Conf/CfP - Histories (Un)Spoken. Survival and Social-Professional Integration Strategies in Communist Political Prisoners' Families in Central and Eastern Europe in the 50s and 60s, 22 - 25 June 2016, Romania

The historiography that developed after 1989 on the topic of the Communist regime focused mainly on the suppressive nature of the system and on the direct victims of the regime from multiple points of view: archival documents, press materials, memoirs, oral history. Recently, studies on Communism extended to aspects of everyday life, demography, urbanization issues, economic issues or consequences of forced industrialization

Within the framework of this conference we would like to deepen the perspective on the impact of the Stalinization period on the Eastern and Central European societies, by taking into consideration the following aspect: the issue of the direct victims of Gulag has been largely discussed, while the strong effects of the system on the victims’ families and their economic and social lives have been under-researched. Therefore, research on torn families and their social and economic isolation may open new prospects regarding the microhistory of the first two decades of communization. The importance of such a topic is backed up by figures: if the number of political prisoners is estimated at about 100,000 (in the Romanian case), the number of “collateral” victims may reach several hundreds of thousands, whereas the impact upon society has been reverberating throughout decades of history up to the present days.

Suggested topics:

- “collateral” victims of the suppressive systems in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 1960s;

- Professional survival in different fields of work in the first two decades of the Communist regime;

- Histories of the families of political prisoners;

- Effects of suppression on the families during the Communist regime and in postcommunism;

- Transitional justice and families of the former political prisoners.

Please send your proposals by the 21st of December 2015 (the title and an abstract of maximum 200 words) at historiesunspoken2016@iiccmer.ro. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by the 15th of January 2016. Full papers are welcomed until the 1st of May 2016. Papers will be evaluated in a peer-review system. Authors of articles accepted for participation at the conference and for publication in a collective volume at an important publishing house will be notified by the 10th of May 2016.

Rules of citation and of text formatting will be announced after accepting the abstracts. The conference languages are Romanian and English. Accommodation and meals will be provided by the organizers, as well as the publication of the conference volume. We look forward to your contributions. Should you require additional information, please contact us by e-mail at histories(un)spoken2016@iiccmer.ro or call +40 21 316 7565.

http://www.romstudyabroad.com/