Call for papers for the 2009 AAASS Convention
The 41st National Convention of the AAASS will be held at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston, MA, from Thursday, November 12 through Sunday, November 15, 2009. Elizabeth Wood of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will chair the Program Committee.
The full Call for Papers for the 2009 AAASS Convention is available in pdf format.
General Rules for Convention Participants
All participants who are Slavic scholars living in the U.S. must be current AAASS members. Only foreigners and scholars outside the field of Slavic studies do not need to join AAASS. All participants on panels/roundtables, members and non-members, must preregister by the deadline and pay the registration fee.
If you agree to participate in the AAASS Convention, you are agreeing to be scheduled during any of the planned sessions. We will honor specific scheduling requests only for religious reasons.
Panels can only have: one Chair; maximum of 3 papers; maximum of 2 discussants. Roundtables can only have: one Chair; maximum of 5 participants.
Each participant may only have one role on a panel or roundtable, may only appear on two panels or roundtables during the convention, and only present one paper during the convention. You may organize as many panels or roundtables as you wish and you may give a paper on one panel and be the chair, or a discussant, or a participant on one other, but you cannot be chair and discussant or chair and give a paper on the same panel, and you CAN NOT sign up for more than two panels/roundtables.
Affiliate organizations of the AAASS are each allowed one panel/roundtable, which must be specified on the proposal form. Each affiliate-sponsored panel/roundtable will be screened in the usual manner by the Program Committee; we will not accept unscreened proposals.
Theme of the 2009 Convention
The theme of the 2009 convention is "Reading and Writing Lives."
Lives are the basic stuff of Slavic, East European and Eurasian studies. Literature creates and recreates lives, literary and cultural studies address autobiography, the link between life and work, even “the death of the author.” The role of individual leaders and of their personalities concerns political scientists and psychologists. Economists make broad assumptions about the way individuals think and behave. Anthropologists study lives within cultures. Historians read memoirs and diaries, and history can be “embodied,” can extend to the history of “emotions and feelings,” and increasingly contemplates interconnections between the lives of people, on the one hand, and of animals, environments and ecosystems, on the other.
“Reading and writing lives” is not something new under the sun. But it is worth asking questions about the nature and uses of doing so. How do various disciplines differ in their reading and writing of lives? How have their approaches changed over the years? To what extent do they illuminate different aspects of what Russians sometimes refer to as “life itself”? Are there “national” or “regional” differences in the way we read and write lives in the United States, the West in general, and in the various countries we study? To what extent do theories illuminate lives, or on the contrary, do theories (whether literary, cultural, political, economic or anthropological) have the effect of distancing us from lives as they are actually lived? What is the balance in human affairs between the influence of individuals and groups large and small? Is it “totally yesterday,” as the new generation might say, to contend, with biographers of previous generations, that history is the lives of “great men and women”? Is history, rather, the lives of ordinary people?
All humanists and social scientists likely think they study lives, or at least the contexts in which lives are lived. Studying individuals, even in contexts, raises distinctive questions, but the term is sometimes extended to collectivities, as well. Groups are said to “think.” Nations are said to have “characters.” Can “biographies,” that is accounts of lives over time, be written of groups and nations as well as of individuals?
These and other related questions need not be the specific subjects of panels. Rather they are offered as spurs to choosing and designing panels for the 2009 Convention.
