Call for papers – ‘She is Made of Stone’: Women in the Socialist and Post-Socialist Public Spaces (April 2 and 3, 2020, European University Institute, Florence)
The goal of this conference is to open up a multidisciplinary conversation about representation, memory and monumentalization of women within the socialist and post-socialist public spaces. While gendered approach to socialism has already been given some attention from scholars, the topic of this conference, arising from the recently structured research field of socialist heritage, is yet to be thoroughly disseminated in the academia.
The stone-carved and sculpted portrayals still persist today in post-socialist (as well as still-socialist) spaces: the sculpture groups portraying the worker-warrior women, the colossal sculptures of female figure allegories of people’s struggles, the busts of individual female revolutionaries, and memorial plaques carrying the names of resistance fighters and emancipators. However, unlike ‘eternally lasting’ stone, used as material for many of these monuments, the discourses around them, their political and social impact, and their state of conservation are more susceptible to change. They are subject to new readings, reinterpretations, erasure, as well as acts of historical revisionism and material iconoclasm.
The conference calls for a common reflection among scholars from across disciplines and backgrounds including history, art history, archeology, heritage studies, urban studies, sociology, political sciences, anthropology, environmental history, etc.