Sessions on the International Medieval Congress; Rosalie Gabay Bernheim (London/Jerusalem) and Kerstin Mayerhofer (Vienna) (Web)

Time: 05.-08.07.2027
Venue: Leeds
Proposals by: 15.09.2026

Rosalie Gabay Bernheim (London/Jerusalem) and Kerstin Mayerhofer (Vienna) invite proposals for “Communities of Bodily Care in the Middle Ages,” a series of sessions at the International Medieval Congress.
The sessions will examine bodily care as a collective practice through which medieval communities defined responsibility, belonging, and exclusion. We welcome papers on the social networks surrounding illness, injury, pregnancy, childbirth, disability, ageing, and death, as well as on the circulation of medical and embodied knowledge. Contributions may also consider how care was shaped by gender, religion, status, kinship, or professional authority, and how practices intended to sustain vulnerable bodies could also entail discipline, coercion, surveillance, or control. Comparative, interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed approaches are particularly encouraged, including work on under-represented regions, traditions, languages, and communities.

If you are interested in participating in our session(s), please submit a title, an abstract of up to 250 words, a short biography, and your preference for presenting in person or online to mayerhk2[at]univie.ac.at or rosalie.bernheim[at]gmail.com by 15 September 2026.

Source: HSozKult (Web)

Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana; Project „Socialist Management in a Global Context: Technocratic Developments in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, 1955-1991“; Ivan Sablin (Web)

Time: 16.02.2027
Venue: Ljubljana
Proposals by: 15.09.2026

State socialism, as a political and economic system, was one of the major innovations of the twentieth century and became a global phenomenon in its latter half, with socialist regimes emerging across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. State socialism can be understood as a political regime characterized by single-party government, directed modernization under systemic governmentality, and the predominance of state property. From the 1950s onward, socialist governance increasingly embraced the notion that political, economic, and social lives could be organized and governed as closed systems. With the “scientific and technological revolution” integrated into the ideology as a new stage on the path to communism, the accumulation and application of knowledge became a central function of state socialist regimes, while holistic, systemic governmentality turned into a key feature of the ideology. The workshop will explore how socialist states sought to manage human life cycles through scientific knowledge, administrative practices, and institutional interventions. Focusing on gender relations, aging, and health, it will examine these fields as central dimensions of socialist biopolitics and as sites where broader models of governance and technocratic management were developed. Bringing together perspectives from conceptual, institutional, and political history as well as the social sciences, the workshop will investigate how socialist regimes attempted to organize social reproduction, welfare, health, and individual life trajectories between the 1950s and 1991. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the development and implementation of official policies concerning family, gender, demographic change, health, and aging; group and individual responses to official policies; the role of scientific research and expert communities in shaping socialist governance; international cooperation and the circulation of knowledge, expertise, and technologies; and the communication of scientific knowledge to broader publics. We are particularly interested in approaches that examine how scientific and technological visions influenced understandings of the human body, social reproduction, and socialist futures, including the Continue reading →