2022 ASEEES Convention Theme

ASEEES 54th Annual Convention

Virtual Convention - October 13-14, 2022
Chicago, IL - Palmer House Hilton - November 10-13, 2022

Theme: Precarity

2022 ASEEES President: Joan Neuberger, University of Texas at Austin

The 2022 ASEEES convention invites discussion of the experiences associated with precarity in Eastern Europe and Eurasia as well as in the academic institutions that employ us to study the region. Primarily associated with unstable, exclusive, and increasingly uncertain working conditions together with the collective cultural and individual psychological experiences that result, precarity, has become a factor on nearly every aspect of life on our planet. While the effects of precarity are highly diverse, they have a profound impact, beyond the realms of work, on our environment, health care, mobility, social hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion, and the politics and economy of cultural production, among others. Changes in the global economy have made precarity especially visible in the present, but these are phenomena with long histories and long-evolving cultures. The peoples of Eastern Europe and Eurasia have created and responded to those threats in important, diverse, and instructive ways, in both the past and the present.

Within our own academic institutions, precarity is both unacknowledged and impossible to avoid. Academic precarity is a persistent subject of critique on social media and in student and faculty organizations. Yet the majority of university administrations embrace precarious employment practices as rational, while largely ignoring their human costs, a situation that affects all of us who work in academia, whatever the specific policies of our institutions.

The Covid pandemic with its recurring new variants reminds us time and again that “success” is ephemeral and we are dependent on one another in our vulnerability. Yet, as Arundhati Roy wrote at the beginning of the pandemic, this catastrophic interdependence might be worth reconsidering in a more positive light: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew…and fight for it.” Can precarity be an opportunity? Proposals from all disciplines and historical periods are welcome, and encouraged.

Deadline for ALL Submissions (panels, papers, roundtables, lightning rounds) is March 15, 2022.