The Sixteenth Annual SOYUZ Symposium, University of California, BERKELEY
April 24 - 26, 2008

"Contemporary Critical Inquiry Through the Lens of Postsocialism"

The disintegration of Soviet and Eastern European socialisms not only ushered in rapid and overwhelming transformations in the former socialist lifeworlds, but also engendered the emergence of the problem-space of "postsocialism" that spans well beyond the boundaries of the former socialist states. In this year's Soyuz conference, we would like to consider: how can theoretical insights gained in our critical engagements with postsocialism shed new light on questions central to contemporary anthropology and critical social inquiry more broadly.

For example, how might our inquiry of postsocialism illuminate:

  • current global configurations of liberalism and neoliberalism, democracy and neo-conservatism, sovereignty and citizenship, biopower and international law, religion and secularism, risk and security, global capitalism and labor outsourcing?

  • complex parallels between late socialist and late capitalist social formations at the level of institutions, practices, sentiments, knowledge, subjectivity, aesthetics?

  • current postcolonial engagements (considering that the ideological opposition capitalism/socialism, in relation to which postcolonial criticism emerged, is now in the past)?


    The selected papers interrogate the relevance of the theoretical insights gained in engagements with postsocialism for other contexts, areas and problems of contemporary world. They will consider the implications of postsocialism, both as a historical formation and as a problem-space, for the problems interrogated in contemporary anthropology and social inquiry.

    The conference organizing committee:
    Alexei Yurchak (UC Berkeley)
    Dominic Boyer (Cornell)
    Dace Dzenovska (UC Berkeley)
    Larisa Kurtovic (UC Berkeley)
    Alex Beliaev (UC Berkeley)
    Nina Aron (UC Berkeley)

    The symposium is generously sponsored by A.G.O.R.A., the Berkeley Institute for European Studies, the Dean of Social Sciences Division, the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, the Graduate Assembly, the Institute of East Asian Studies, the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Kroeber Anthropological Society (KAS), and the Townsend Center for the Humanities. The conference is made possible in part through a grant from the US Department of Education under Title VI.