AWSS Conferences
Association for Women in Slavic Studies Biennial Conference: "Gender in Conflict"
April 2011
The 5th Biennial Conference for the Association for Women in Slavic Studies took place April 1st and 2nd on the campus of University of Texas, Austin. Framed by the approaching 20th anniversaries of collapse of? Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, the conference was dedicated to the gender analysis of conflict-economic, political, social, military, cultural-in the origins, experiences and legacies of the communist experiments in the former "Eastern bloc" states and the USSR.
Conference organizers Mary Neuburger (University of Texas) and Maria Bucur (Indiana University) brought together an impressive number of participants from disciplines across the general field of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian studies. Twenty-seven scholars from seventeen universities and five countries represented eleven disciplinary (and interdisciplinary) fields, including history, literature, law, journalism, public policy, anthropology, psychology; in their collective scope, the papers presented addressed over twelve countries and regions, including Albania, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Russia, and the Balkans.
Conference goals included consideration of the usefulness of gender as a lens through which to examine conflict in the region; the degree to which 'women's issues' remain as such, or whether there has been a scholarly shift in agenda and perspective in the last two decades to consider them more generally as 'human issues'; and the ways in which women's (and men's) experiences might be nuanced so that they are seen as agents of transformation or even destruction, rather than "revictimizing" them as mere objects.
The cluster of connections that emerged among the papers made clear that the questions above remain vital ones, and fertile ground for continuing scholarship: from the move from victimization to agency (Bucur, West, Ghodsee, Hashamova, Azhgikhina); the recuperation of the legacies of progressive women (Ghodsee, Heczkova, Saburova, Stoff, Azhgikhina, Harris); changing (and unchanging) gender roles in families and couples (Kuzmic and Huston, Lostrioscio and Malbasa, Wise, Musliu, Duda, Kolchevska and Bokovoj); identity formation (Linhardt, McCullough, Bucur, Sabuova); politics and the body (Lalo, Brown, Neuburger, Severson, Chamberlin, Musliu); and gender and wartime experience (Stoff, Dzyadevych, Jug, Hashamova). (See program below for full names and paper titles.) In the keynote address, "Suffering and Survival: Gender in the Balkans Beyond State and Religion," Yana Hashamova (The Ohio State University) masterfully wove all of these themes into her discussion of the changing image of ethnic, gender, and family conflict as projected in Balkan film of the socialist and post-socialist periods.
The organizers and AWSS would like to thank once again conference sponsors University of Texas (Austin); the Center for European Studies at UT, Indiana University (Bloomington) and Ohio State University (Columbus) for their generous support.