Ab Imperio 2013 annual theme

Download the program

2013

annual theme:

Freedom and Empire:
Dialectics of Diversity and Homogeneity in Complex Societies

№ 1/2013 How Do We Understand Freedom Today? Free Interpretations and Predetermined Models

Freedom and liberty ● dialectics of freedom and sovereignty ● “natural rights” and the problem of their defense and maintenance ● “anarchy is the mother of order” ● does the class-based approach have a future? ● are human rights contrary to freedom? ● “hierarchy of freedoms”: paradoxes of emancipation movements and decolonization ● whose freedom? ● “progressors”: can freedom be imposed? ● imperial liberties and modern conceptions of freedom ● body as the space of freedom and object of freedom and bondage ● phenomenon and concept of legal pluralism ● imperial law and imperial rights ● common law and modernization of legal discourses ● “for our freedom and yours!”: national and imperial emancipation movements ● concepts of autonomy and federalism in colonial and continental empires ● concept of historical justice and its connection to the right for autonomy and for a sovereign state ● Siberian oblastnichestvo yesterday and today ● Cossack concepts of self-government and invention of the Cossack tradition in the early twentieth century ● modern citizenship and imperial subjecthood ● historical precedents of multiculturalism ● twentieth-century humanitarian interventions and new post–Cold War world order.

№ 2/2013 Freedom and Order: Interpreters and Intermediaries – Entrepreneurs of Groupness

Subjects of freedom ● concepts of freedom and privileges in empire and nation ● freedom as the new order: democracy or nationalism? ● unrecognized freedom and invented traditions of liberty: regional and corporate regimes of self-government and democracy from the moment of incorporation into empire to the invention of traditions in the era of mass national movement and politics ● imperial “peoples–intermediaries” ● authoritarian tendencies of emancipator messianism from Slavophilism to communism ● comparative history of political representation and constitutionalism in land-based empires: Russian parliament of the early twentieth century, Ottoman parliament of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ● Russian revolutionaries and projects of revolutionary nation ● Mensheviks are for spontaneity, Bolsheviks are for discipline? – rethinking the old model ● pogrom and Aktion: the other side of emancipation? ● is there diversity under socialism? gradient of freedom: thawing out of the Soviet regime ● freedom to be a nation under socialism ● Soviet dissidents ● politics of childhood: pedagogy as a guardian of group identity.

№ 3/2013 Freedom as an Object of Intellectual Import and Export: Lost in Translation, Found in Translation

Translatability and untranslatability of languages of self-description: how to recognize freedom? ● translatio imperii and hegemony as a problem of translation ● interpreters in the system of administration and foreign policy of Muscovy and the Russian Empire ● a breath of freedom: the school of Soviet literary translation ● emancipation and kulturtraegershaft: projects of translation into and from languages of the peoples of the USSR ● misusing the right to groupness: ethnic conflict as a Soviet invention ● translation of historical knowledge into politics and administration ● post-imperial reinventions of groupness and collective identities ● languages of codification as politics of translation of legal traditions ● translating and mediating urban spaces ● education: disciplinary practices of shaping freedom of thought ● transfer of educational models into Russia ● subtexts of emancipation and discrimination: politics of gender in education ● alternative forms of socialization and politics of (self)education ● private schools and universities in late imperial Russia ● Soviet education: site of modernization, indoctrination, or social engineering? ● did Russia have colonial institutes? ● imperial subalterns as products of educational systems: unification of subjugation and protest ● exile as a laboratory of imperial knowledge ● postcolonial and post-imperial knowledge: emancipation, freedom of manipulations, violence.

№ 4/2013 Emancipation of Researchers Through the Decentralization of Normative Models: Reciprocal Comparisons

Academic freedom today: institutional mechanisms and cultural norms of stimulating and limiting scholarly research ● innovation or trickstering? recognizing innovation in the humanities ● freedom from stereotypes: the principle of historicism and method of estrangement from historical experience ● comparative history of key social and political conceptions ● modernity beyond Eurocentrism ● hierarchies in the production of knowledge ● reciprocal comparison: circulation of knowledge and interwoven institutions and practices in historical dynamics ● instrumentality of translation for comparative history ● historians after postmodernity ● deterritorialization of analytical models ● decentralization of narrative without “toxic relativism” ● new horizons, conceptual traps and dead ends of normalizing the exceptionalism of historical experience.

Permanent Sections:

Theory and Methodology ■ History ■ Archive ■ Sociology, Anthropology & Political Science ■ ABC: Empire & Nationalism Studies ■ Newest Mythologies ■ Historiography and Book Reviews.

For subscription please contact our authorized commercial distributors: www.amazon.com,
East View Publications, EBSCO, and
KUBON & SAGNER Buchexport-Import.