{"id":55062,"date":"2026-08-24T11:19:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T09:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/historiografija.hr\/?p=55062"},"modified":"2026-08-23T17:27:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T15:27:34","slug":"cfp-the-making-of-solidarity-a-conference-on-eastern-and-central-european-dissidents-1945-1991","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/historiografija.hr\/?p=55062","title":{"rendered":"CfP: The Making of Solidarity: A\u00a0Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents, 1945-1991"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This open call invites proposals for an interdisciplinary conference on Eastern and Central European dissidence, solidarity, and anti-imperial thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Making of Solidarity: A Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents, 1945-1991<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

16.-17. November 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A close reading of Ivan Dziuba\u2019s classic\u00a01965 essay Internationalism or Russification? <\/em>offers a\u00a0useful lens through which to understand a\u00a0distinctive feature of Russian colonialism: its operation not only through discrimination and coercion, but also through the\u00a0language of brotherhood. Written from within the\u00a0Soviet system, this insight anticipated questions that postcolonial theory would not fully engage with for decades. It also serves as a\u00a0reminder that Eastern and Central European intellectuals were thinking rigorously about imperial power long before postcolonial frameworks entered broader academic discussions of the\u00a0region. The Making of Solidarity<\/em> takes this intellectual tradition as its point of departure \u2014 not merely as historical background, but as a\u00a0body of thought that continues to illuminate the\u00a0present. To do so demands a\u00a0particular approach to history: one that treats dissident thinking as a\u00a0form of knowledge production in its own right, and that attends carefully to how the\u00a0memory of dissidence has itself been shaped \u2014 which figures have been canonized, which forgotten, and by what institutional, political, and cultural processes those selections have been made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conference challenges the dominant understanding of Eastern European dissidence that took shape in international academia during the Cold War and became further entrenched in the years following 1989. This understanding tended to privilege figures who had already established networks in Paris or London, while overlooking workers and labor activists, as well as religious, national, and cultural communities whose resistance took different, less readily translatable forms. It elevated Russian voices, at times even those inflected with imperial nostalgia, while failing to fully recognize the anti-imperial thought of Ukrainian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, and other dissidents. The Making of Solidarity<\/em> proposes a reorientation: toward those whose resistance has been harder to recover, and toward what V\u00e1clav Havel famously described as \u201cthe power of the powerless\u201d\u2014the refusal of ordinary people across the full breadth of Eastern and Central Europe to live within a lie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The conference also marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Polish Workers\u2019 Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976\u2014one of the most consequential initiatives to build solidarity across class divisions under an authoritarian regime. This anniversary is not merely commemorative. The making of solidarity\u2014the difficult and unfinished work of bringing together people from diverse backgrounds in opposition to structures of oppression\u2014remains a challenge for contemporary societies. It is through this continuing relevance that the legacy of dissident movements still speaks to the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These histories are now being reconstructed\u2014and actively contested\u2014across digital platforms, with Russia\u2019s full-scale war against Ukraine lending new urgency to figures such as Vasyl Stus, the Ukrainian poet and dissident who died in a Soviet labor camp in 1985. By bringing together historians, literary scholars, postcolonial theorists, and digital humanists, The Making of Solidarity<\/em> asks not only which histories have been overlooked, but also under what conditions their recovery becomes possible\u2014and what forms of solidarity, across time and borders, that recovery demands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CALL FOR PROPOSALS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Making of Solidarity: A Conference on Eastern and Central European Dissidents<\/strong>
16.-17. November 2026 \u00b7 Pilecki Institute Berlin \u00b7 In person and online<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Proposal deadline:<\/strong> 31 August 2026
Send proposals to:<\/strong> conference@pileckiinstitut.de<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We welcome proposals from historians, literary scholars, postcolonial theorists, digital humanists, and practitioners working across the following themes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n