Conveners: Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (University of Cambridge) and Madeleine Reeves (University of Manchester)

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1313

Registration is now open for this workshop, to be held on September 24th-25th 2010 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge. Funded by CRASSH, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studied (CEELBAS), the workshop brings together 12 speakers whose research has explored the social and affective lives of documents in and after the Soviet Union.  The event is held in the memory of Cambridge geographer, Graham Smith, in whose honour a keynote lecture will be given.

The workshop asks how papers enter the lives of those who hold them. What kinds of affective and social relations do documents elicit?  What notions of person do they constitute, and, conversely, in which culturally and historically specific understandings of personhood does the ‘documented self’ come to acquire meaning? How do these documents affect and constitute geographical movement of people across the vast post-Soviet terrain and what Soviet legacies of territorial residency do they reveal?  More generally, what does the proliferation of identification documents - the fact that we are not fully a person without papers, and that that these papers are not merely texts but also certain kinds of material objects - do for contemporary theoretical debates about subjects and objects, persons and things, the blurring of the social and the material?

The workshop runs over two days, beginning on the morning of Friday September 24th, and concluding with tea late on Saturday afternoon, September 25th.

Registration information:

Interested scholars and graduate students are welcome to attend, and should register in advance online.  The workshop is small and informal, and places are limited so early registration is encouraged. Further details of the workshop, including a more detailed programme and background to the workshop, information on how to register and accommodation options in Cambridge can be found on the CRASSH website.

Queries regarding the workshop can be addressed to Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (ns267@cam.ac.uk) and Madeleine Reeves (madeleinereeves@gmail.com). 

Queries regarding registration should be addressed to Anna Malinowska at CRASSH (apm50@cam.ac.uk).