Old Conflicts & New Media: Commemorating the Socialist Experience Online

Old Conflicts & New Media: Commemorating the Socialist Experience Online

Interdisciplinary Conference of the Web Wars project (the Bergen pendant of the HERA project Memory at War)

When: 31 August - 2 September 2011,

Where: Hotel Solstrand, Os (Norway)

Plenary speakers: Adi Kuntsman (U of Manchester), Volodymyr Kulyk (Institute of Political & Ethnic Studies, Kyiv)

Organizers: Ellen Rutten (University of Bergen), Vera Zvereva (University of Bergen/RGGU)

Object: This conference takes the emerging field of online memory studies to post-Soviet space. In the 2000s, former Soviet states still face the challenge of constructing national identities, producing national memories, and relating to the Soviet legacy. Their pasts are principally intertwined: changing readings of history in one country generate fierce reactions in others. In this transnational memory war, digital media form a pivotal discursive space - one which provides speakers with radically new commemorative tools. Launched by the team of the research project Web Wars, Old Conflicts & New Media unlocks the online vectors of post-Soviet memory by uniting leading scholars and practitioners in the field.

Research questions: How is the Soviet trauma mediated digitally? How are digital memory narratives produced and negotiated in post-socialist new media? How, in these media, does technology impact on public and private commemorative discourse - in other words, the language of memory? And how does the diasporic nature of online communication affect notions of post-socialist states as national communities?

Disciplines: We welcome contributions from any relevant field, including language, media, communication and cultural studies, technology studies, sociology, history, and political sciences. The working language is English.

Submission deadline/types: January 28, 2011. Proposals for individual papers, panels, and alternative presentation formats are welcomed. For paper proposals, please provide an abstract (max. 400 words), your name, affiliation + contact details. For panel proposals, we ask a 300-word panel description, and, for each paper, an individual paper proposal.

Expenses: The Web Wars project covers all local costs; participants are asked to contribute towards travel expenses.

Timetable: The organizers inform potential speakers by the end of February 2011. Preliminary and final conference programs are announced in June and July 2011, respectively, on this site.

Dissemination: Papers are 1) made available as podcasts on this site 2) eligible for publication in a peer-reviewed volume.

Contact: Please email submissions or questions about the conference to the organizers,

Ellen Rutten: www.ellenrutten.nl, contact@ellenrutten.nl, 0031 6 10526218

Vera Zvereva: www.culturca.narod.ru, zverca@mail.ru