Fall Deadlines

Call for proposals for a special issue of Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (www.digitalicons.org)

"Digital Selves: Embodiment and Co-Presence in New Media Cultures in Central Europe and Eurasia" (to be published early summer 2021)

Guest editors: Cassandra Hartblay and Tatiana Klepikova (University of Toronto)

Deadline to apply: July 31, 2020

Since the emergence of new media cultures, the theorization of the relationship between embodied positioning in space and our digital personas has evolved in new and significant directions. We have become increasingly aware of the forms of extended, multiple and fragmented selves that are made possible by internet and computer-facilitated settings. New media have championed previously unthinkable practices of self-representation necessitating a change in how researchers understand the virtual traces of our bodies online and the relationship between material bodies and physical spaces.

As of recently, the global pandemic has shifted daily practices and forced many people to seek new, predominantly online, ways of socializing. However, even before this crisis, there were many digital ways of being apart together – developed in minority or marginalized communities. For instance, in mid-March 2020, Russian disability activists started a hashtag campaign, #ButWeAreAlwaysAtHome (#АМыВсегдаДома) seeking to mobilize popular conversations about ‘surviving quarantine’ to highlight ongoing social exclusion of people with disabilities and crip strategies for living at home.

This special issue studies the lived experience of digitally mediated environments, with a particular focus on the embodiment and material conditions that support digital sociality in Eurasia and Central Europe. While we take the dynamics of the pandemic as one possible source of inspiration, this issue welcomes the exploration of digital embodiment and togetherness more broadly. As guest editors, we orient this issue towards bringing together the Slavic Studies of online worlds and feminist and postcolonial cultural studies of the body. We are interested in how human bodyminds are shaped through and shape digital media, emplaced at once in material space and in virtual interfaces. We follow disability studies scholars in using the term bodymind to connote a way of thinking body-and-mind sans cartesian dualism, and referring to how our human selves interact, socialize, live (Haraway 2004 [1985]; Price 2015; Schalk 2018). This line of inquiry follows the idea that “[t]he digital body is extended, enhanced, reconfigured and yet identifiable as a body of infinite variability and creativity, that is still linked with our everyday mode of “being” tied to our locatable and temporal existence’ (Broadhurst and Price 2017, 2). We are interested in exploring the body online in the current moment and political possibilities that new media enable for ‘our pixelated selves’ (Hartblay 2019). Drawing on understandings of the self, social life, publics and social change developed in contemporary social theory, as well as feminist science studies’ attention to the political stakes of the labour that facilitates online co-presence, this special issue takes a blended ethnographic and cultural studies approach, highlighting research and media expressions that document and theorize dynamics of social power at work in how we live now as digitally enabled, materially present selves.

Some possible questions that follow from this line of inquiry include:
How do emplaced and embodied users perform digital selves in Eurasia and Central Europe? What configurations of corporeality and new media enable the effect of co-presence? How do linguistic, national and cultural contexts in contemporary post-socialist Eastern and Southern Europe and Eurasia differentiate modalities and trends in digital corporeality? How have theoretical innovations in feminist, queer, critical race, postcolonial and disability studies presented new possibilities for imagining digital selves and understanding the corporeal internet? How have new media and digital technologies enabled new perspectives on embodied relations, or what the body / bodymind is? What new ways of gathering and being together on and offline are engendered by contemporary digital practices? What kinds of solidarity, liberatory practice and social possibilities emerge from new configurations? How do contemporary practices of embodied selfhood present new challenges to the metaphors that we use to understand social life – including inequality, inclusion/exclusion, democracy, liberalism, capitalism and so forth?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
•       Embodiment on regional internets
•       Techniques of digital sociality – from dating rituals to political organizing
•       Embodiment and local cyberfeminisms
•       Embodied labour in the creation, maintenance, and repair of digital networks
•       The diversity of sensory and material modalities of work in the digital era
•       Material, digital, and social access to online worlds
•       Intertextuality of digital and material embodied experience
•       Temporalities of digital co-presence
•       Representations of embodiment and co-presence via digital life in regional media (journalism, advertising, film, television, literature, etc.)
•       Refugee, migrant, and diasporic Eurasian life in (transnational) digital places

Contributions to this special issue are welcome to examine these and related questions in digital contexts of Central Europe and Eurasia. Digital Icons particularly invites contributions that focus on the new media cultures of Armenia, Georgia, Poland, Ukraine, and Turkey, which are currently underrepresented in academic discourse. We also look forward to receiving proposals that attend to the ways in which online embodiment and digital sociality may transcend national borders.

Digital Icons publishes original research in the form of articles, essays, visual essays, interviews, and book reviews. In this special issue, we encourage submissions that make use of the visual media capacities of the journal’s format. Images must be used with permission, and authors are responsible for obtaining permission for use and for creating image descriptions. Please visit https://www.digitalicons.org/info-for-contributors/ for complete author guidelines.

Issue Timeline

Please submit an abstract (500 words for research articles, 300 words for other formats) and a short bio by July 31, 2020 at digitalselves2021@gmail.com.

Authors will be notified about the decision on their proposal by August 15 and will have to submit full manuscript of their contribution by November 15 for review. All articles will go through a double blind peer review, only contributions that pass it will be accepted for publication. The issue is slated for a quick turnaround to be published in Digital Icons in late spring 2021.

If you have any questions, please contact special issue guest editors Cassandra Hartblay and Tatiana Klepikova at digitalselves2021@gmail.com.

Cassandra Hartblay is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Health Humanities at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, graduate faculty in Anthropology and affiliated faculty at Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School for Global Affairs & Public Policy. Dr. Hartblay is a sociocultural medical anthropologist working in a variety of media and performance formats, with a research focus on the Russian-speaking former Soviet Union. She has held fellowships at Yale University, University of California San Diego and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington DC. Her first book, I Was Never Alone or Oporniki (University of Toronto Press 2020), explores personal narratives of people with disabilities in their own words. She has published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Current Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Slavic Review and JSPS.

Tatiana Klepikova studied Slavic Literatures and Cultures in Passau (Germany) and Language Pedagogy and Linguistics in Yaroslavl (Russia). She is co-editor of three collections of essays, including Privatheit in der digitalen Gesellschaft [Privacy in a Digital Society; Duncker & Humblot, 2018] and Outside the “Comfort Zone”: Performances and Discourses of Privacy in Late Socialist Europe (De Gruyter, 2020). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, where she works on a monograph about contemporary Russian queer theater and drama. Her broader research interests include Soviet and Russian literature and the arts, gender and sexuality in Eastern and East-Central Europe, performance studies, publics and citizenship in the digital age and digital body and posthumanism.

Call for Papers: Special Issue "Cities in Limbo: Katerynoslav–Dnipropetrovsk–Dnipro and Aleksandrovsk–Zaporizhzhia"

Deadline to Apply: August 15, 2020

• Guest Editors: Oleksandr Pankieiev and Volodymyr Kravchenko (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta)

Today, the cities of Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro share many common characteristics. Yet, they differ in many aspects, not only from other cities of Steppe Ukraine but also from each other. This special issue will examine these commonalities and differences from the viewpoints of a diverse range of disciplines and approaches.

Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia have a history of relations with each other, with Aleksandrovsk (Zaporizhzhia) often placed in a subordinate or uezd status in relation to Katerynoslav (Dnipro). The ongoing war in the Donbas has had an enormous impact on the cities’ outlooks. Being on the front lines of the war, they have had to face all the identity problems they have accumulated since they were founded under the Russian Empire.

For this special issue, authors are encouraged to explore the following issues or other relevant themes connected to the multifaceted nature of the two cities of Dnipro (Dnipropetrovsk) and Zaporizhzhia:

o   Public spaces, landmarks, and architecture and their places in the formation of urban identities;

o   Local and national heroes and antiheroes and the making/unmaking of urban, ethnic, and civic national identities;

o   Correlations between place and regional and national identities of city inhabitants;

o   Historical myths and city legends; 

o   Development of scholarship and science; 

o   Environment and social movements;

o   Images of the cities in literature and cinema; 

o   Official and underground cultures;

o   Social and linguistic landscapes of the cities;

o   Manifestations of religions and beliefs;

o   Russian imperial and Soviet legacies;

o   Frontline cities;

o   Provincialism.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words to Dr. Oleksandr Pankieiev (oleksandr.pankieiev@ualberta.ca) by August 15, 2020. Authors whose abstracts are approved by the guest editors will be invited to submit complete manuscripts of up to 10,000 words, including references, by January 31, 2021.

For more information on East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, see https://www.ewjus.com/. For submission guidelines, please refer to https://www.ewjus.com/index.php/ewjus/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions

Call for Papers: Slavic Review Forum on Race and Bias

Deadline to Apply: August 15, 2020

Call for Submissions: 2020 AWSS Graduate Research Prize

Deadline to apply:  September 1, 2020

The Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) Graduate Research Prize is awarded annually to fund promising graduate-level research in any field of Slavic/East European/Central Asian studies by a woman or on a topic in Women's or Gender Studies related to Slavic Studies/East Europe/Central Asia by a scholar of any gender. Graduate students who are at any stage of master's or doctoral level research are eligible.  Only current graduate students are eligible for this prize.

The grant can be used to support expenses related to completion of a thesis or dissertation, as well as travel, services, and/or materials.  The award carries a cash prize of $1000.00. Nominations and self- nominations are welcome.

A completed application consists of 1) a 2-3 page proposal that explains the project, how the funds will be used, and why this funding is necessary for continued progress on the project; 2) a CV; 3) a detailed budget and timeline; and 4) two letters of recommendation.  Please submit application materials in MS Word or PDF.  Winning recipients should submit a report on their use of the funds to the Committee Chair by August of the year following the receipt of the award.  Recipients must be members of AWSS; if award recipients are not current AWSS members, they must join AWSS as condition of the award.

Applications are due by September 1, 2020, and must be complete by that date to be considered for the award.  Letters of recommendation should be forwarded to the AWSS Graduate Prize Committee Chair directly.

Please direct all questions and send all application materials by email attachment to the Committee Chair, Sharon Kowalsky, Associate Professor of History, Texas A&M-Commerce:

Sharon.Kowalsky@tamuc.edu

Call for Papers: Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women's and Gender History

Deadline to apply: September 1, 2020

seeks articles and other contributions that explore the history of women and gender in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). We welcome submission on any topic and any time period in the field of women's and gender history in CESEE.

We are currently soliciting submissions focused on the topic of "Queer
Histories of Women in CESEE" that address the histories of queer
femininities and/or queer women. Contributions of research articles and/or
discussions of primary sources focused on any time period or geographic area
within the CESEE are welcome.

Article Submissions

Submissions are welcome at any time and will always receive full
consideration. We encourage submissions on the theme of "Queer Histories of
CESEE" by 1 September 2020.

Submissions of up to 9,000 words (including endnotes) can be sent to
aspasia.editor@gmail.com. Please direct any questions to that email, or
contact the Managing Editor, Sharon Kowalsky, at Sharon.Kowalsky@tamuc.edu

For more information, visit www.berghahnjournals.com/aspasia, where you can
also download the       Aspasia Guidelines for Authors.

Aspasia is Open Access, published and distributed in print and online by
Berghahn Journals w w w.b e r g h a h n j o u r n a l s.c o m/a s p a s i a.

For those teaching undergraduates, could you please bring this to their attention.  It is a unique opportunity to have their research published - and given this particular situation, a chance for something positive during the pandemic. 

Undergraduate students working in any relevant discipline are invited to submit their papers for consideration to the UC Undergraduate Journal of Slavic and East/Central European Studies.  All papers will be subject to peer review. 

Deadline to apply: October 5, 2020.  Late submissions will not be considered.   

If you are submitting now, please send your papers to Prof. Roman Koropeckyj, Editor-in-Chief: koropeck@humnet.ucla.edu

Whether you are submitting now or later, please also do the following now: email me with your name, preferred email, paper title, and name and email of your advisor so that we have a preliminary headcount: yfurman@humnet.ucla.edu

It is expected that you will work with your advisor between now and the submission deadline on revising your paper.  Please keep in mind that there is a large difference between a conference presentation and a written article.  Your papers should have a well-formulated and well-developed thesis, with plenty of textual evidence to back it up. When citing a non-English language source, please give the quote in English translation in the body and in the original Slavic language in the footnotes. The papers should be a maximum of 25 double-spaced pages and need to include footnotes and a bibliography (the page limit is inclusive of the bibliography/footnotes). For the bibliography, please use the Chicago Manual of Style format.

The call for papers can be found here: 

https://slavic.ucla.edu/conference/uc-undergraduate-conference/undergraduate-journal/

And if you haven't seen the journal, you can do so here: https://www.international.ucla.edu/cwl/slavicjournal/1415