[Athena] Appel à com : Technology and East-West relations: Transfers, parallel histories, and the European laboratory]

[Patrice Bret <patrice.bret AT yahoo.fr>]

APPEL A COMMUNICATIONS : Technology and East-West relations:
Transfers, parallel histories, and the European laboratory

4th Tensions of Europe Plenary Conference and Closing ESF Inventing
Europe Conference

Date : 17-20/06/2010
Lieu : Sofia University (Bulgaria)

Deadline : 18/12/2009

The European Science Foundation (ESF) and the Foundation for the
History of Technology in the Netherlands are jointly organizing the
final and closing conference of the ESF EUROCORES program Inventing
Europe and the bi-annual conference of the Tensions of Europe network
(ToE). Inventing Europe and ToE strive, through collaborative
research and coordinating efforts, to promote studies of the
interplay between technical change and European history. Instead of
focusing on national histories, the emphasis of both initiatives is
on transnational technological developments that have shaped and are
shaping Europe.

We encourage scholars from all disciplines who study subjects related
to the overall conference theme or the Inventing Europe/Tensions of
Europe intellectual agenda to submit abstracts for the research
sessions, roundtables and research collaboration sessions.

Overall Theme of the Conference

The main theme of the conference applies to papers, which treat
processes of circulation and appropriation of technologies between
Eastern and Western Europe as an entry point into the contested
practice of Europeanization. During the Cold War, for instance,
Europe has been one of the central laboratories for the
experimentation with ideological and political regimes, which deeply
infected traditional paths of knowledge and technology transfer in
Europe. While the history of the Cold War has mainly been told as a
history of discontinuity and fragmentation, we would especially
welcome papers and sections dealing with examples of successful
co-operation or "hidden continuities" in inter-European technology
transfer during the 20th century.

Despite the fact that the focus of the conference will be on the
post-World War II period, we will welcome session proposals and
individual papers referring to the practices of appropriation and
circulation of ideas, skills and people in Europe from the mid-19th
century onwards - thus from the period before the notions of Eastern
and Western Europe were coined. This results from our conviction that
one should look for the roots of the European integration and
fragmentation in a "longue duree" perspective.

General areas to be explored are:

- Changing times: Continuities and discontinuities in the transfers
of knowledge and technology between Eastern and Western Europe from
the mid-19th century to the present.
- Negotiating identities: spaces and places of co-operation or
confrontation before, during, and after the Cold War.
- Parallel histories: alternative processes of European integration
and fragmentation in Eastern and Western Europe.
- Blurred boundaries: spill-over effects and holes in the Iron Curtain
- Europe as a trading zone, a symbolic battle field, and the
diplomatic playground for world hegemony.
- Chilling effects: Technologies at war & wartime technology
- Contested approaches: the merits and pitfalls of concepts like
Americanization, Sovietisation, Westernization for European historiography.

In addition, the program committee welcomes papers that want to
contribute to the general Inventing Europe/Tensions of Europe
intellectual agenda. This agenda treats technological change as an
entry point into the contested practice of Europeanization.

Five general areas to be explored are:

- Building Europe through Infrastructures, or, how Europe has been
shaped by the material links of transnational infrastructure.
- Constructing European Ways of Knowing, or, how Europe became
articulated through efforts to unite knowledge and practices on a
European scale.
- Consuming Europe, or, how actors reworked consumer goods and
artefacts for local, regional, national, European, and global use.
- Europe in the Global World, or, how Europe has been created through
colonial, ex-colonial, trans-Atlantic, and other global exchanges.
- Synthetic methodological or historiographical explorations of the
role of technology in transnational European history.

Sessions formats

The Program Committee welcomes proposals that address the overall
conference themes in the following four formats:

* Individual paper proposals.

* Research sessions with three papers based on original research, and
an invited commentator. Because the conference encourages debate,
appropriate time for discussion should be allocated to the
commentators as well as the members of the audience. The papers will
be pre-circulated to all conference participants. Conference
participants are expected to have read the papers thus presentations
should be brief.

* Roundtable sessions with an open agenda or one paper to start-off
the discussion. The sessions will host no more than six discussants
including the organizer and the chair. The organizer is responsible
for preparing a dialogue paper to stimulate debate, and if relevant,
supplementary material. Ideally, the dialogue paper will be a brief
piece that poses a number of historical problems and/or questions
related to the conference theme that will be addressed in the debate.
While the organizer should propose discussants, the Program Committee
may make additional suggestions. The chair may decide either to limit
the conversation to invited roundtable discussants or to allow the
audience to ask questions and enter the debate.

* Research collaboration sessions which are meant to present results
of a specific project to the conference. The session could be paper
based, but could also focus on a discussion of the framing and wider
implications of the specific project. The Program Committee may make
additional suggestions for commentators.

Research sessions and research collaboration session will be allotted
a minimum time slot of one and a half hours, and roundtable
discussions one hour.

Deadlines and Time-line

The deadline for proposals is DECEMBER 18, 2009. The research session
abstracts (maximum 600 words) should be submitted by the organizers
together with the abstracts for the individual presentations (maximum
500 words each). To propose a roundtable, please submit a list of
invited participants and an abstract (maximum 600 words). Note: When
giving the proposal a digital file name, please include the
organizer's last name, and either RS for research session, RT for
round table or RCS for Research Collaboration Session. So Fickers_RS
for example.The abstracts should be sent to the Program Committee by
email to TOE AT tue.nl.Please direct queries to the Program Committee
Chair, Andreas Fickers (A.Fickers@maastrich tuniversity. nl).

The Program Committee will inform the session organizers about its
decisions no later than February 15, 2010. Inventing Europe &
Tensions of Europe programs are seeking to provide a contribution
towards travel and/or accommodation costs for those who have no
opportunity to participate otherwise.

Papers and roundtable discussion texts must be submitted to the
Program Committee by May 1, 2010 because they will be distributed to
all conference participants before the conference on a CD and made
available on the website.

For the Program Committee for the Fourth Plenary Conference of
Tensions of Europe,
Andreas Fickers, Chair, Maastricht University, The Netherlands
Helena Durnova, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic
Valentina Fava, Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of
Helsinki, Finland
Ivan Tchalakov, Plovdiv University & Institute of Sociology, BAS, Bulgaria

Sponsors

This conference is made possible by:
European Science Foundation
Foundation for the History of Technology
Technical University Eindhoven
University of Sofia
Bulgarian Academy of Science


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