THE SECOND SEMINAR ON THE POST-COLD WAR MILITARY ZONES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

Prague, Czech Republic, November 6-8, 2018

Organizing committee: Jan Pohunek (National Museum, Prague), Petr Janeček (Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague), Dagnosław Demski (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), Dominika Czarnecka (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw), Elo-Hanna Seljamaa (Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, University of Tartu).

The post-Cold War military zones in Central and Eastern Europe represent an interesting environment for social sciences. The presence and withdraval of the Soviet Army in large areas of Central and Eastern Europe and also activities of the Allied forces after 1989, have impacted both landscape and human communities in many different ways. Their legacy is a subject to continuous renegotiations, reinterpretations and interventions on individual, local, regional and even transnational levels. The seminars on this topic (first of which took place in Borne Sulinowo in 2016) are an attempt to provide researchers an unique opportunity to compare original data from a number of states and to present analyses of dealing with the post-Cold War past and ‘foreign’ legacies.

We welcome applications from all disciplines and career stages and would like to invite scholars who conduct research on topics such as:

- the new status (administrative, political, economic, social, cultural) of the post-Cold War military zones;
- old and new functions of these zones;
- negotiating meanings of the past at transnational, national, regional, local levels;
- practices of remembering and forgetting;
- forging national/regional/local identities in new settlements;
- multidimensional processes of adapting and integrating these areas with the rest of the national territories;
- (re)constructing local, regional, national and transnational networks;
- ecological problems;
- commodification of the past.

Special focus of the 2018 seminar will be on change and interpretations of former military areas. Topics like different kinds of tourism, appearance of former military areas in media and oral tradition or shifts in aesthetic interpretations of such places are to be highlighted. Applicants might, however, also consider different subject matters, related but not limited to the proposed issues.

The seminar will be held in Prague on November 6-8, 2018. Please send the title of your paper, an abstract (100-200 words), your name(s) including institutional affiliation(s) to the organizer(s) no later than the end of June. The event will be hosted by the Department of Ethnography of the National Museum and the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University. First two days will be dedicated to presentations and discussion, then there will be a tour to the former military areas of Milovice or Ralsko on the third day. Both former bases have a longer tradition of military use dating back to pre-WWI period in the case of Milovice, and were occupied by the Soviet Army from 1968 to early 1990s.

We plan to publish papers as a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal. Previous issue from the first seminar was published by Folklore: An Electronic Journal of Folklore (http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/) and is available here: http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol70/.

Additional details concerning the seminar will be circulated in March 2016.

On behalf of organizers
Jan Pohunek jan_pohunek@nm.cz
Petr Janeček petr_janecek@ff.cuni.cz
Dominika Czarnecka d.czarnecka@hotmail.com
Dagnosław Demski d.demski2@gmail.com
Elo-Hanna Seljamaa elo-hanna.seljamaa@ut.ee