Reflections of the Revolution : The October Revolution and Global Order, 1917-2017 (Missoula, Montana)
Reflections of the Revolution : The October Revolution and Global Order, 1917-2017
Missoula, Univ. of Montana, 20-22 oct. 2017
Call for Papers
For those on the lookout in the West, one hundred years after Russia’s October Revolution of 1917, phenomena suggestive of revolutionary upheavals still lurk behind news headlines and global social realities: rebellions, wars, oppression, persecutions, suffering, and looming and actual ecological disasters. Disruptions of the social and political order are feared by some, demanded by others, and inevitable to all. Global and local contradictions have complex interrelationships both requiring and defying totalizing narratives. Is the only revolution left a neo-liberal one realized through triumphant technological advances, increases in scientific knowledge and an increasingly immaterial labor force?
Do revolts of the (neo-)colonized, persecuted, impoverished and/or marginalized peoples and groups, perhaps, suggest otherwise? Are new revolutionary paradigms after the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions possible? In Bolivarian revolutions, the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East, and in the various “color revolutions” in countries of the former Soviet Union? Have they fundamentally marked collective consciousness, modified ways of doing politics, shifted power structures, reinforced others, altered or stabilized economics, societies and cultures? What do we make of the “information revolution”?
To better understand some of these questions, we have numerous theoretical traditions and conceptual tools to rely on—others, no doubt, still lie over the horizon.
This conference aims to learn from the revolutions of the past as well as to explore the possibility/impossibility of revolutionary scenarios today.
Keynote Address:
Ronald Grigor Suny, the William H. Sewell, Jr., Distinguished University Professor of History and Political Science Professor at the University of Michigan, will give a keynote lecture on Friday, 20 October 2017.
We invite proposals for papers related to revolution(s), either broadly conceived or specifically focused. Possible lines of investigation include:
- Remembering revolutions: history of terms and practices
- Revolutionary theories and ideologies
- Discontent, rebellion and revolution: chains of events and their meaning
- Capitalist revolution
- French and Russian revolutions as models
- Revolutionary ethics
- Revolution and totalitarianism
- Revolution and genocide
- Failed revolutions
- The trans-cultural impact of revolutions
- Representation of revolution/revolutionary representations
- Information and communication revolutions (satellites, drones, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Revolutions as radical promises of the Enlightenment
- Revolutions in biogenetic technology, the emergence of the “transhuman”
Paper proposals of about 250 words should be submitted in a Word document (“doc” or “docx”) format and must include paper title, your name, title, institution/organization, address, telephone number, and email address. Include the same information for any co-authors. Send the abstract by email to Clare Kelly, clare.kelly@mso.umt.edu. The deadline for paper proposals is February 20, 2017. Notification of abstract acceptance will be sent by email by March 1, 2017.