (1945-1989) will be presented.

NEP4Dissent events at 2019 ASEEES

Book Presentation: New Directions in Research on Cultures of Dissent in Eastern Europe (1945-1989)

Monday, November 25, 1:45 to 3:30pm, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Floor: 4, Pacific F

Brief Description
The leaders of working groups in four focus areas (Muriel Blaive: “the Culture of Surveillance”; Piotr
Wciślik: “Culture in the Grey Zone”; Katalin Cseh-Varga and Rolf Werenskjold: “Alternative Cultures”; and Tamás Scheibner: “the Cultural Memory of Dissent”) will present the findings of an 18-month self-study which led to this report. Our curatorial team will also be represented by Ieva Astahovska, who will share their contribution to the report: a survey of critical exhibition practices on oppositional and alternative culture. Finally, the project’s leaders (Maciej Maryl and Piotr
Wciślik) will summarize the goals of this group in moving scholarship forward both substantively and technologically, through the leveraging of digital humanities methods and resources to convincingly illustrate and narrate these historical trends.
This panel is sponsored by the journal East European Politics and Society and Cultures.

Saturday, November 23

• Roundtable: Digital Migrations: Diasporas, Transnational Circulations, and Border Crossings through the Lens of Digital Humanities
  Roundtable member: Jessie Labov, Central European U (Hungary).
• Roundtable: A Belief in Nation-States?: The 1919 Peacemaking for East Central Europe at 100
  Roundtable member: Peter Bugge, Aarhus U (Denmark)
• Roundtable: Global Imagination after Versailles: Alternative Histories of Social Science in Eastern Europe
  Roundtable member: Joanna Wawrzyniak, U of Warsaw (Poland)
• Panel: Locating Eastern European Experimental Cinema in the Socialist-Era Cultural Landscape
  Paper presentation by Tomas Glanc, U of Zurich (Switzerland): “Underground Film in Eastern Europe as a Cultural Practice during the 1960s-1980s”

Sunday, November 24

• Roundtable: Intellectual and Aesthetic Sources of Eastern European Performance Art
  Roundtable member: Tomas Glanc, U of Zurich (Switzerland)
• Panel: Eastern and Southern European Dissent and its International Networks
  Paper presentation by Petra James, U Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium): “‘Framing’ the Eastern European Dissent in American Newspapers of the 1970s and 1980s”
• Panel: “Ideology of Chekism” from the Cold War Soviet Bloc to Putin’s Russia
  Paper presentation by Jens Gieseke, Centre for Contemporary History (Germany): “East German Chekism in Late Communism” and Tomas Sniegon, U of Lund (Sweden): “Ideology of Chekism and Ideology of Communism in Recollections of Vladimir Semichastny, Head of the KGB 1961-1967”

Monday, November 25

• Roundtable: Beyond Belief: The Contours of Real Existing Post-Socialism in East Central Europe
  Roundtable member: Muriel Blaive, Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (Czech Republic)
• Panel: Exhibitions as Spaces of Artistic Contact during the Cold War (chair: Kristóf Nagy, Central European U (Hungary))
  Paper presentation by Katalin Cseh-Varga, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Austria) / George Enescu National U of Arts (Romania):  “The Exhibition as an Ephemeral Site of Contact: The Collision of Conceptual Art, Performance and Sports”.
• Panel: New Approaches to Czechoslovak Dissent
  Paper presentation by Jan Matonoha, Institute of Czech Literature CAS (Czech Republic): “Injurious Identities, Wounding Attachments, and Dispositives of Silence: Gender, Czech Dissent Literature, and Václav Havel’s Essay Anatomy of a Reticence”
• Panel: Creating for the State During Socialism: The Role of Artists’ Unions
  Paper presentation by Kristóf Nagy, Central European U (Hungary): “The Socialist Origins of the Right-Wing Dominance in the Hungarian Artists’ Unions”

Tuesday, November 26

• Panel: Belief in Democracy, Disbelief in Rule of Law?: Legacies of Dissent and Revolutionary Outcomes in East-Central Europe, 1989-2019
  Paper presentations by Piotr Wciślik, Institute of Literary Research, PAS (Poland): “Paper Politics: The Eclipse of Unlicensed Media Activism in the Course of 1989” and Michal Kopecek, U of Jena (Germany): “The Legacy of Dissident Legalism”.
• Panel: The Imprints of Philanthropy: American Foundations in Eastern Europe during Communism
  Paper presentation by Tamás Scheibner, ELTE U of Budapest (Hungary): “When Philanthropy Mattered: Hungarian Refugee Programs and Cold War International Exchange”
• Book Discussion: “One Hundred Student (r)Evolutions. The Student Generation of 1989 in Longitudinal Perspective,” by Miroslav Vaněk et al.
  Roundtable member: Peter Bugge, Aarhus U (Denmark)
• Panel: Second-Hand Beliefs: Recycling Culture in Post-Soviet Russia
  Paper presentation by Maria Engström, Uppsala U (Sweden): “Gosha Rubchinskiy: Conservative Queer and Biopolitics of Fashion”
• Roundtable: Women Dissidents: Their Beliefs and Their Legacies
  Roundtable member: Jan Matonoha, Institute of Czech Literature CAS (Czech Republic)

Established in 1948, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) – a nonprofit, non-political, scholarly society – is the leading international organization dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, and Eastern Europe in regional and global contexts.

Read more: https://www.aseees.org/