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International Workshop organised by the Department of History, University of Warsaw and the Department of Public History, FernUniversität in Hagen

Often framed within the triumphalist narrative, most prominently articulated in the “end of history” concept (Fukuyama, 1989), transformations that reshaped the socialist states in Europe in the late twentieth century are most often narrated through the teleological frameworks of “transition,” “return to Europe,” and “catching up” to a normative model of political and economic modernity. Yet, as a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated (Ghodsee 2011; Massino and Wien 2024; Kolářová 2025; Johnston et al. 2026), these narratives obscure the uneven, affectively charged, and often non-linear processes through which postsocialist societies were reconfigured.

This international workshop aims to promote sociohistorical research on the transformations of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, the USSR, as well as Yugoslavia. It fosters an interdisciplinary dialogue on the lived experiences of transformation, the mechanisms of socio-political as well as economic change, and the diverse ways in which societies navigated this period of upheaval and instability.

Drawing on critical perspectives from postsocialist studies, this workshop seeks to interrogate transformation not as a completed historical rupture, but as a long-term, ongoing, and at times chronically unfinished process that has reshaped societies, institutions, and social identities. We aim to examine the longue durée of transformation, encompassing the broader processes of socialist order disintegration and the construction of new structures across the 1980s and 1990s, and reflect on alternative chronologies of transformation, shaped by local contexts. Overarchingly, this workshop asks: how can we write histories of transformation that take seriously both structure and experience, both rupture and continuity, and both the exceptional and the mundane? How did different societies experience and narrate transformation before and after the canonical years of 1989 and 1991? What economic, social, and political shifts occurred beyond the established historical breakpoints?

We invite contributions that critically explore the social, cultural, and political histories of transformation across Central and Eastern Europe, the USSR (including the Baltics), and Yugoslavia, with attention to both local specificities and transnational entanglements.

We particularly welcome papers that examine:

• ​​temporalities and chronologies of transformation(s): alternative periodisations, lived time, delays, accelerations, and asynchronous developments across regions, future expectations
• vocabulary: transformation, transition, postsocialism, “post-” as an analytic category
• crisis, instability, strikes, protests, and outbursts of violence
• everyday and embodied experiences of transformation (work, care, family, social reproduction)
• civil society, activism, state withdrawal, and alternative political imaginaries
• economic restructuring, austerity, and their social consequences
• urban and rural transformations, migration, mobility, and displacement
• environment, ecology, and the socialist/postsocialist landscape
• the situation of minorities and marginalised groups
• gender, sexuality, disability, and the reorganisation of normativity
• class, habitus, and rearticulations of social stratification
• history and the public: dissident collections and the establishment of new archives and narratives
• memory, representational regimes, and competing narratives of the postsocialist past and present.

The workshop will take place on December 9–11, 2026 at the Department of History, University of Warsaw. Publication of the selected contributions is planned in the form of a special issue.

Submission Guidelines:

We welcome proposals for panels or individual papers. We also encourage submissions that explore alternative formats and presentation methods (such as films, debates, or book launches).

Please send your abstract (250 — 300 words) and a short bio of about 150 words (both as one PDF file) to transformations@uw.edu.pl by July 31, 2026. Panel proposals should include either three papers and a discussant, or four papers and a moderator; please provide: a panel title, a brief session description (up to 150 words), a title and abstract for each paper (250 — 300 words each), and short biographical notes for all participants (up to 150 words each). Notification of acceptance will follow by August 30, 2026.

The event will be based on pre-circulated work-in-progress papers. We kindly ask participants to submit drafts of about 2,500 words by November 18, 2026 so we can circulate them among discussants in advance.

We will be applying for limited funding to cover travel and accommodation for invited speakers, with priority given to early-career researchers and colleagues from lower-income countries. If you already have your own funding, please note this in your application, it may help us sponsor more participants who do not have access to these types of funds.

For any inquiries, please contact us via transformations@uw.edu.pl

Organisation committee:

Dr. Janine Fubel, Department of Public History, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
Katarzyna Szarla, Department of History, University of Warsaw, Poland

Scientific committee:

Prof. Dr. Felix Ackermann, Department of Public History, FernUniversität in Hagen
Prof. Dr. Dobrochna Kałwa, Department of History, University of Warsaw
Prof. Dr. Claudia Kraft, Research Center for the History of Transformations, Vienna
Prof. Dr. Jannis Panagiotidis, Research Center for the History of Transformations, Vienna
Prof. Dr. Joanna Wawrzyniak, Director of the Center for Research on Social Memory, Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw

Important Dates:

Proposal submission deadline: July 31, 2026
Notification of acceptance: August 30, 2026
Workshop date: December 9-11, 2026

Publications:

Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer): 3–18.

Ghodsee, Kristen. 2011. Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Johnston, Rosamund, Jannis Panagiotidis, Magdalena Baran-Szołtys, Anna Calori, Thuc Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Sheng Peng, Anastassiya Schacht, and Philipp Ther, eds. 2025. The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation. London: Routledge.

Massino, Jill. 2019. Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania. New York: Berghahn Books.

Massino, Jill, and Markus Wien, eds. 2024. Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe: History Doesn't Travel in One Direction. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Kolářová, Kateřina. 2025. Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Sex, and Race in Eastern Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.