ASTR 2016 - EAST EUROPEAN working group

[Yana Meerzon]

Dear friends and colleagues,
I would like to bring to your attention the working group on trans-bodies in Central-Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Russia at this year's ASTR (November 3 - 6, 2016; Minneapolis Marriott City Center 30 S 7th St Minneapolis, MN 55402). We hope you will find the topic both broad enough to include your research and productive  for us to have a fruitful and invigorating conversation about the region's theater historiography and contemporary performance practices (with the possibility of taking this forward toward publication).

Jacob Juntunen, Southern Illinois University, and Margarita Kompelmakher, University of Minnesota, and I are conducting this year’s meeting of the group together. We are looking forward to your abstracts! Details included below.

Yana Meerzon
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http://www.astr.org/general/custom.asp?page=16_WGSessions#3
Beyond the State: Performances of Trans-Bodies in Central-Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Russia


Jacob Juntunen, Southern Illinois University
Margarita Kompelmakher, University of Minnesota
Yana Meerzon, University of Ottawa

In The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Katherine Verdery describes how the discovery of mass graves, the reburial of national heroes, and the removal of monuments depicting extraordinary Soviet figures formed a body politics that facilitated the post-1989 process of transition in former Soviet territories and satellite states. According to Verdery, the unique advantage of the body in politics is that it provides “a concreteness that nonetheless transcends time, making past immediately present” (Verdery: 2013). Building on this insight, this working group takes trans- as a point of departure to investigate the body as a performing site that shifts and challenges our understanding of politics in the region prior and post-1989. We invite participants whose work examines bodily practices in excess of state-enforced censorship historically and today, as well as projects that address the proliferation and institutionalization of forms of trans-performance under the demands of global capitalism and human rights.

Accordingly, we are interested in a wide-range of topics including, but not limited to: bodily practices among refugees, migrants, and minorities; medical and scientific uses of bodies; virtual technologies and prosthetic-bodies such as performing objects and puppets in memory politics; performance protocols of being “human” and influence of discourses such as human rights; forms of cultural diplomacy and cross-cultural exchange; and trans-body performance in the region’s historiography.

In early September, convenors will circulate three short readings on trans-bodies to build a foundational vocabulary among group members. Drawing on the vocabularies and trajectories of trans- presented in the readings, group members will write a 5-7 page position paper by mid October that situates their research in the field of trans-body studies. In Minneapolis, participants will be asked to bring an object, document, article or ethnographic anecdote specific to their position paper research. For the first half of our meeting, we will split up into small groups where members will (a) discuss their research object and the question that object situates about trans-bodies (b) respond to the group’s position papers and broader theoretical intersections. In the second half, groups will create a “graphic recording” of their discussion and present it to the other three groups and the audience at large. Lastly, we will reserve time at the end of the session to discuss the prospect of an edited anthology on the subject of trans-bodies and performance in Central-Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Russia.

For any specific questions, please contact the working group convenors at jjuntunen at siu.edu<mailto:jjuntunen at siu.edu>, komp0026 at umn.edu<mailto:komp0026 at umn.edu>, and Yana.Meerzon at uottawa.ca<mailto:Yana.Meerzon at uottawa.ca>.

Please note that all submissions must be received formally through the ASTR website, athttp://www.astr.org/page/16_WGSubmissions. The form will allow you to indicate second and third -choice working groups if you wish; if you do so, note that there is a space for you to indicate how your work will fit into those groups.

The deadline for receipt of working group proposals is 1 June 2016 and we anticipate that participants will be notified of their acceptance no later than 30 June.

As this is the first year of this new process, please contact the conference organizers at astr2016 at astr.org<mailto:astr2016 at astr.org> if you have any questions about the process.



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