Title: Call for Papers/Panelists: The post-post-Soviet space? Interrogating the region in the quarter century since communism’s end
Call for Papers: AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, 29 March – 2 April 2016
Session Title: The post-post-Soviet space? Interrogating the region in the quarter century since communism’s end
Organizers: Ted Holland, Havighurst Postdoctoral Fellow, Miami University of Ohio, hollance@miamioh.edu
About a decade ago, scholars from across the social sciences were engaged in reflection on the wider resonance of systemic change in the Soviet Union. In geography, the region was foregrounded as the central analytic for understanding this process; drawing from work on the new regional geography, Lynn (1999: 839) argued that orthodox understandings of political and economic transition in the former Soviet Union discounted “social, historical, and institutional (local) contexts” (see also Bradshaw 1990; Mitchneck 2005). We seek to return to the region as analytic in light of recent domestic and interstate developments in the former Soviet states. Our central question is: to what extent does “post-Soviet”—a descriptor still commonly invoked in social scientific inquiry—remain salient as a geographic construct a quarter century after the collapse of the USSR? Put succinctly, have we moved beyond the “post-Soviet” as an organizing logic for this region?
We plan to organize two sessions around this question. The first is a panel session that reflects on defining and redefining Russia and its neighboring states through the regional analytic. We aim to stimulate a conversation that critically considers the continued aggregation of Russia and its neighboring states as a geographic region. The second is an associated paper session that brings together scholarship that evaluates recent political, economic, and societal developments in Russia and neighboring states. We are particularly interested in topics and/or geographic areas that have been less frequently considered in the social scientific literature. In turn, potential topics are varied and could include contributions from political, economic, social, cultural, and urban geography, among other subfields.
Sponsored by the Political Geography Specialty Group.
Submissions: Please send expressions of interest in the panel session and abstracts for the paper session to Ted Holland (hollanec@miamioh.edu) by 15 October 2015.
Sources: Bradshaw, M. 1990. New regional geography, foreign-area studies and Perestroika. Area 22 (4): 315-322.
Lynn, N. 1999. Geography and Transition: Reconceptualizing Systemic Change in the Former Soviet Union. Slavic Review 58 (4): 824-840.
Mitchneck, B. 2005. Geography Matters: Discerning the Importance of Local Context. Slavic Review 64 (3): 491-516.