The 42nd National Convention of the Association will be held in Los Angeles, California, from Thursday, November 18, to Sunday, November 21, 2010 at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Suites. The theme of the 2010 convention is “War and Peace” (see below for more information).
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. If you are not currently a member or have not renewed your membership for the 2009 calendar year, please go to our Members Only / Registered Users site (www.aaassmembers.org) and click on “Membership Form” to activate your 2009 membership.
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.
2010 Convention Theme
The theme of the 2010 convention is “War and Peace”
Lev Tolstoy, in his classic novel, chose to explore the philosophical, psychological, religious, historiographical, and other aspects of human life through the experiences and perceptions of two families during the years of war and peace in early 19th-century Russia. With similar transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary ambitions, we highlight “war and peace” as next year’s convention theme. Wars and the peace that issued from them have shaped and often transformed the societies of Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia. Borders and citizenship, political economies, nationalities and ethnicities, religious affi liations, and gender identities are among the many features of human existence that have undergone and continue to undergo drastic changes as the result of conflicts and the resolutions thereof.
We are a world that has been at war for much of the recent past. To some degree that involvement has led to a revival of interest in such topics as the origins of war and the conditions for stable peace, the ethics of just war and peacetime occupations, gender and war, and the religious and ethnic or national determinants of war and peace. Historians themselves, unwittingly or otherwise, have been implicated in fundamental rewritings of national pasts (frequently pitting long suppressed versions of putatively ancient pasts against more conventional narratives) with wars and unjust peaces fi guring prominently in these “invented traditions.” Anthropologists have helped us all to understand how memory of war and commemorations of battles and wars contribute to the invention of those very traditions. Writers, playwrights, composers, and painters have explored the multiple dimensions of war and peace. Political scientists have tested old theories and devised new ones to explain why societies go to war and how to craft a postwar peace, especially in recent ethnic violence. In short, humanists and social scientists will fi nd much common ground in these themes. War and peace is not limited to international confl ict, but also includes civil war, guerrilla wars, and rich metaphorical uses of war and peace (more war than peace) in the politics and culture of the region—from class war to wars on terrorism, on backwardness, culture wars, and more.
One of the many stereotypes that organizes outsiders’ understanding of our region is that the area is beset by extraordinary violence and wars, lately reinforced by various versions of Balkan blood vengeance in the late twentieth-century wars of Yugoslav succession. I do not share this judgment, based often on willful or other forms of historical amnesia about scholars’ (and journalists’ and politicians’) own national and regional histories. But one aim for the panels devoted to the theme might be to compare the experiences of East European and Eurasian region with others in the world.
Finally, war and peace can easily continue the productive cross-disciplinary discussions that came out of the last three years’ themes of empire, gender, and biography. After all, empires are created through war, strive to keep their reputations as good warriors, maintain peace for long periods by managing difference skillfully, and often fall apart in wars, but also have left their powerful legacies in the various forms of post-imperial peace. Socially prescribed and politically enforced gender roles and public sexuality have both shaped and been shaped by major confl icts, but also by the transitions to peace. Biographies, too, are a central component of all considerations of societies in war and peace; war, like revolutions, not only places severe stress on individual human lives, but also prompts refl ection on the worth of human life and interactions in print and fi lm memoirs, diaries, letters and fiction.
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 2010 Convention.
