2022 RSA Central and Eastern Europe Conference Special Sessions

Session organisers:

• David Celetti, PhD, Professor, University of Padua, Italy
• Irina Turgel, Dr of Sc. (Econ), Professor, Ural Federal University, Russia
• Konstantin Bugrov, Dr of Sc. (History), Leading Researcher, Institute of History and Archaeology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Professor of Ural Federal University, Russia
• Irina Antonova, Cand. of Sc. (Econ), Associate Professor, Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia

1. The concept of creative reindustrialization of single-industry and second-tier cities
2. The concept of digital twins in territorial development
3. Sociological theory of frames in urban development
4. Models of economic concentration, knowledge flow and center-periphery relations
5. The concept of transnational transfer of politics
6. Spatial inequality of single-industry and second-tier cities: between concentration and diversification.
7. The State supporting policy of company towns and the policy of town-forming enterprises to support the territories of presence.

Session organisers:

• Komali Kantamaneni, University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom
• Sigamani Panneer, Central University Tamil Nadu, India
• Campika Liyanage, University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom

Session description to follow in due course.

Session organisers:

• Agnes Gagyi , University of Gothenburg, Sweden
• Lela Rekhviashvili, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Germany

Within European debates, Chinese investments in Europe’s infrastructures have been most often discussed in terms of threats vs. opportunities they entail for different European countries and subregions. These dichotomic discussions tend to naturalise foreign direct investments as virtuous and simultaneously exceptionalise Chinese investments as uniquely geo-politically and geo-economically threatening phenomenon. Despite the fact that Europe’s’ core economies (like Germany, France and the UK) have been main recipients of Chinese infrastructural investments, China’s engagements with Eastern Europe have been met with a particular suspicion. Beyond rare exceptional studies that attempt to embed Chinese investments in Eastern Europe in broader discussions of changing accumulation regimes and spatial restructuring of capitalism, existing research on the region has tended to be dominantly nation centric and to reproduce geopolitical and moral East/West binaries. Meanwhile, broader international critical economic geography and political economy discussions thematize infrastructural investments and a global trend of increasing state interventions in infrastructure deals as part of the uneven development of the current global transformation.  This special session seeks out for contributions that update prevailing narratives on Chinese infrastructure investments through [1] situating these investments in historical and ongoing transformations of capitalism as a global system, and discussing Eastern European infrastructural investments’ role in relations between Chinese and European capital within that context; [2] understanding and theorising Chinese infrastructural investments as part of the broader process of financialisation of infrastructures and global infrastructure-led development [3] scrutinizing the role of the EU in recent transformations of countries and (subnational) regions across CEE, questioning what role European investments and policy requirements play in local regimes’ reaching out for Chinese investments [4] and addressing comparisons and interconnections between Western and Chinese investments (including terms, conditionalities, joint deals, competitive projects as well as social and environmental consequences).

Session organisers:

• Lena Dallywater, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig, Germany
• Špela Drnovšek Zorko, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
• Daria Krivonos, University of Helsinki, Finland

Inspired by Critical Whiteness Studies and Critical Race Studies/Theory, fields that have disproportionately focused on issues of race and racism in the West, this panel interrogates the concepts of “whiteness” and “race” as core components for understanding national belonging in Eastern Europe. In responding to the theoretical and empirical terrain of both “whiteness” and “race”, the panel unpicks the ways in which the language of whiteness, blackness, and otherness have manifested in different settings in Eastern Europe and among migrants from the region abroad. This comparative session takes a closer look at discourses about and lived experiences of racialization and othering in a variety of contexts, including media in Eastern European societies. The contributions compare and contrast how “Old and New Divides” are indeed bridged, or rather deepened – and which societal and political developments and legacies may affect such change. Featuring historical studies as well as current empirical investigations, this interdisciplinary panel engages with the understudied histories of race in Eastern Europe and the failure within the dominant geographical accounts of the region to engage with global contexts of race and racism. It further goes against the grain of seeing East European migrants as encountering “race” only after migration to Western Europe: the East of Europe has been long involved in the (re)production of global racial orders, including by distancing itself from those racialized as non-white Others to claim its own belonging to whiteness and Europe “proper”. The region is also connected to the histories of decolonization and race through the often-overlooked circulation of goods, people, and knowledge with the decolonizing world, which produced an alternative project of global interconnections in the state socialist era. These histories and legacies of “postness” still act upon the present, producing multiple positionings of the East and of East European migrants within global racial hierarchies. In this discussion, attempts are made to understand the histories of race nationally, regionally, and to situate them within the overlooked global contexts. In so doing, the papers aim to understand the historical roles of race, not as an adaptation from the West, but rather as internal manifestations in Eastern Europe as well as in the West. To do this effectively, individual papers discuss the formations which constitute the underpinning for diverse, yet interrelated racialized exclusions and marginalization, and afterlives of socialist legacies (both as opportunity as well as an obstacle). They deal with issues such as language, societal integration, the nexus of race and migration, the intersection of race and class, and the multiplicity of exchanges and entanglements with communities in the Global South in a trans-regional perspective.

All panel titles below are work in progress and to be confirmed. The special session organisers are interested in accommodating new papers, even if they do not fit within the existing arrangements, as panel titles and structure of the sessions are still to be confirmed.

Part I: Divides between Race and Nation Building 

• Andreja Mesaric: ‘Mid-19th Century Catholic Missionary Networks and Enslaved African Children in Carniola’
• Agata Luksza: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Understandings of „slavery” in Polish society in the nineteenth century’
• Monika Bobako: Whiteness as component of Eastern European identity, historical perspective; critical whiteness / postcolonial Europe; Poland
• James Mark:’ Wilson’s White World: Race and the Formation of Central-Eastern European Nation States’
• Łukasz Zaremba; Visual Archive of the Inter-War Polish Colonial Complex and it’s Contemporary Legacy
• Discussant 1: N. N.

Part II: Minorities, Identity Politics and Racialisation

• Bolaji Balogun: Blackness and Racialisation in Central and Eastern Europe; lived experiences; national identity; Poland (tbd)
• Nsama Simuziya and Stephanie Rudwick: Racial identity politics in the Czech Republic: Focusing on the African diaspora’ (Race, language, identities, discrimination, African, Czech Republic)
• Chelsi West Ohueri: Medical anthropology, race and racialization in Southeastern Europe, Romani studies (tbd)
• Piotr Cichocki and Natalia Zawiejska: ‘Catholic Missionary Museums and the production of racialized polish identity’
• Dušan Bjelić: ‘Black Marxism, Racial Capitalism and the Balkans & the Eastern Mediterranean Complex. On the Abolition of Europe’s Racial Supremacy’ (racial capitalism, Black Radical Tradition, The Balkans and East Mediterranean slavery)
• Discussant 2: Alexander Yendell

Part III: Migration, ‘postness’, and encounters with ‘race’

• Špela Drnovšek Zorko: (Central-) Eastern European migrants in the UK, racialisation, racial grammar, migrant and minoritised communities
• Daria Krivonos: Bringing political economy back in critical whiteness: racial capitalism and postsocialist migration 
• Jan Grill tbd  Kasia Narkowicz: ‘White Enough, Not White Enough: Racism and Racialization among Poles in the UK’ (whiteness and race among Polish migrants in the UK)
• Yulia Gradskova tbd and Victoria Shmidt tbd
• Discussant 3: Steffi Marung (tbc)

Session organisers:

• Marek Mikuš, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
• Leonardo Pataccini, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland / University of Latvia
• Martin Sokol, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Arguments centred on infrastructure have become increasingly influential across social sciences. While infrastructure is primarily understood as embedded technical support systems that provide services to populations and organizations, social scientists document that infrastructures themselves are integrated into larger ecologies of other infrastructures, social organization, work routines, norms and standards, communities of users etc. (Niewöhner 2017). Infrastructures can be thus seen as extended and technologically mediated material assemblages that continuously produce social and socio-technical relations in both planned and unplanned ways (Harvey et al. 2017). Scholars working on finance deploy the concept as a heuristic for making visible “hard” infrastructures in finance as well as the socio-technical and organizational arrangements and processes surrounding them (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn 2019; Krarup 2019). They further developed the notion of the infrastructural power of finance to draw attention to the ways in which state actors such as central banks and treasuries come to depend on financial actors, markets and practices for the execution of their policies, with obvious implications for regulation (Braun 2020; Gabor and Braun 2020). A related line of enquiry focuses on entanglements between financial infrastructures and security (de Goede 2020), which have been recently taken to a new level with unprecedented sanctions against Russia’s access to particular financial markets, assets or payment systems. This special session invites analyses of these two dimensions of the relationship between infrastructure and finance in Eastern Europe – a region in which this line of enquiry is still underdeveloped, although existing scholarship already points to distinctive financial infrastructures such as foreign-led banking systems.

First, the session invites analyses of the infrastructures of Eastern European finance. The term is interpreted such as to cover a wide range of infrastructural phenomena – technological instruments and systems (e.g. trading platforms, payment systems, credit registries), mechanisms and techniques (e.g. credit scoring, government debt issuance techniques), and institutions and institutional frameworks (e.g. exchanges, markets.).

Second, the session invites reflections on the infrastructural power of finance in the region as well as its limits – the ways in which financial instruments and markets become prerequisites for monetary, security and other policies, but also the ways in which states may reassert their power vis-à-vis finance and deploy it for their purposes.

Session organisers:

CESCAME Collective:

• Slavomíra Ferenčuhová, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
• Anja Decker, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
• Petr Jehlička, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
• Terezie Lokšová, Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic

In response to the RSA Conference brief’s invitation to think about ‘globalisation as not simply emanating from an assumed centre [and] creating all kinds of peripheries’, we seek submissions on urban informality that aim at pushing this line of thinking further. Inspired by Doreen Massey’s (2004) geographical reasoning, we are looking for submissions that do not consider localised and everyday practices in urban contexts as merely responding to and mitigating the effects of global forces but also as agents in globalising processes. On top of that, we welcome contributions that adopt novel or alternative research perspectives on urban development by theorising from the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) or that bring in dialogue research perspectives from CEE with those from the world’s other non-central regions. Specifically, we are interested in research addressing negotiations, improvisations and co-production of practices generated at the intersection of urban formality and informality. The manifestations of urban formality and informality that the session will explore may include, but are not limited to, water management, transport, housing, food provisioning and food waste reduction. Despite their appearance of small scale, marginality, or niche character individually, collectively these practices might amount to a vision with transformative capacity that would allow us to relate CEE to the notion of ‘a progressive sense of region’ (Blumberg et al. 2020). In this claim, the session is inspired by post-colonial calls to incorporate work from ‘outside of the core’ in the production of knowledge. Accordingly, rather than replicating and confirming findings from the centre by research in CEE, the session invites work which challenges and extends extant knowledges and theorisations.

Session organisers:

• Ottavia Cima, University of Bern, Switzerland
• Lilian Pungas, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany
• Thomas Smith, LMU University , Munich, Germany

This open special session deals with alternative economic practices and theory in CEE, broadly defined. It invites participants to reflect on the extent Gibson-Graham’s Diverse Economies framework can (or cannot) contribute to studying, nurturing and enacting alternative socio-economic trajectories that deviate from the idealized goals of growth, the free market and/or capitalism. Thirty years after the Soviet dissolution, contemporary scholarship on CEE still struggles to cope with the socialist legacy. Hence, post-socialism calls for examining the (dis-)continuities with the socialist past, as a kind of inevitable past that renders intelligible but also haunts the capitalist present. “Transition” in the CEE context, at least according to the prevailing orthodoxy of developmentalist thinking, entails a movement from such “really existing socialisms” towards idealized versions of liberal market democracy. Discussions around the recent populist backlashes in CEE against such transition models recognize economic and territorial issues. Yet, they tend to highlight the contestations of liberal democracy, thus leaving the main coordinates of capitalist development and transition intact. Diverse Economies thinking, and especially Gibson-Graham’s The end of capitalism, found fertile ground in the 1990s and 2000s, during which globalization and capitalist development appeared as a monolithic and all-pervasive force (partly due to CEE’s fate, as many have argued). Diverse Economies scholarship challenged such monolithic capitalism/neoliberalism/globalization discourses. Yet, what is its theoretical and practical potency in 2022, at a time when the literature produces an ever more fine-grained understanding of transitions? Not only is capitalism now commonly understood as a “variegated” phenomenon, but also the existence of transitions beyond ever-increasing capitalist marketization is recognized, examined and supported by scholarly traditions in various fields. This special session addresses traditions and transitions that are directed at such other reference points, including circular economy, degrowth, postcapitalism, postdevelopment, decolonial and postcolonial critiques of capitalism and related approaches. Is there an added value of a Diverse Economies-inflected approach for re-thinking transitions and regional development in CEE? What are the blind spots of Diverse Economies in this context and how can they be overcome through the integration of other scholarly traditions? In other words, how can Diverse Economies contribute to, learn from, and make alliances with, the multiplicity of research traditions that are similarly interested in not only “reading” but also “making” other transitions possible? What can, and should, Diverse Economies learn from an extended engagement with CEE and its peculiarities, on the one hand, and from other cognate approaches on the other? As the session aims at deepening the dialogue between scholarly traditions, the contributions of individual presenters will be kept relatively short in order to leave abundant time for discussion. We invite interested contributors to submit a short abstract outlining how they would contribute to the proposed dialogue.

Session organisers:

• Nadia Johanisova, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
• Markus Sattler, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Germany
• Lucie Sovová, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Session Community economies I draws on the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and their insights regarding the existence of alternative capitalist, non-capitalist and non-market economic practices, which are hard to discern from more mainstream economic perspectives and thus often remain hidden, or „under the water-line“ in the well-known Gibson-Graham iceberg metaphor. This landscape of „economic alternatives“ or „community economies“ is alive and even thriving  in CEE and involves a wide spectrum of economic practices.

These range from family subsistence activities to initiatives and enterprises which, though functioning in a market environment, are quite different from the mainstream firm. Where are these „economic alternatives“ or „community economies“ coming from? How do they differ within and across various CEE countries? How do they see themselves and how are they seen from various perspectives in post-socialist discourse and scholarship? What can cross-pollination with fields such as regional studies and (post)development bring to the thinking about community economies in CEE? And more generally, how does the vantage point of CEE advance the theorization of economic difference?

Speakers and their contributions:

• Lilian Pungas (Institute for Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany): Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) as an example of diverse economies and why it still remains a ‘blind spot’?
• Markus Sattler (Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany): Geographies of innovation in Georgian/Armenian enterprises
• Nadia Johanisova (Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic): Czech alternative-capitalist, non-capitalist and non-market enterprises

This closed special session will allow ample time for questions and inputs from the audience.

Session organisers:

• Nadia Johanisova, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
• Markus Sattler, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Germany
• Lucie Sovová, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Session Community Economies II draws on the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham and their insights regarding the existence of alternative capitalist, non-capitalist and non-market economic practices, which are hard to discern from more mainstream economic perspectives and thus often remain hidden, or „under the water-line“ in the well-known Gibson-Graham iceberg metaphor. This landscape of „economic alternatives“ or „community economies“ is alive and even thriving  in CEE and involves a wide spectrum of economic practices. These range from family subsistence activities to initiatives and enterprises which, though functioning in a market environment, are quite different from the mainstream firm. Where are these „economic alternatives“ or „community economies“ coming from? How do they differ within and across various CEE countries? How do they see themselves and how are they seen from various perspectives in post-socialist discourse and scholarship? What can cross-pollination with fields such as regional studies and (post)development bring to the thinking about community economies in CEE? And more generally, how does the vantage point of CEE advance the theorization of economic difference?

Speakers and their contributions:

• Thomas Smith (Department of Geography, LMU-Ludwig-Maxmilians-Universität, Munich, Germany): Lithium and Localism after the European Green Deal: Composing community economy alternatives in CEE
• Peter North (Department of Geography and Planning, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom): Lingering discourses of the Polish People’s Republic in contemporary Poland – their impacts on conceptualisations of postcapitalist possibilities.
• Ottavia Cima (Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Switzerland) and Lucie Sovová (Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands): Diverse economies and the East: towards a postcapitalist postsocialism.

This closed special session will allow ample time for questions and inputs from the audience.

Session organisers:

• Maria Gunko, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
• Friederike Pank, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Development under late capitalism produces more uneven geographies than ever (Harvey 2006; Andersson and Saxer 2019). Across the globe, capitalist devaluation of places and state withdrawal manifest themselves in the dismantling of infrastructures, the disintegration of social security and welfare provision, and labour market precarisation (e.g. Dzenovska 2020). Grand narratives – of modernity, progress, development – are increasingly losing traction. Future trajectories become ever more uncertain, fragmented, or even ‘evacuated’ (Guyer 2008). Accordingly, scholars turn towards the study of individual forms of world-making (e.g. Biehl 2013), more-than-human agency (e.g. Tsing 2015), or the material environment (e.g. Collier 2011) to make sense of contemporary transformations under conditions of perpetual and overlapping crises (e.g. Ramsay 2020). Against this backdrop, the trope of the energy transition towards renewable energy generation, advocated by the Just Transition framework and national governments across the Global North, seems to promise a new way forward based on technological innovation and environmental recovery. However, the transformation of energy provision infrastructure requires radical forms of spatial reorganisation. For places that secured energy provision of the previous order (i.e. nuclear, oil, and coal-based energy generation), this reorganisation means first and foremost the upheaval of local forms of economic, social and political organisation. Once central spatial coordinates for sustaining national economy, infrastructure, and populations, these places become rapidly disconnected and devalued under the new energy paradigm. In addition, they are peripheralized and reframed as places of danger, not only in terms of industrial waste that haunts the present but also in terms of social unrest, as the support of far-right ideologies and criminalisation rates increase. The intricacies of global interdependencies, the overlapping of crises, the fast pace of change, and the oscillation between the articulation of future trajectories and their disruption complicate planning and prevent stable and coherent local orders from taking form. This special session invites papers that discuss how global forces – such as post-Cold War geopolitical reordering, climate change, post-Fordist and post-socialist deindustrialisation, economic crises, Covid-19 pandemic, new and ongoing wars – disrupt the fabric of the local, especially focusing on but not limited to sites of energy production. We seek papers from different academic disciplines and geographical contexts in a strife for developing a nuanced understanding of contemporary world-making in relation to changing energy paradigms. By facilitating an interdisciplinary and cross-regional conversation about the global through various local articulations, our aim is to bridge conceptual divides between Global South and Global North, ‘East’ and ‘West’, as well as to think across disciplinary boundaries and epistemologies.

References

Andersson, R. and Saxer, M. (2019). ‘The return of remoteness: insecurity, isolation and connectivity in the new world   disorder.’ Social Anthropology 27.2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12652.

Biehl, J. (2013). Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California  Press. Collier, S. (2011). Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400840427.

Dzenovska, D. (2020). ‘Emptiness: Capitalism without people in the Latvian countryside.’ American Ethnologist 47.1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12867.

Guyer, J. (2008). ‘Prophecy and the near future: Thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time.’ American Ethnologist 34.3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409

Harvey, D. (2006). Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. New York: Verso Books.

Ramsay, G. (2020). Time and the other in crisis: How anthropology makes its displaced object. Anthropological Theory 20.4, 385-413.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Session organisers:

• Jana Moser, Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde – IfL, Germany
• Philipp Meyer, Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde – IfL, Germany
• Sofia Gavrilova, Leibniz-Institut für Länderkunde – IfL, Germany

The Soviet state has imposed various and traditions in the system of the geographical education, which have been dictating the way the USSR itself and the rest of the world should have been seen. This system of the geographical education, which have been implemented quite widely in the socialist countries, has produced a lot of spaces and places, practices, and spatial imaginations, which started to be contested after the dissolution of the USSR. The proposed open session therefore aims to capture both those practices, media and places created by the Soviet system of geographical education, but also to focus on the ways in which post-socialist countries have been transforming and challenging the Soviet heritage.

Session organisers:

• Markus Grillitsch, Lund University, Sweden
• Linda Stihl, Lund University, Sweden
• ACORE project

The broad range of deep and existential recent crises are threatening the health of the planet and the health of human kind. In parallel, there are more delimited, but not necessarily less pressing, regional and local crises. It is clear that we live in a changing world and have to tackle various ecological, economic and political challenges. With limitations to the effect of international and national responses, it is necessary to understand the implications for regional development and in particular how and to what consequences local actors can engage in change processes. This special session thus aims to contribute to the burgeoning literature on human agency in regional development (Grillitsch and Sotarauta, 2020). What actors do when facing a crisis, when building resilience in order to avoid dependencies or challenging the set path have effects on regional outcomes. Yet, regions vary in forms, conditions, locations and opportunities. Hence, the scope for agency and the effects of actions will also differ across regions (Rekers and Stihl, 2021). The particular focus of this special session is thus to understand which contextual factors at the local, regional, national, and global scale mediate the emergence of certain patterns of human agency, and the mediate their intended and unintended outcomes both regionally and beyond. This session thus aims to stimulate a discussion about the emergence, role and outcomes of agency in processes of regional development, including questions about:

• To what extent, why and how regional context conditions shape the emergence, form, and outcomes of local agency?
• What is it about national institutional arrangements that effects local agency in regional development processes?
• In what ways, do industrial structures or industrial particularities influence the emergence, form, and outcomes of local agency in regional development processes?
• How do local actors respond to the grander challenges of a changing world?
• How can we observe and measure local agency and link it to regional development outcomes in different regional contexts?
• Under what conditions and how can changes in regional development be initiated by local actors in different contexts?
• Under what conditions, why and how does local agency induce change at the national or international scale?

GRILLITSCH, M. & SOTARAUTA, M. 2020. Trinity of change agency, regional development paths and opportunity spaces. Progress in Human Geography, 44, 704-723.

REKERS, J. V. & STIHL, L. 2021. One crisis, one region, two municipalities: The geography of institutions and change agency in regional development paths. Geoforum, 124, 89-98.

Session organiser:

• Benjamin Klement, Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economy IMW, Leipzig, Germany

A vast literature has developed in regional studies and (evolutionary) economic geography that has been developing theories, concepts, recommendations and instruments for the design of policies for promoting regional transformation. These are mainly concerned with questions of regional diversification, regional structural change, the transformation of innovation systems or types of regional path development  (Asheim et al. 2013). With the challenging task of managing energy transitions, the most urgent area of application of these theories and methods has recently emerged in the political support of carbon-intensive and coal regions to transform their economies substantially. Yet there is a mismatch of the context in which these theories and instruments have been developed and the contexts in which they will be applied. While most empirical and theoretical work has been coming from Western and Northern Europe, a considerable number of carbon-intensive and coal regions lies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) (Initiative for coal regions in transition 2020). This mismatch may imply a limited applicability of the above-mentioned concepts and needs to be explored. Considering the deep transition and transformation processes in CEE since the 1990s, coal regions in CEE may exhibit many specific challenges and opportunities.  Hence this special session calls for research on the design of policies for the regional transformation of coal regions in CEE and how they can be and are informed by current concepts and methods of regional studies and economic geography. The session aims at bringing together scholars working on political measures supporting regions phasing out of coal in different countries so that a fruitful discussion on common and distinct challenges in the context of CEE can develop. Together we shall explore what specific sociodemographic, economic and institutional characteristics of the CEE context influence the design of policies aimed at promoting structural change in coal regions.

Session organisers:

• Nadir Kinossian, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany
• Ani Saunders, Cardiff University, UK
• Linda Stihl, Lund University, Sweden

There is a growing interest in explaining the role of human agency in local and regional development and formation of new regional development paths. While economic geography has traditionally focused on structural factors and constraints, there is a gap in our understanding of the role of agency in identifying, triggering, negotiating, and narrating new development paths, specifically in places burdened by strong industrial specialisation, relatively small population size, and location outside metropolitan areas. We conceptualise agency as diverse in terms of the form, purpose, and capacity to act (Grillitsch and Sotarauta 2020). To explain the capacity of local actors to shape regional development we need to analyse their own capabilities, as well as the legitimacy and mandates they gain within country specific institutional architectures (Nagy et al. 2021). Thus, such an agency perspective is highly sensitive to the relationship of centrality – peripherality and uneven power, the processes of centralisation – devolution, spatial reorganisation of production, and production of development visions and spatial narratives.  This closed special session is dedicated to the findings of ‘Agents of Change in Old Industrial Regions of Europe’ project. Five teams of researchers have focused on the agency of change in old-industrial and non-metropolitan regions located in the countries of both Western (Germany, Sweden, the UK) and Central Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary). The findings show how local agency emerges, functions, and facilitates the creation of new development paths under conditions of relative geographical peripherality and strong legacies of industrial specialisation.

Presenters:

1. Franziska Görmar, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany
2. Linda Stihl, Lund University, Sweden
3. Ani Saunders, School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University
4. Jan Píša Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czechia
5. Melinda Mihály, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary

Session organisers:

• Erika Nagy, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Hungary
• Kevin Morgan, Cardiff University, UK
• Ani Saunders, Cardiff University, UK

A series of crises – like the financial and economic meltdown, the migration crisis, the pandemics and the war in Ukraine – has undermined stability in Europe, triggering new constellations of power and processes that repositions places, regions and agents in the political map of the world. Such events challenge existing institutional systems and create possibilities for alternative narratives of development – such as social and spatial justice, well-being, ecologically sustainable production and consumption, solidarity and self-organisation, all of which entail new conceptions of agency (Soja, 2010; Pike et al, 2017; Hadjmichalis, 2018; Görmar et al, 2019).  This session aims to stimulate a discussion over changes in institutional arrangements, practices and narratives underpinning place-based development policies in relation to powerful shocks to explore how such institutional shifts impact upon, and were shaped by, the actions of local agents in various spatial contexts during the last decade. In particular we seek to understand:  How powerful structural changes were ‘localized‘ in policy narratives and practices, and how local resources and processes were placed in changing global, national institutional context; How such processes were driven by the entry of new agents and/or the changing position of local actors in the multilevel polity; How such agentic changes produced new dependencies and inequalities within Europe and beyond, raising new questions about scales and networks for place-based politics;  How subsequent shocking events enforcing institutional reactions supported/downplayed actions, agencies and processes that rested on alternative visions of regional and local development;   How the interests of marginalized groups and domains (the poor, the immigrants, the natural environment for example) could be embraced in local development, and whether the decentralization of institutional systems and the empowerment of communities could entail more just and sustainable development trajectories.

Görmar, Franziska, Lang, Thilo, Nagy, Erika, Ragmaa, Garri. 2019. Re-thinking Regional and Local Policies in Times of Polarisation: An Introduction. In Lang, Görmar. (eds): Regional and Local Policies in Times of Polarisation. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Hadjimichalis, Costis. 2018. Crisis spaces. Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London: Routledge

Pike, Andy, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, and John Tomaney. 2017. Shifting horizons in local and regional development. Regional Studies 51 (1): 46–57

Soja, Edward. 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Session organisers:

• Vladan Hruška, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic
• Melinda Mihály, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Békéscsaba, Hungary
• Jan Píša, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic
• ACORE project

In recent years, regional studies have witnessed a shift of attention from formal and bureaucratic actors to individuals and their collectives. Similar approaches penetrate studies focusing on activities of actors engaged in diverse environmental issues. As collective action, the role of civil society and social movements is increasingly emphasized in regional development and sustainability discourses. Although most of individuals act within the path-dependency frame and reproduce existing practices leading to the maintaining of old and unsustainable development paths, some of them might have a transformative role resulting in creation of new and more sustainable futures. However, sufficient capacity to act of an individual and a collective is a basic precondition for having the transformative role. Agency on an individual level consists of specific constellations of accumulated social, cultural and economic capital and maybe even the emotional capital which might trigger the change agency in a given place e.g. because of the place attachment or anger with a current situation in the place and society. Agency on a collective level (social movements, civil society initiatives) depends on resource-mobilization strategies (including social base), the political opportunity structure and cultural framing of a social issue. Resulting agency is then implemented in a specific structural and institutional setting which might have accelerating or hindering effects for the change in the development path. In this special session we would like to welcome papers focusing on the role of individuals, civil society initiatives and social movements in constructing new and more sustainable futures of places and regions. Especially we would like to focus on the issue how their capacity to act is constructed and transformed into the activities changing the situation in the given place or community formed by a multi-scalar institutional setting. We also welcome papers focusing on the role of emotions mobilising these actors to act in local communities, as we find this topic underdeveloped, but highly relevant.

Session organisers:

• Erika Nagy, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Békéscsaba, Hungary
• Melinda Mihály, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Békéscsaba, Hungary

This session aims to better understand the methodological challenges when conducting fieldwork with a comparative approach. Our positionality including our epistemology and ontology and the intersectionality of our class, gender, ethnicity, place of residence etc. influence how we conduct research. Within this roundtable discussion we will discuss inequalities of power in knowledge production and the role and opportunities of researchers in questioning existing power hierarchies. Our roundtable discussants are junior researchers of the ACORE ( Agents of Change in Old-industrial Regions in Europe) project with different class, gender and ethnicity both from Eastern and Western Europe. Intersectionalities need to be reflected in conducting fieldwork with a comparative approach. In addition to case and interview-partner selection for an (inter)national comparison and strategies for co-writing the research results, researchers of the ACORE project needed to redesign their research strategies after the breakout of COVID-19. Lessons learnt from conducting fieldwork with a comparative approach in a diverse, international research team will be shared in this roundtable discussion.

Roundtable participants:

• Franziska Görmar, junior researcher, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Germany)
• Melinda Mihály, PhD, research fellow at Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Békéscsaba (Hungary)
• Jan Píša,  PhD student, in The Faculty of Social and Economic Studies of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem (Czech Republic)
• Ani Saunders, PhD student, School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University (UK)
• Linda Stihl, PhD student, Lund University (Sweden)

Session organisers:

• Sunna Kovanen, Brandenburg Technical University of Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany
• Melinda Mihály, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Békéscsaba, Hungary

The post-socialist transformation of Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies implied their (re)integration into global capitalism as “dependent market economies” that are dominated by foreign direct investment and have only a limited degree of economic sovereignty. This development was accompanied by internal polarisation and peripheralization, which were amplified by the steady erosion of the European social model linked to the financial crisis in 2008. Europe had entered the age of austerity, and the pain generated by these adjustments and the subsequent political upheaval imposed significant legitimacy challenges to the political elite and its crisis management strategy in Eastern and Western Europe alike. The rise of the radical right is connected to this political discontent of the inhabitants of peripheralized areas, and to sociocultural and material deprivation in internal peripheries characterised by economic stagnation and selective outmigration. In this session we look for contributions on alternative, bottom-up mobilising and it´s potential of channeling this discontent described above towards globally aligned local struggles for a socially and environmentally just transition. Thus, we call for research- and practice-based contributions related to the organising, upscaling and political struggle of social and solidarity economy initiatives in rural and regional development. We aim at diversifying the discourse on rural engagement in CEE, typically framed as “anti-modernist” and “non-innovative”. Such narratives neglect the political abandonment of the inhabitants of peripheries and the silent sustainability practices, such as food self-provisioning still characteristic in both rural and urban areas in CEE. Western theories of civil society are unable to grasp the richness of community self-organising connected to livelihood in CEE, thus often portraying the civil society in CEE as “weak”. In the former Eastern Germany, instead, a new narrative focusing on rural social innovation via “spatial pioneers” has succeeded in turning the “anti-modern” image of rural areas into a positive and agile space of transformation. While bearing possibilities of popularising sustainable local transition, the focus on young and educated initiators from urban areas might further marginalise the silent and everyday engagement of the existing civil society and drive forth a new kind of rural gentrification.  This session aims at enlightening these often tense and complex relations of the social and solidarity economy with its broader institutional and social contexts in rural areas. The question can be approached at least from threefold perspectives: a) Success of social movements in relation to their resource-mobilisation strategies (including financial resources, the networks they are embedded in and their social base), the political opportunity structure they are embedded in and the cultural framing of their message to multiple, simultaneously local and multiscalar audiences.  b) Encounters between the globally connected civic environmental movements with the local residents, and in particular with the locally embedded, silent sustainability practices. Addressing joint practices, aims or campaigns but also tensions related to e.g. ethno-nationalist ideologies underlying the tradition of environmental protection.  c) Opportunities and challenges to social and solidarity economy initiatives  to prioritise global ecological concerns and their local manifestations and respect for non-human beings in all areas of economic organising. We invite papers focusing on social and solidarity economy initiatives and their potential to mobilize the politically abandoned inhabitants of (rural) peripheries in CEE and beyond.

Session organisers:

• Kristine Beurskens, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany
• Bettina Bruns, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany

Questions of security have always been a major part and focus of political and public debates as well as individual thinking and emotions. During the last decades, insecurities rose on many spatial scales during various crises and events. When planning this session, the global COVID-19 pandemic is overshadowed by the fights in Ukraine, putting concerns for security on the top agenda of politics, while causing widespread fear and concerns among European societies. As this development shows yet again, matters of security are intrinsically tied to space.

Spatial sciences have taken on matters of security in different ways. A part of studies particularly within planning or architecture has focused on the material aspects as well as perceptions of secure spaces or spaces of fear. Critical and feminist geopolitics approaches on the other hand have taken on the entanglements of security politics between state governance and its societal enactments, hence, drawing on emotional perceptions of geopolitics at an individual level. Related to that, political and social geographies have broadened their interest from spatial and social aspects of processes of securitization to more subject-focused, emotionally grounded concepts of geographies of (in)securities and fear.

We see a particular need for further field research and analysis of the entanglements of spatial relations with narratives and emotions of insecurity on one side, and politics and practices of security on the other side. Above all, this is relevant with regard to the observable rise of reactionist and right-wing politics, civil militias and (para)military groups gaining popularity in Central and Eastern Europe.

With this session, we therefore want to stimulate the exchange on experiences and analyses across central and Eastern Europe by tackling the following questions:

In what way do security and insecurity get related to spatial aspects in discourses and political action? How are spatialities of security argued politically, and how are they experienced emotionally in different societal contexts? Calling for experiences and studies in central and Eastern Europe, we strive to discuss the relations of spatial aspects with security or insecurity on different (intertwined) scales.

Session organisers:

• Vera Smirnova, Kansas State University, US
• Guenola Inizan, University of Lyon, France
• Daria Volkova, Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany

In recent years, universalist discourses around property rights have been called into question. The idea of property as legitimate individual ownership of land and landed resources with clear boundaries and a secured bundle of rights fail to explain complex spatialities and forms of ownership beyond Western and Eurocentric experiences.

Familiar forms of property, and, along this line, “non-property,” laid out certain norms of “legibility and structuring” (Heynen, 2021). From this perspective, property relations often imply individual ownership and the use of space (Blomley, 2015), the right to exclude or not be excluded relies on the existence of firm legal boundaries (Peluso and Lund, 2011), while the security of ownership rights is assumed and not challenged. Hence several discussions from the post-socialist worlds – on the informality of collectivist ownership systems, smallholder land enclosure, slow violence, or racial dispossession of property regimes, have emerged as an antipode to formal ownership, often highlighting the coloniality of Anglo-Saxon property debates and their omnipresent universality at the expense of other experiences (Jehlicˇka, 2021; Inizan and Volkova, forthcoming; Kušić, 2020; Smirnova, 2019; Vorbrugg, 2019).

This session brings together a set of contributions that build on this exact provocation. The goal of the session is to transcend the familiar theorizations of property regimes by bringing into a conversation various experiences of land ownership from across the CEE countries. The latter do not only present a fruitful ground for exploration, but share (in part due to the embedded coloniality of the socialist period) long legacies of collectivist land ownership, informality, and fluid spatiality of property boundaries, built directly in opposition to the Western discourse on individual land ownership. The various socialist-era property regimes across the CEE countries are not merely “contrary” to private property, but constitute a separate phenomenon, emerged at the intersections between state-led practices of regulation, indigenous norms of ownership, and experiences of its racial dispossession. Although connections between the trajectories of spatial planning across these contexts have been drawn (e.g.: Hirt et al., 2016), the question of land ownership is left understudied (Canfield et al., 2020), as the internal complexity of these contexts is often overgeneralized, collecting them under the seemingly homogeneous “post-socialist” or Eastern European umbrella.

This session explores and addresses this issue through both, case study-based investigations and theoretical inquiries across and beyond the following topics:

• Legal geographies of property;
• Land surveying practices and bureaucracies;
• Spatial dimensions of property regimes;
• Indigenous property rights, dispossession, and coloniality;
• Large scale land grabbing;
• Piecemeal enclosure and slow violence;
• Power relations between individuals, institutions, and the state;

References:
Blomley, N. (2016). The territory of property. Progress in Human Geography, 40(5), 593-609.
Canfield, M. C., Foblets, M. C., Goodale, M., Sapignoli, M., & Zenker, O. (2020). Property Regimes. The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology.
Heynen, N. (2021). “A plantation can be a commons”: Re‐Earthing Sapelo Island through Abolition Ecology: The 2018 Neil Smith Lecture. Antipode, 53(1), 95-114.
Hirt, S., Ferenčuhová, S., & Tuvikene, T. 2016. “Conceptual forum: The “post-socialist” city.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57 (4-5): 497–520.
Inizan, G. & Volkova, D. (forthcoming). Land plots in soviet housing estates as interstices: juridic appropriation as a contesting strategy.
Jehlička, P. 2021. Eastern Europe and the geography of knowledge production: The case of the invisible gardener. Progress in Human Geography 45(5):1218–1236.
Kušić, K. 2020. Studying human-soil relations in Southeast Europe. Paper presented at Conjunctural Geographies of Postsocialist and Postcolonial Conditions: Theory Thirty Years after 1989, Leipzig, Germany, May 14–16.
Peluso, N. L., & Lund, C. (2011). New frontiers of land control: Introduction. Journal of peasant studies, 38(4), 667-681.
Smirnova, V., 2019. Territory, enclosure, and state territorial mode of production in the Russian imperial periphery. Geographica Helvetica, 74(1), pp. 13-25.
Vorbrugg, A. 2019. Not about land, not quite a grab: Dispersed dispossession in rural Russia. Antipode 51(3):1011–1031.

Session organisers:

• Wladimir Sgibnev, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany
• Tonio Weicker, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany
• Lyubomir Pozharliev, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany

The session explores how CEE infrastructures affect, determine or co-produce human-non-human interactions and how those interactions are intertwined in the course of infrastructures’ conception, production, perception or operation. Non-human actants play a crucial, though underestimated role in making social sense of infrastructures. Looking into multiple processes of planning, policy-decision making as well as public contestation, we observe non-human actors as crucial vehicles shaping common perceptions of material environments.

Thus, we would like to assess how material artefacts move along infrastructures, and how the non-human entities construct experiences and perceptions. This includes the material ‘hardware’, such as roadways and vehicles, but also trajectories and flows, smells and sights, as well as other non-human actants such as animals, viruses, and smartphones. Contributions might include but are not limited to the mobility of material artefacts, contestations, networks, business models, or the connected modernisation paradigms and underlying normativities.

Session organisers:

• Annegret Haase, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) Germany
• Katja Castryck-Naumann, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, (GWZO), Germany
• Lela Rekhviashvili, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL), Germany

Research on CEE and other regions has a decade’s long tradition in Leipzig’s academic institutions. It is currently anchored at several non-university research institutes, at Leipzig University and in the Leibniz Science Campus “Eastern Europe – Global Area”. Contemporary and historical processes in the societies and politics of CEE are studied from a broad spectrum of disciplines – geography, history and cultural studies, political science, sociology, economy as well as environmental sciences. The interdisciplinary work is built upon a close inter-institutional collaboration, which is embedded in a large network of partners in CEE, and other parts of the world. This special session introduces these interconnected institutional settings, and the existing as well as emerging lines of CEE-focused research agendas pursued in Leipzig. We discuss how the ongoing multi-disciplinary and collaborative knowledge production could contribute towards understanding and elaborating responses to various kinds of crises in CEE, including the recent war in Ukraine ushering unprecedented wave of displacement, geopolitical shifts and uncertainties.

The session will primarily highlight the following lines of research:  regionalization and transregionalization in the context of international organizations and conflicts socialist mobilities of activists and experts from Eastern Europe and the Global South;  urbanisation dynamics in cities and urban regions: postsocialist urban shrinkage, post-shrinkage regrowth and reurbanization, green governance and environmental justice;  multiple geographies of local and regional development, migration and mobility;  transformation of regional innovation systems.

We plan it as a podium session where a podium (4 persons and a moderator) with representatives of Leipzig-based research institutions and a moderation from one of our partner institutions. In a first part, we think of a moderated podium that might start with an initial short statement by podium participants; in a second part, the discussion should be opened up for questions and feedback to the entire audience.

Moderator:
Lela Rekhviashvili, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL)

Panel speakers:

• Annegret Haase, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)
• Katja Castryck-Naumann, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, (GWZO)
• Wladimir Sgibnev, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL)
• Lela Rekhviashvili, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL)
• Steffi Marung, Leipzig University (UL)
• Benjamin Klement,  Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economics (IMW)

Session organisers:

• Kristine Beurskens, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany
• Špela Drnovšek Zorko, Waseda University, Japan/University of Warwick, UK
• Vera Smirnova, Kansas State University, USA
• Monika Bobako, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

With the ever-present shifting of political and societal currents, accompanied by debates about Europe’s boundaries, divisions, and spaces of solidarity, the need for exchange of knowledge and strong collaboration between researchers is growing ever more urgent. But what are the current conditions of our collaboration?

While this conference arguably represents an example of successful cooperation between ‘East’ and ‘West’, many of our daily experiences of researching and collaborating in different parts of Europe reveal a more differentiated picture. Not only languages, but often also very separate publication arenas hamper awareness of each other’s work and opportunities for joint research. In the face of very different national evaluation logics and institutional publication strategies, citation and resource gaps, inequalities regarding funding, knowledge production, and theoretical cross-conceptualization, and last but not least, political pressures, researchers can often be limited in sharing their work across national and linguistic boundaries, reinforcing the continuation of rather parallel research communities. While some of the factors are material in nature, there is also a need to account for the symbolic dimension, which is grounded in the uneven, historically conditioned relationship between East and West.

Our aim in this session is therefore to address the obstacles to academic exchange between researchers based in Central-East and Western Europe, in order to identify whether a division exists, if so, what are its causes, and how we can begin to tackle it. In short, we think it’s time to discuss these experiences together: how can we know more about each other, work more closely together?

For this round-table discussion, we encourage expressions of interest from participants who would like to offer insights into their experiences of collaboration in the form of short individual interventions followed by an open discussion. Rather than traditional paper presentations, we would like to foreground an exchange of views and opportunities to make new connections as we seek out ways of strengthening cooperation. In light of the present situation, the session will also include a round of exchanges on the current conditions of collaboration in consequence of the war in Ukraine, which has given rise to new barriers as well as opportunities for solidarity.

Instead of an abstract, please submit a short paragraph (1-2 sentences) outlining how you would like to approach the discussion.