Abel Polese
Development and governance in theory (mostly USSR) and practice (Southeast Asia, USSR and Latin America)
Address: Narva mnt 29, 10120 Tallinn, Estonia
Address: Narva mnt 29, 10120 Tallinn, Estonia
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Everywhere, people are brought together by similar burdens and frustration and creatively think about how to counter the forms of domination they are ascribed to. In academia as well there is an awakening among scholars to further investigate these multiple forms of resistance and equip the field with useful and empowering knowledge.
This book aims at presenting some of these findings and reflecting upon the implications, social relevance, and ethical challenges of the growing field of Resistance Studies.
"From France’s gilets jaunes to the native pipeline blockades in North Dakota - numerous societies confronted with the impact and the decline of a certain political and economic order, see forms of protest and resistance that cannot be embedded in nor really connected to ‘classical’ political actors and civil society. This is why a comparative work on resistances like this one is timely."
— Bruno De Cordier, Associate Professor, Conflict Research Group, Ghent University, Belgium
"This work is an excellent contribution to our understanding of the complex issue of resistance in its different forms and shapes. It is a brilliant introduction to the new trends in resistances studies based on fruitful empirical research. Each chapter integrates a case study which highlights an ongoing debate commented by scholar-activists engaged in the movements they study."
— Firouzeh Nahavandi, Professor, Free University of Brussels
"Resistances is a rich illustration of the interdisciplinary range, empirical scope and theoretical depths of contemporary resistance studies. It articulates a new wave by scholar-activists combining theoretical analysis with activist concerns. It brings the field forward by critically discussing earlier work and suggesting new approaches. Importantly, it argues for our engagement with the "resistance-violence nexus" and domination within the academia."
— Stellan Vinthagen, Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Based on the author’s experience and stories collected from five continents, The SCOPUS Diaries is intended to change the way readers understand academia and live their academic careers.
Now that academics are required to be teachers, managers, media catalyzers, analysts, fundraisers, and social media animals: How do you strike a good balance between what is expected from you and what you want to do? What conferences to attend? How to find the money to go there? Is it worth it to act as a peer reviewer? What publishers are best to target? Is publishing a chapter in an edited book worth the work? This book is intended to help scholars to design and think strategically about their own career. Beginning with “How to get published in good journals,” it explores a number of questions that most academics encounter at various stages of their careers.
Why Read Informality in a Substantivist Manner? On the Embeddedness of the Soviet Second Economy
Informal Economy: The Invisible Hand of Government
Estimating the Size of the Croatian Shadow Economy: A Labour Approach
Informal Employment and Earnings Determination in Ukraine
Approaching Informality: Rear-Mirror Methodology and Ethnographic Inquiry
Explaining the Informal Economy in Post-Communist Societies: A Study of the Asymmetry Between Formal and Informal Institutions in Romania
Post-Socialist Informality Rural Style: Impressions from Bulgaria
Exploring the Practice of Making Informal Payments in the Health Sector: Some Lessons from Greece
Violent Pressure on Business and the Size of the Informal Economy: Evidence from Russian Regions
Labor Informality in Mexico: An Indicator Analysis
The Interplay Between Formal and Informal Firms and Its Implications on Jobs in Francophone Africa: Case Studies of Senegal and Benin
Governing Informal Payments by Market in the Chinese Healthcare System
Social Mechanisms of the Counterpublic Sphere: A Case of a Coffee Farmers’ Cooperative in LAO PDR
Formalisation of Entrepreneurship in the Informal Economy in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Role of Formal Institutions: An Analysis of Ghana’s Experience
Evidence on Corruption in Public Procurements in Healthcare and the Implications for Policy
In contrast to approaches which tend to classify informality as ‘bad’ or ‘transitional’ – meaning that modernity will make it disappear – this edited volume concentrates on dynamics and mechanisms to understand and explain informality, while also debating its relationship with the market and society.
The authors seek to explain informality beyond a mere monetaristic/economistic approach, rediscovering its interconnection with social phenomena to propose a more holistic interpretation of the meaning of informality and its influence in various spheres of life.
They do this by exploring the evolving role of informal practices in the post-socialist region, and by focusing on informality as a social organisation determinant but also looking at the way it reshapes emergent social resistance against symbolic and real political order(s).
This book was originally published as two special issues, of Caucasus Survey and the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.
Nation-building as a process is never complete and issues related to identity, nation, state and regime-building are recurrent in the post-Soviet region. This comparative, inter-disciplinary volume explores how nation-building tools emerged and evolved over the last twenty years. Featuring in-depth case studies from countries throughout the post-Soviet space it compares various aspects of nation-building and identity formation projects. Approaching the issue from a variety of disciplines, and geographical areas, contributors illustrate chapter by chapter how different state and non-state actors utilise traditional instruments of nation-construction in new ways while also developing non-traditional tools and strategies to provide a contemporary account of how nation-formation efforts evolve and diverge.
It covers the former Soviet republics comprehensively, including republics such as Russia where colour revolutions did not occur, despite apparently favourable conditions, and considers why some post-Soviet countries underwent a colour revolution and others not. Identifying the conditions for successful colour revolutions, it asks whether there is a revolutionary blueprint that has been exported and continues to be transferred to areas of the world under autocratic rule.
The book examines the ideologies of the post-Soviet ruling regimes, showing how political elites integrated nationalism, populism and authoritarianism into political debates; analyzes anti-regime opposition movements, discussing the
factors which led to the rise of such movements and outlining how the opposition movements were constituted and how they operated; and assesses the impact of external forces including the US, the EU and Russia. It evaluates the colour revolution phenomenon in its entirety, pointing out common features between different countries.
"
Engaging comprehensively with the former Soviet republics, the contributors to this book ask why there wasn’t a revolution in a post-Soviet republic such as Russia, despite apparently favourable conditions. They also explore the circumstances that ensured some post-soviet countries underwent a successful colour revolution whilst others did not. Identifying the conditions for successful colour revolutions, this book asks whether there is a revolutionary blueprint that may be exported to other areas around the world that are under autocratic rule. Carefully considering the ideologies of the post-Soviet ruling regimes, this book demonstrates the manner by which political elites integrated nationalism, authoritarianism and populism into public debates. It analyzes the diverse anti-regime movements, discussing the factors that led to the rise of such factions and outlining how these opposition groups were constituted and operated. In addition, it assesses the impact of external forces including the influence of the USA, the EU and Russia. By examining the colour revolution phenomenon in its entirety, this book marks a significant contribution to both our micro and macro understanding of this tide of transformation.
Mit Beiträgen von: Uwe Backes (Dresden),
Josette Baer (Zürich), Stanislav Balík (Brno), Timm
Beichelt (Frankfurt/Oder), Joakim Ekman (Örebro),
Sergiu Gergina (Leiden), Jan Holzer (Brno), Tytus
Jaskulowski (Berlin), Jonas Linde (Örebro), Miroslaw
Mares (Brno), Wolfgang Merkel (Berlin), Donnacha
O’Beachain (Almaty), Abel Polese (Edinburgh), Gert
Pickel (Frankfurt/Oder), Pavel Pseja (Brno), Johnny
Rodin (Haninge), Dieter Segert (Wien), Paulina
Sekula (Krakau), Svend-Erik Skaaning (Aarhus) und
Stefan Troebst (Leipzig).
Engaging comprehensively with the former Soviet republics, the contributors to this book ask why there wasn’t a revolution in a post-Soviet republic such as Russia, despite apparently favourable conditions. They also explore the circumstances that ensured some post-soviet countries underwent a successful colour revolution whilst others did not. Identifying the conditions for successful colour revolutions, this book asks whether there is a revolutionary blueprint that may be exported to other areas around the world that are under autocratic rule. Carefully considering the ideologies of the post-Soviet ruling regimes, this book demonstrates the manner by which political elites integrated nationalism, authoritarianism and populism into public debates. It analyzes the diverse anti-regime movements, discussing the factors that led to the rise of such factions and outlining how these opposition groups were constituted and operated. In addition, it assesses the impact of external forces including the influence of the USA, the EU and Russia. By examining the colour revolution phenomenon in its entirety, this book marks a significant contribution to both our micro and macro understanding of this tide of transformation.
Cfa: PhD scholarship: Informality and innovation: building post-pandemic resilient communities in Morocco (based at: University of Latvia, EPRC Georgia and UCD Morocco)
This is part of an industrial doctorate project whose description is below. Also documents to apply are listed below in this call.
Your job in a nutshell:
1) you will be enrolled in a PhD programme under guidance of Prof Ilona Baumane-Vitolina and Dr Abel Polese, Dr Irina Guruli and Prof Kamal Labassi
2) you will be employed full time with a competitive salary calculated according to Marie Curie standards (a short description can be found here https://fastepo.com/phd-and-postdocs-salary/salary-of-phd-student-in-marie-sklodowska-curie-itn/)
3) your employment will be shared between a standard university research contract and a contract as an analyst at EPRC with data collection in Morocco
4) you will be part of a large network with 29 partners from Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America. The network will meet twice a year in different locations and you will have a chance to benefit from expertise of other professionals. A list of partners and participants can be found here
https://www.presilient-dn.eu/
5) you will be expected to conduct a research on informality in Morocco while contributing to practical tasks and develop a career plan, in consultation with your supervisors, leading you to be competitive on the job market (with both research and professional experience) as soon as you defend your PhD
We will be assessing applications on a rolling basis with last day to apply the 1 of December 2023. Starting date is 1 January 2024 or as soon as possible at a later agreed date.
Applications should be emailed to presilient.dn@gmail.com cc-ed to Prof Ilona Baumane-Vītoliņa: ilona.baumane@lu.lv and abel.polese@dcu.ie
An application package must include:
1) a curriculum vitae (including explicit details of country / countries of residence for the past 3 years, this is needed for eligibility purposes);
2) an application letter no longer than 500 words;
3) a short (500-1000 words) summary of your doctoral project.
4) The grades achieved in your Master’s degree (certificates will be requested if you are shortlisted)
5) Name and contact of 2-3 references who can comment on your professional qualifications and abilities (they will be contacted only if you are shortlisted)
The study aims to explore the level of knowledge and understanding of the adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) among Vietnamese young people aged 16 – 30. It identified trends and priority issues and Goals among young people, generally as well as depending on different gender groups and on different geographical bases.
At the same time, the study interpreted the data collected to produce intelligence and recommendations on how to: 1) better inform young people to increase their understanding of the SDGs and 2) identify modes of intervention that take into account preferences and priorities of young people to bring about greater participation of young people in SDG implementation.
The study's results have informed the Voluntary National Reviews on SDG implementation of Vietnam presented in July 2018 by Vice Minister of MPI- Mr. Nguyen The Phuon
Dublin City University (www.dcu.ie) is a research-intensive, globally-engaged, dynamic institution consistently positioned in the rankings of the world’s top young universities. Dublin City University is ranked in the top 150 in the world for politics and international relations by both the QS and Shanghai world rankings.
DCU Home | DCU
www.dcu.ie
Active engagement with stakeholders and partners is a cornerstone of DCU’s unique identity. We are the antithesis of the ‘Ivory Tower’ university and believe ...
Dublin City University Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction invites applications from students for a PhD studentship in Politics and International Relations, valued at between €21,000 and €27,000 pa, for up to four years.
We welcome high quality applications from those interested in working within the following topic area
Informality, informal or shadow economies, with a specific focus on the former USSR region (Southern Caucasus or Central Asia)
The student will be working together with the research group from our recently started project SHADOW: An exploration of the nature of informal economies and shadow practices in the former USSR region
SHADOW is a research and training programme with the goal of producing strategic intelligence on the region and train a generation of specialists on informality in post-Soviet spaces. Our goals are two-fold: 1) we intend to construct an index to provide an accurate measurement of the level of shadow activities in our target countries; 2) we aim to conceptualise a taxonomy of shadow practices in the post-USSR region in a cross-country and cross-regional perspective.
Criteria
Applicants must have a Masters Degree, fluent English and excellent academic grades. International students will need to meet the university’s English language requirements. http://www.dcu.ie/registry/english.shtml
English Language Requirements for Non-Native Speakers of ...
www.dcu.ie
English Language Requirements for Non-Native Speakers of English | RegistryregistryEnglish language requirements for non-native speakers of EnglishIn the case of all ...
Informal Enquiries are welcomed and can be made to:
Dr Abel Polese
abel.polese@dcu.ie
We are happy to facilitate discussion on draft research proposals and to make connections with potential supervisors.
Further information:
This PhD scholarship has a value of up to €21,000 to €27,000 (full fees, plus €16,000pa (usually tax free), for up to 4 years, subject to satisfactory progress.
Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction website http://iicrr.ie/
General Information on PhD’s at Dublin City University https://www4.dcu.ie/graduatestudies/postgrad-research.shtml#ProspectivePGRinfo
Closing date for receipt of applications: 22 March 2018
Applications should be made to IICRR@dcu.ie and they should include
a cv, including 2 academic referees
a one page letter of application
the grades achieved in your Masters degree with copies of transcripts
a 2000 word research proposal, setting out your research question, how the research relates to existing academic literature and a brief description of your proposed methodology.
Keynote speakers: James Scott and Stellan Vinthagen
Naples, 14-15 February 2025
Deadline: 5 January 2025, we plan to send acceptance messages by the 10th of January so that you have enough time to prepare the trip (submission details below).
Organisers
Dublin City University (Abel Polese)
University of Naples, l’Orientale (Ruth Hanau-Santini)
with the support of the EU Horizon Programme PRESILIENT (“Post-pandemic resilient communities: is the informal economy a reservoir for the next generation of digitalized and green businesses in the Global South?” https://www.presilient-dn.eu/), LABOUR (Tackling informal employment in Asia: building post-COV19 solutions to precariousness through case-study based evidence on Bhutan, Laos, Maldives, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam https://www.labour-rise.eu ) and Progetto di Ricerca di Ateneo (PRA) RAP-RISK (Risks and promises of assessing political risk).
Rationale
Informality studies are thriving. From political informality to economic approaches to international relations (Polese 2023), and from the study of the everyday to crisis situations (Helou and Polese 2024), the number of works engaging with an “informality framework” is growing exponentially.
With this workshop, we aim to address two main issues. Theoretically, we seek to organize the study of informality, develop a taxonomy of informality, and explore categories specifically linked to everyday governance of crises, risk management, and political activism. Building on the idea that informality can be regarded as a form of resistance (Murru and Polese 2020), we intend to examine forms of political activism, ranging from contentious politics and unorganized resistance to informality as a form of insurgence (Hanau-Santini and Polese 2017; Polese and Hanau-Santini 2017). While pursuing these goals, we also aim to strengthen our theoretical understanding of informality with solid case studies and robust data collected in a variety of contexts (we are open to any cases and data that can advance the understanding of informality) and their interpretation.
Through this approach, we advocate for at least two major roles of informality: (1) as a key concept for understanding the theory and practice of governance, and (2) as a methodological approach. To achieve this, we encourage contributions that link informality approaches to the following dynamics:
1. Informality in times of peace and/or stability
2. Informality in times of conflict
3. Informality and early crisis interventions
1) Informality in Interventions and Policymaking
Interventions and policymaking are not what they are conceived to be, but what they become after passing through practical challenges. Accordingly, it is virtually impossible to carry out an intervention and successfully bring about behavioral change if informal mechanisms, power relations, and dynamics are not taken into account. We welcome papers that engage with the theory and practice of intervention, considering not only the official but also the unofficial—such as informal institutions, informal leaders, and informal practices—in a development context.
Another key aspect is informality as a methodology for “the study of the invisible” (Pawlusz and Polese 2017). The study of official discourses, policies, and macro-level trends of a country often fails to capture the “infrapolitics” dimension (Scott 2012). This concept suggests that an action, seemingly insignificant on its own, when repeated millions of times by actors who may be unaware of each other, can ultimately cancel a political measure, counter a top-level government decision, or render it ineffective. We wish to encourage studies of these invisible, uncoordinated, and seemingly insignificant actions (and signals) that play a significant role in the political, economic, and social life of a state and its society.
2) Informality and Governance in Conflict-Affected Areas
We also welcome contributions that examine informality as a tool for analyzing governance in conflict-affected areas. While existing literature often emphasizes formal institutions in rebel governance, informal mechanisms—such as patronage networks, customary law, and local arrangements (Themnér and Utas 2016; Mampilly and Stewart 2021; Loyle et al. 2022)—are crucial.
Additionally, we are interested in the increasing role of non-Western, non-state actors in fragile settings, particularly in Africa. Beyond local insurgent groups, this includes private military companies and fighter groups with direct or indirect connections to non-Western countries, such as Turkey, Russia, and Iran. We encourage research on how these actors' informal status and mandates intersect with local governance dynamics (Lewis 2022; Jütersonke et al. 2021).
3) Informality and Early Warning Systems (EWS)
Finally, we invite analyses focusing on how informality intersects with Early Warning Systems (EWS) in conflict or humanitarian crises. Incorporating community-based actors, social networks, and unofficial communication channels can strengthen—or challenge—the effectiveness of EWS (GFDRR 2024). These explorations may reveal how informal dimensions of governance and crisis management enhance, alter, or undermine official interventions. They can also raise critical questions about power imbalances, trust, and inclusivity.
Starting from the above considerations, we invite papers engaging with at least one of the aspects mentioned. We are particularly interested in empirically-based analyses from any region of the world that can advance the methodological and theoretical dimensions of informality studies. Below are some possible topics and approaches. However, this list is by no means exhaustive, and we encourage submissions beyond these suggestions:
• Crisis Situations: How everyday practices help individuals navigate and overcome hardship in contexts where macro-level and governmental interventions have limited effectiveness.
• Risk Analysis and Management: Discrepancies between official and unofficial data, risks, and actors.
• Everyday Governance: How informality operates in times of peace and (apparent) stability.
• War Economies: The role of informal networks and practices in sustaining economies during armed conflict.
• Illegal and Illicit Economies: The relationship between informal, illegal activities and the official, legal structures of the state.
• Rebel Governance and Non-State Actors: How informality factors into governance by rebel groups and other non-state actors in conflict or post-conflict contexts.
• Early Warning Systems (EWS): The role of informality in shaping the effectiveness of EWS in fragile or conflict-affected settings.
Publication plan
The papers presented will be invited to submit to a special issue (and/or edited volume) that we plan to submit for publication after the workshop. Plans will be discussed with participants during the event
How to apply and conditions of participation
If interested send a 300 word abstract and a short biographical statement to
abel.polese@dcu.ie rhanausantini@unior.it and benjamin_bisimwa.cisagara@lu.lv
by the 5th of January. We are aware that time is short so that we will work to give you an answer by the 10th of January so that you can prepare.
There is no participation fee. All meals, including coffee breaks, lunches, and dinners, will be covered by the organizers. We may be able to reimburse short-distance travel costs (100–150 euros) for a limited number of participants who do not have institutional funding. If you need this type of support, please mention it in your abstract or message. While we cannot guarantee funding for everyone, we will do our best to accommodate requests.
A Joint Workshop by CARSI / ESCAS / MARMARA University
Marmara University, Istanbul 11-13 October 2024 (deadline 31 July 2024)
The organisers
The European Society for Central Asian Studies http://www.escas.org/about-escas/ in collaboration with the project CARSI (Central Asian Research on Social Innovation) https://www.carsi-se.eu/
is planning to hold cozy and friendly workshop at Marmara University in October
Rationale
This small workshop, and possibly book project that will result, is intended as a platform for reflection about how far research on Central Asia and its neighbourhood has gone so far. We welcome papers with virtually any focus and spacing from societal, political to economic dynamics of contemporary Central Asia as long as they propose a novel focus (be this an underexplored topic, an innovative methodology or novel theorisation of existing phenomena). We are particularly interested in topics and approach that sound unorthodox or unusual. On the other hand, we are not obsessed with having to discuss only extremely unorthodox or unusual topics. We rather seek to stimulate a conversation to look at mainstream and alternative topics through some different lenses or framework for interpretation.
Expected sessions
This presential (no online presentations) workshop will host a small amount of papers so to leave space for discussions and reflections but also socialisation, networking and building up new collaborations across the region. There will be space for social events (i.e. dinner, a walking tour) and for training sessions (i.e. publication strategies, fundraising). Each session will be chaired by a specialist to promote constructive discussions and offer suggestions
Geographical scope
The geographical focus is also flexible. We are open to comparisons with other regions (as long as Central Asia is in the picture) and to the broader Eurasian region, spacing from Turkey and the Caucasus to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mongolia and Western China in addition to the five Central Asian post-Soviet republics.
Follow-up plans
We plan to share plans for a joint publication (special issue of a journal or edited book, or both if there are enough good papers) and the event shall also be an occasion to discuss possible future workshops in the region
Submissions
If interested, please send, by the 31th of July, a 300 word abstract and a short biographical statement to escastudies@protonmail.com
please also cc to: melanie.sadozai@zea.uni-regensburg.de and abel.polese@dcu.ie
Financial conditions
- there is no workshop fee
- meals will be provided to all participants
- it is not possible to take care of travel but for those with limited funding we can cover accommodation for 2-3 nights
The imprint left by people on things inherited from the Soviet past or newly introduced by the economic and political opening of the system generates a human-material interplay. This transforms social relations over time and fulfills a structuring role in societies. The choice of a material approach combines the universe of things (objects, consumer goods, but also real estate and technical infrastructures) with the space of social relations. It also opens a door on the ordinary intimacy of material arrangements that make everyday life “liveable” in unsettled times. The event is planned as a multidisciplinary dialogue between history, sociology, anthropology and economics.
A lost decade? Ordinary perceptions and academic analyses
The 1990s have left such a negative mark that the period has been either pushed into oblivion as a repressed memory or put forward as a political scarecrow. In post-Soviet societies, the 1990s were met with disappointment with soaring democratic and liberal expectations, hopes for widespread prosperity, and modernization through the market. "The 1990s" were so turbulent and feverish, so equivocal and uncertain for many post-Soviet societies that their popular and political narratives are torn between dichotomous representations: an era of moral and legal decay ("Lykhie 90"), on the one hand, and a liberal experience ("ostrov svobody") on the other. The narrative also varies by country: it can be one of nation-building as in Ukraine, or one of exit (from communism) and entry (European) as in the Baltic countries. These years – the chronological boundaries remain fuzzy - were experienced in a variety of ways by societies of the former USSR: it is a period of social, political, and economic production that cemented the political dynamics of the 2000s in Russia, Belarus, the Baltic countries, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
There is one experience that binds these societies across the region in the immediate post-Soviet aftermath: a shared loss of certainty in the broadest sense of the word. Whether by the trauma of war or otherwise violent social collapse, populations lost their points of reference and of visibility in daily life, they saw their horizons of expectation contracted to address the immediate present. In short, the world had become unpredictable and unreadable.
Numerous works of economic and cultural anthropology dealing with the post-Soviet space explore the management of these states of uncertainty from the point of view of adapting practices and strategies of economic survival, cultural practices, consumption, state regulation, and property (Morris 2016, Verdery 1999 and 2013, Allina-Pisano 2008, Hann & Gudeman 2015a 2015b). As for the political science perspective, it draws a connection between the 1990s and the legitimization of authoritarian and statist regimes. The existential uncertainty of populations has been commonly identified as the generator of a social demand for "order" and as the foundation of the Putinist social contract (Garrigues, Rousselet 2004, Cook and Dimitrov 2011, Feldmann and Mazepus 2017).
Academic research has brought nuance to the understanding of the 1990s, in particular by analyzing the weight of legacies from the past and adaptations in a context of social collapse (see bibliography and references). However, the 1990s have not yet been put into historical perspective. We frame the experience of the 1990s as one of populations caught in a state of " permanent liminality" (Szakolczai 2014) where they are forced to reinvent in a continuous loop a "new normality" through the mediation of practices but also of everyday objects (Maček,2016).
Reinventing the 1990s? Creativity and revolution in social relations with things
Looking at the"1990s" through the concept of liminality underlines the dimension of creativity that such a state of permanent uncertainty embodies: actors invent and create in order to ensure a semblance of control over their situation and their horizon of expectation (Thomassen et al. 2015). The anthropologist K. Verdery described the introduction of market relations and private property as a period of possible innovation. The 1990s signified a revolution in the way of thinking and interacting to the point of touching the "foundations of what constitutes a person", through the new relationship it establishes between the person and the thing owned (Verdery 2013). The materialized and starkly visual and aesthetic expression of the break with the past is striking: it can be the sudden irruption of new things like imports of consumer goods, experiences of urban transformation (degradation or aestheticization), social differentiation, the abandonment of Soviet rituals or public practices and the introduction of new ones. Social dynamics of the 1990s such as the transformations of firms, of the relationship to the urban or natural environment, of the management of new private property or that of the public good also deserve a fresh eye through a material approach. Some scholarship has shown how, in a context of shortages, the practices of "home-made" and DIY created a particular relationship to things, constitutive of the "Soviet subject" (Golubev 2020, Gerasimova 2004). One may wonder how material creativity in Soviet everyday life interacts with one forged in market conditions.
We take as a vantage point material objects to build an argument that things lost, repaired, shared, invented or adapted during the 1990s constitute windows on the Soviet social orders, rooted in the past but transformed and continued. The 1990s are treated as a time-space of social creativity, where present mix with an in-depth historical investigation. Through materiality, the colloquium offers the opportunity to throw a fresh look on the research done on informality, entrepreneurship, the market, civil society but also the media, culture ... to go further in seeking to understand what new where new social ties and interactions are made around the material "novelties" in the entire post-Soviet space.
Call for papers
With historical hindsight of nearly thirty years, this conference opens the floor to a less normative, more empirical rereading, closer to people and their material culture. The aim is to approach the 1990s as a field of transformation of social ties resulting from the Soviet order around material and technical innovations. These marked the era, contributing to the de-fabrication of old networks and the development of new ones. Materiality represents, through new or transformed objects, social universes. They establish a connection with the contemporary- or fail to do so. Proposals can address – but are not limited to- the following aspects:
Defecting: breakdowns of things, neglect, shutdowns, degradation, accidents, breakage, destruction, deindustrialization, depopulation, management of new commons and their failure (for example, the pod’’ezd, water and electricity supply, distribution and power cuts, life in darkness -Tbilisi, Alma-Ata, Dushanbe, etc.).
Repairing: objects and their reconversion, re-use, sharing; managing shortages and mutual aid (in the light of examples as diverse as the renovation of children's playgrounds, the distribution of clothing to refugees or the proliferation of pawnshops (“lombard”)
Exploring: new places, new consumer and capital goods, new equipment and how to use it, the invention, circulation and consumption of goods and products, the chelnok/shuttle trade (from the arrival of Turkish and then Chinese everyday consumer products (hygiene, clothing, utensils) to the first computers and the use of drugs and adulterated products). These explorations also concern the revolution of intimacy, the relationship to the body and the relationship to gender (feminine intimate hygiene, sexuality, sensuality...), new aesthetics (video-show, media and advertising) and experiences of the senses (songs, smells, tastes).
Conflicting: objects caught in conflicts of claim, appropriation, or expropriation (around coveted apartments or production assets, industrial resources or security assets).
The visual dimension of the conference can be expanded by the use of video, photo or audio contributions. With regard to the debate around historicizing the recent past, the conference organizers welcome papers on sources (public and private archives, testimonies, interviews...) as a subject of contributions.
Submission guidelines:
Abstract submissions are due on 1 May 2021. They should include the following elements:
· Title
· Abstract (500 words)
· Author’s name, affiliation and short bibliographical note (150 words) (in the body of the email)
Authors will be notified within approximately a month of the abstract submission deadline as to the status of their contributions.
Authors of the selected submissions will be invited to confirm their participation in the conference (planned in Paris on 8 - 9 March 2022) in mid-October 2021.
They will be invited to submit the draft of their paper proposals (7000-10000 words) by 15 December 2021.
Abstract submissions shall be sent to Dr. Sophie Lambroschini (sophie_lambro@yahoo.com) and Prof. Françoise Daucé (dauce@ehess.fr) with “Submission Making1990s” as your email subject.
The conference will take place in Paris on 8-9 March 2022. Upon request, funding will be made available, if necessary, to cover the travel costs of participants whose proposals have been selected.
Two Early Stage Researcher positions (with enrollment into a PhD programme) to start in January 2021
deadline 20 November 2020
MARKETS: Mapping Uncertainties, Challenges and Future Opportunities of Emerging Markets: Informal Barriers, Business Environments and Future Trends in Eastern Europe, The Caucasus and Central Asia
Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) is part of a consortium that was awarded a €3.9m grant from the European Union to fund a European Training Network entitled MARKETS - a world-leading politics, business and policy oriented Early Career Training programme which will equip 15 fellows, across a range of 9 international partners (University of Bremen, University of Helsinki, Catholic University Leuven, University College London, Maastricht University, Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, Tallinn University of Technology and the Center for Social Sciences in Tbilisi). with theoretical knowledge, analytical skills and complementary training to understand and deal with emerging markets in the Eastern Europe, The Caucasus and Central Asia regions.
Two positions will be based in Tallinn, Estonia, at the Faculty of Business and Economics of Tallinn University of Technology. Successful fellows will receive a salary for three years, at the EU early Stage Researcher rate, including social benefits (pension scheme, medical insurance). The fellow will be expected to enroll also into a PhD programme in the School of Business and Governance at TalTech. Subject to satisfactory progress a national level scholarship may be available in year 4. Fellows will also benefit from international summer schools, international mentors in universities and non-university partners and funding for tuition fees, field research, conference travel, language classes. The 15 Fellows and the supervisors meet up for joint workshops approximately every six months – ensuring that fellows graduate not only with a PhD but with a well established international network.
Fellows will conduct their research on one of the topics listed below.
The overall goal of the project is to compare countries that had fully opened to foreign investors by the early 2000s – Estonia, Latvia (now EU members), Georgia (considered by many as an example of best practice in reforms), and Kyrgyzstan (where markets are stable but no major economic leap is expected in the next immediate future) – with what have been identified as significant prospective post-USSR markets for the next ten years - Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan (all of which have shown a more concrete desire for economic dialogue in the past three years), Russia (its eastern region and, in particular, Siberia, which has remained largely unexplored by EU companies), and Azerbaijan, a country that has finally started interacting in more concrete terms with the EU.
Project topic
Project focus
Entrepreneurial behaviour, informality and the construction of social norms: a cross-regional perspective
Use behavioural game theory to explore the interplay between social norms and informal economies; provide a model of why actors engage with informality beyond simple financial motives, contribute to policy debates
Ethics, principles, state vs. individual morality, and the construction of new or diverging moralities in EU eastern neighbours
Identify the role of national and international external actors in shaping the notion of state morality; inquire into the nature of gaps between official (state) morality and accepted moral values or ‘the norm’ among citizens
Practical details
Financial conditions (including salary levels) and background documents are available at https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/msca-itn-2020 NB: select guide for applicants. The financial conditions in the call will the one that apply to you.
Your salary will be calculated according to MSCA rules and your personal + family situation. More information can be found at the financial section of the MSCA ITN guide for applicants that you can find in section 5 (Financial Aspects) of the document. These are worth checking before you decide to apply since, if selected, you will be expected to familiarise yourself with these rules also to be aware of your formal rights and obligations towards the donor.
Eligibility: applicants must hold a degree enabling them to enroll into doctoral studies by December 2020 (usually a MA or MSc). They cannot have more than 4 years full time research experience (or hold a doctorate already, even if they worked less than 4 years to complete it) at the time of recruitment.
Mobility requirement: applicants can be of any nationality but cannot have been resident (or have had their main activity i.e. work or study) in the Republic of Estonia for more than 12 of the 36 months prior to recruitment. This means that if you spent less than 12 months in Estonia (including if you have never been there) you are eligible.
NB: this is a very intensive programme. Each selected candidate will be enrolled into a PhD programme, and will be seconded to the target region for data collection and will subsequently be seconded to a non-academic partner to gain a hands-on work experience on how research skills can be used beyond academia for the benefit of the governmental, private or international development sector. There will also be workshops of 4 to 5 days duration approximately every 6 months at which attendance is essential. Therefore a willingness and ability to undertake these international mobilities is a core requirement.
Any informal enquiries about research topics or the process (if you have questions about issues that are not already addressed in this call or in the guide for applicants) should be addressed to Lawschooleu@gmail.com
Applications should be sent to Lawschooleu@gmail.com (cc shugyla.kilybayeva@gmail.com) and must include:
1) a curriculum vitae (including explicit details of country / countries of residence for the past 3 years, this is needed for eligibility purposes);
2) an application letter no longer than 500 words;
3) a short (500-1000 words) summary of your doctoral project.
4) The grades achieved in your Masters degree (certificates will be requested if you are shortlisted)
Please send all the documents together in one PDF file named after your name and surname and use, as subject of your message, “MARKETS-ETN-2020 Application”. Failure to do this might result in your application ending up in the wrong folder and, in a worst case scenario, ignored.
Deadline 20 November 2020, 23.59h (Estonian time)
University of Lund, Sweden, 17-19 September 2019 (Deadline 15th May 2019)
Rationale and main aims of the workshops
While early works on informality mostly explored its economic aspects (shadow economies, informal sector), recent studies have unveiled the multi-faceted nature of informality. From ways to get things done at the top political level (Ledeneva 2013) to everyday resistance (Scott 1985, 2012), informality has been regarded as an integral part of governance structures and mechanisms (Polese et al. 2017). For this workshop, we give continuity to the classification of the four "flavours of informality" (Polese 2019) to regard informal practices as an act of deliberate, if unorganised, non-compliance with formal instructions. At the everyday level, these actions may remain isolated and sterile. However, once they are embraced regularly by a significant portion of a given population they may come to renegotiate, or even reject, policy measures that are regarded, consciously or unconsciously, as inappropriate for a given situation context.
Footing on these assumptions, with this event, we propose to shift attention away from informality perceived, especially at the everyday level, as a mere survival strategy to think in a different direction. When people produce similar, or even the same, patterns of behaviour, informality can acquire political significance and reshape the way policies are implemented in a given context.
Starting from the above assumptions, our workshop has a three-fold goal.
First, it will expand the scope of theoretical research on informality beyond its economic understanding at the national level, something pointed out by studies by Dixit (2007), Helmke and Levitsky (2005) and Stone (2010) as necessary, but not yet systematically studied. We will look at the role of informal practices in the redefinition and renegotiation of business environments and how entrance and exit barriers are created, causing the reversal that state-led measures were intended to bring about.
Second, it will apply this interpretative framework to look at the way policymaking, and development policies, are affected by informality in the transitional world. This will eventually allow us to engage with worldwide debates from a comparative perspective. Our departure point is the post-socialist region, where informality has been widely studied. However, with this workshop, we intend to upscale the scope of our inquiry to Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America.
Third, inasmuch as this has been timidly attempted so far, our event represents a chance to establish and develop a research group on informality that can work on further conceptualizations of the relationship between informality, policy-making and development at a global scale. We anticipate some of the contributions to be invited into an edited volume (we have a preliminary agreement with Routledge). In addition, should we have enough papers with a profound theoretical engagement, we will consider pulling together a special issue of a journal
As a result, we welcome contributions focusing on the following list of topics:
NB the list is non-exhaustive and we are open to considering further perspectives and foci
1) Measuring informality: novel and mixed methods for the measurement of informal practices, their effects and the rationale behind the desire (active or passive) to engage with informal practices in different contexts and with different ends
2) Informality and policymaking: studies on the relationship between the formal and the informal; how informal practices affect policymaking at the top level (negotiations of laws and rules, power relations between parties, groups, economic actors); how individuals, groups and non-state actors react, oppose, renegotiate policy measures at the everyday level
3) Informality and international development: explorations on the role of informal practices in a North-South development context; how instructions by international and development organizations are filtered, renegotiated or opposed when going against the interests of powerful individuals, interest groups, lobbies; how individuals (especially the weak, the marginalized, the poor) react to measures that they do not perceive as necessary, useful or beneficial
Given our initial specialization, our starting point has been the post-socialist world. However, we would like to use this workshop to expand the upscale the scope of our inquiry to a global scale in an attempt to construct comparisons with other world countries and regions.
Technical information
– You will be notified by the 1st of June 2019 on whether your abstract has been accepted. Please note that the dates might slightly change (1-2 days later) but we will send the final dates along with the acceptance letter
– Meals and accommodation during the workshop is covered for all accepted speakers
– There is limited availability of funds to cover travel to and from Lund. If you expect to be unable to get support from your institution, please add this information in your abstract
How to apply
If interested, please send by the 15th of May 2019 in a single word document named after your surname containing:
1) An abstract and your contact details (300 words)
2) A short biographical statement (300 words)
3) if you need financial support for your travel
to Sevara Usmanova at usmanova.c@gmail.com and cc your message to ap@tlu.ee and Rustamjon.Urinboyev@soclaw.lu.se
‘OP 068. Encountering Deceptions of Development(s): Exploring the Practices and Knowledge in the Global South’
to be held at the 18th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil, on 16-20 July 2018.
Abstract submission: http://www.inscricoes.iuaes2018.org/trabalho/view?ID_TRABALHO=375
Deadline: 28 February 2018
Since long development, or better a normative understanding of what development should be, has been uncritically considered as panacea to all sorts of social and political problem in various parts of the world. Critical views, often grounded on empirical studies showing the limits of this approach (Escobar 1994), have shifted attention on the fact that resistances and counter narratives, from the Global South as well as from the Western world itself, feed a series of challenges to the initially understanding of development.
In particular, a possible effect of neoliberal persuasive agendas has been to shift attention away from the social responsibility of the state and citizens have to struggle to find a way to survive despite of beyond the state (Polese et al 2017). This panel comes in response to the above tendency and we invite contributors to explore the local knowledge in development practice and to examine how it encounters the hegemonic notion of developmental paradigm.
With this panel we seek to understand various formal and informal approaches to produce nuanced knowledge that can help develop critical ideas on how to better engage with development practice in various areas of the world. We expect, with this panel, to foster a dialogue on the development ideas and practice encountered by various communities in the global south. This would also delve into issues pertaining to people in their everyday life in the developing world.
Special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fswi20/current
Guest editors: Abel Polese (Dublin City University and Tallinn University of Technology),
Ruth Hanau Santini (University of Naples, L’Orientale)
Rob Kevlihan (Kimmage Development Studies Centre)
Deadline for abstracts: 30 June 2017
Deadline for first draft of papers: 30 September 2017
We are editing a guest issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies that will come out in 2018 and is intended to investigate the synergies generated by the co-existence, competition and conflict between competing actors of security governance.
Our main focus is on the multi-actor and multi-level nature of security governance across the Middle East and Africa, sidestepping the application of fictitious notions of state unitary actorness and absolute monopoly of violence. In particular, we expect to investigate, through a number of empirical case studies with strong conceptual components, the interplay between the mixed nature of security actors and the creation of specific security orders.
Theoretically, by building on critical literature on statehood and sovereignty we intend to challenge two main paradigms: the Westphalian and the Weberian. The former emphasizes borders’ sanctity as prerogative of modern states, while commonly used understandings of the latter emphasize a static conceptions of states as sole possessors of monopolies of violence. . The idealized “Westphalian state”, which has distinct boundaries and emphasizes the right of nonintervention and borders’ inviolability, has arguably been under attack since the end of the Cold War (Kaldor, 1999; Thakur, 2016). We intend to push the boundary further to enrich debates on the importance of historicizing and contextualizing the different forms and shapes statehood and governance can take (Bierstecker 2013).
We would also like to test the notion of ‘areas of limited statehood’, to be understood as more than geographical spaces, but rather spaces where non-state actors can either compete or cooperate with the state depending on the circumstances (Risse 2013). The result can include different forms of hybrid governance, including, but not limited to the coexistence of modern and traditional practices of the exercise of power (Bacik 2008). While the clash between different sources of authority and claims of legitimacy can generate tensions and conflicts, the presence of competing actors can lead to a variety of outcomes. We will explore cases from stratified and yet peaceful systems of authority to cases where the competition is less peaceful, leading to violent struggles between a central authority and insurgent groups. Within heterarchical orders, characterized by multiple rankings of power and multiple actors possessing coercive power, we will distinguish different degrees of intensity of these non-anarchic and non-hierarchical orders.
We are interested in papers analysing relations among actors possessing power (including but not limited to coercive power) over given territories, be they state, non-state, public, private, national and trans-national actors. We seek to explore these forms of power, including the manner in which relations between centralized authorities and social actors create, reflect and reproduce power relations. We seek to understand the implications these dynamics have for populations in terms of human security, conflict management and experiences of violence. Regional and international actors are included in the plethora of security or insecurity generating actors and will be analysed according to the principal-agent relations they enjoy with local state actors, as well as with local populations and the other coercive wielding actors in a given area. Sources of legitimacy for each category of security actor will be particularly scrutinized: a traditionally neglected but increasingly relevant aspect includes local populations’ dynamics of interaction, negotiation and/or resistance vis-à-vis both state and non state actors exercising coercive power over their territories.
Abstracts of 300 words must be sent by June 30th, 2017 to both addresses
Ruth Hanau Santini rhanausantini@johnshopkins.it
and Abel Polese ap@tlu.ee
The selection outcomes will be communicated by July 30th, 2017. Paper givers will be invited to a workshop in Naples in early December and expected to submit their final version by the 15th of January 2018.
5-6 May 2017, Naples, Italy
Joint Workshop
Università L’Orientale di Napoli,
Universite’ Libre de Bruxelles and
Tallinn University of Technology
Deadline to submit abstracts: 17 March 2017
The main aim of this workshop is to investigate the synergies generated by the co-existence, competition and conflict between competing actors of governance.
While governance is traditionally a function performed by the state, and formal institutions, recent empirical evidence has shed light on the capacity of informal structures and institutions in a variety of world regions to fulfill similar functions (often referred to as: informal, rebel, real or insurgent governance). For this workshop, our main focus is on the Middle East and North Africa but we are keen to see comparative approaches engaging with other regions (i.e. the post-Soviet spaces or Sub-Sahelian Africa).
We are keen to attract contributions exploring empirical evidence that allows us to test the notion of ‘areas of limited statehood’, to be understood as more than geographical spaces, but rather spaces where non-state actors can either compete or cooperate with the state depending on the circumstances (Risse 2013). This can produce different forms of hybrid governance, and can possibly go to the extent of foreseeing the coexistence of modern and traditional practices of the exercise of power (Bacik 2008). While the clash between different sources of authority and claims of legitimacy can generate tensions and conflicts, the presence of competing actors can lead to a variety of outcomes. We are keen to explore cases from stratified and yet peaceful systems of authority to cases where the competition is less peaceful, leading to violent struggles between the central authority and insurgent groups.
Theoretically, by building on critical literature on statehood and sovereignty we intend to challenge two main paradigms: the Westphalian and the Weberian. The former emphasizes borders’ sanctity as prerogative of modern states, while the latter stands for a static conception of states as the only form of political organization. The idealized “Westphalian state”, which has distinct boundaries and emphasizes the right of nonintervention and borders’ inviolability, has been under attack in recent years (Kaldor, 1999). We intend to push the boundary further to enrich debates on the importance of historicizing and contextualizing the different forms and shapes statehood and governance can take, even with regard to the territory and the fluidity of borders (Bierstecker 2013).
We are also keen to redefine informal practices as “varieties of governance” (Polese et al. 2017) to explore a wide range of options covering informal, invisible and unrecorded forms of action, be they deliberate manifestations of resistance to state power, or alternative, bottom-up informal practices compensating for public authorities’ inaction or absence. Even if they are rarely regarded as acts of resistance against the state but as compensation for what the state fails to deliver, we see that in the case of power vacuums, local actors will emerge and create new political economy of survival, a web of informal structures able to create opportunities and generate economic activities for the local populations, creating new patron-client relations, located in the grey area between the legal, illegal and extra legal.
We would be keen to receive contributions that engage with the (non exhaustive) list of topics:
The relationship between civil society and formal institutions in an empirical and/or comparative perspective
Societal demands and bottom-up visions of statehood
Hybrid governance, hybrid sovereignty, hybrid statehood, examined in their different theoretical underpinnings but with reference to empirical cases
Frozen conflicts, sub-levels of state governance
Forms of insurgent and rebel governance
Formal governance vs real governance
Theoretical exploration and/or empirical illustration of examples of political economy of resistance versus political economy of survival
How invisible or unperceived forms of resistance transform into visible ones (for instance the genesis of social movements)
If interested please send an abstract (300 words) and short biographical statement to
by the 17 of March 2017 to gc.giuliacimini@gmail.com
back-up addresses: ap@tlu.ee and rhanausantini@johnshopkins.it
There is no participation fee. If selected, we might be able to cover your board and lodging in Naples for 2 days (2/3 nights)
Our goal of integrating a non-state perspective into Political Science and IR debates has prompted us to construct this section across three main points: the changing nature of power and agency in IR and International Studies; theorising IR and IS beyond the state; conceptualising relevant global political action to contemporary challenges. We are interested in proposals that address, from any perspective, one or more of the points below:
Agents of power in IR and IS
Emerging fields of global action
Economic management structures and non-state actors
Global arenas of violence
Individual mobilisation and international action
Traditional, human and informal security: intersections between traditional and new security actors
Market vs non market institutions: dynamics, mechanisms and actors providing various kinds of security and social justice
Informal market institutions and their impact on the local governance processes
State and non-state actors and their role in redefinition of security and securisation
Main challenges and threats to individual and collective security in a cross regional and cross country perspective
Critical security perspectives on the state and non-state actors
Perspectives and directions in critical political economy
Interdisciplinary dialogues in IR: benefits and limitations
Critical conceptualisations of governance
Economic inequalities and insecurity in the Global North and South
Submissions to
http://eisa-net.org/sitecore/content/be-bruga/eisa/events/11th-pan-european-conference.aspx
In spite of Hobsbawm and Rude’s warning that phenomena tend to be ignored until they make headlines (1968), a large number of scholars have tended to concentrate on phenomena that are highly visible, neglecting whatever was not easily visible. However, recent reflections on the construction of the political and on political actors has shown that there is no real boundary between the political and non-political. Indeed, key concepts such as ‘politics’, and the ‘political’, continue to be an essentially controversial and yet crucial matter in both geography and international studies.
A recent critical reflection by scholars rooted in various disciplines has, however, sparked a debate on the production of politically-relevant phenomena. and Scholars are increasingly focusing on actors and dynamics that have so far been under-reported, under-studied, or have remained invisible. Examples include, but are not limited, to:
informality, or informal practices, as a feedback mechanism towards political decisions;
consumption patterns as a symbolic political spaces that redefine interethnic relations;
the way elites stretch their space of appearance to redefine their political space.
the role of rural / urban communities and associations in the production of political spaces and power reconfigurations.
Centred on the above issues, this panel will engage with the notion of the political, exploring the causes that lead some social phenomena to pass unperceived, and discussing how the situatedness of scholars, civil society actors, decision makers and ordinary citizens interact with their imaginative world to define the importance of a given phenomenon. Featuring empirically grounded works, embedded in critical theoretical reflections, panelists will discuss how the political is affected by spatial assumptions and representations that stretch beyond fixed notions of border and of formal administrative divisions.
Contact: Abel Polese ap@tlu.ee; filippo.menga@manchester.ac.uk
If interested contact me at
ap (at) tlu.ee or just reply to this message
by the 20 of August at latest (better earlier). We would need the paper as soon as possible but we might be able to negotiate a bit
The national in everyday life. Identity and nation-building in post-socialist spaces
Editors: Abel Polese, Jeremy Morris, Emilia Pawlusz and Oleksandra Seliverstova
Overview and rationale
With this work we intend to explore, from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, how everyday practices become a meaningful and useful site for understanding socio-political engagements in the nation-building processes. The meaning of ‘everyday’ encompasses any kind of quotidian and ‘banal’ practices. These could be related to consumption, kinship, embodiment, mobility, games, clothing, Although there is a growing body of literature on informality and everyday practices in the post-socialist context, most of them do not sufficiently connect the micro and the macro or, in other words, do not necessarily explore the way micro processes at the local and/or everyday level may come to affect macro transformations and policy making at the national or regional level.
By complementing current works on identity construction from a bottom-up perspective, the current volume will focus on how, through everyday practices, individuals establish, negotiate and embed references to concepts of citizenship, statehood and national self-definition. Developing earlier insights into the study of everyday nationalism, initiated by Michael Billig (1995) and critically updated by Skey (2009) to encompass the need to take account of globalization, the editors are seek empirically-based studies of nationhood that emerge not from the state level, but in practices of everyday life among ordinary people and serve to 'materialize' the nation.
Questions perspective authors might want to engage with include (but are not limited to):
· How national identity could be explored through everyday acts, like consumption, leisure, food procurement and cooking, education of children, handcraft and arts, fashion, tourism, organisation of household.
· What are the dispositions and habituses that reveal shared or conflicting understandings of national identity.
· Perception and understanding of national belonging by ordinary people.
· How national characteristics are revealed in organization of public/private space, and movement through that space.
· Informal or spontaneous nation-building.
· The contrast between ‘hot’ and banal forms of everyday nationalism.
· The long durée effect of post-socialist transformation on nationalism.
If interested contact me at
ap (at) tlu.ee or just reply to this message
by the 20 of August at latest (better earlier). We would need the paper as soon as possible but we might be able to negotiate a bit
The national in everyday life. Identity and nation-building in post-socialist spaces
Editors: Abel Polese, Jeremy Morris, Emilia Pawlusz and Oleksandra Seliverstova
Overview and rationale
With this work we intend to explore, from a variety of perspectives and disciplines, how everyday practices become a meaningful and useful site for understanding socio-political engagements in the nation-building processes. The meaning of ‘everyday’ encompasses any kind of quotidian and ‘banal’ practices. These could be related to consumption, kinship, embodiment, mobility, games, clothing, Although there is a growing body of literature on informality and everyday practices in the post-socialist context, most of them do not sufficiently connect the micro and the macro or, in other words, do not necessarily explore the way micro processes at the local and/or everyday level may come to affect macro transformations and policy making at the national or regional level.
By complementing current works on identity construction from a bottom-up perspective, the current volume will focus on how, through everyday practices, individuals establish, negotiate and embed references to concepts of citizenship, statehood and national self-definition. Developing earlier insights into the study of everyday nationalism, initiated by Michael Billig (1995) and critically updated by Skey (2009) to encompass the need to take account of globalization, the editors are seek empirically-based studies of nationhood that emerge not from the state level, but in practices of everyday life among ordinary people and serve to 'materialize' the nation.
Questions perspective authors might want to engage with include (but are not limited to):
· How national identity could be explored through everyday acts, like consumption, leisure, food procurement and cooking, education of children, handcraft and arts, fashion, tourism, organisation of household.
· What are the dispositions and habituses that reveal shared or conflicting understandings of national identity.
· Perception and understanding of national belonging by ordinary people.
· How national characteristics are revealed in organization of public/private space, and movement through that space.
· Informal or spontaneous nation-building.
· The contrast between ‘hot’ and banal forms of everyday nationalism.
· The long durée effect of post-socialist transformation on nationalism.
In the early days of the war in Ukraine, I often heard the “but what about the [allegedly neo-Nazi] Azov Battalion?” refrain even by (allegedly) fellow scholars. How did the Azov argument get so strong? Yes, there are ultra-nationalists enrolled in the battalion. Yes, its ideology is partly inspired by far-right ideas. But would the alleged extremism of some of its 1,000 soldiers outbalance Russian mass killings, torture, and rape of civilians, and, in general, a full-scale invasion of a country? (Would you expect members of any military brigade to read Gandhi as a bedtime story, by the way?).
I wonder how many people still use the term “post-Soviet.” Until last February, I admit, I used it a lot. Force of habit, perhaps inertia, one could say. Perhaps also attempts to “defend my territory” when debating with specialists on other regions.
Yet, since February, I no longer feel comfortable with the term. A war is a war and I feel like I was suddenly awoken and pushed out of my comfort zone. In retrospect, the end of “post-Soviet” was in the air already. Perhaps I did not want to notice how diverse the region had grown, how different ordinary Russians and Ukrainians had become.
In terms of money raised, target amounts can vary a lot, depending on the fundraiser and the research projects involved. But, in percentages, this equates to an 8% success rate, calculated as total applications vs funded ones and 5%, if one compares the amount requested vs the amount received. Are these figures any good?
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/08/19/reflections-on-academic-fundraising-the-art-of-getting-there/
I find it difficult to locate a precise moment in time when research on informality gained such a momentum. But I can at least recall my own starting point. When I got inspired by the Odessa-Chisinau ''elektrichka'' to write a paper for a workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle in 2005, I was advised to use "survival strategies" instead of "informality" in the title because few would understand the latter word. I remember how relieved I was, a couple of years later, to find Colin Williams devoting a great deal of his time and efforts to informality and to Ukraine.
A few years after that things had radically changed. After a short break from academia, I was back in November 2013, parachuted into the largest event on informality in the post-socialist world I have ever seen. Thanks to a series of generous grants, my friend Nicolas Hayoz invited around 120 scholars working on informality in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asian regions to Fribourg. Informality seemed to have gone big and has since become a catchword decorating academic articles, books and special issues from a variety of regions.
At the conference I was introduced to the idea of the Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (Ledeneva 2018) that was being developed at the time and that eventually brought scholars from the four corners of the world to the launch of its two volumes in London in March 2018.
In spite of the autobiographic introduction to the term informality, I have no intention to deny the long history of debates developed around it well before this. If we take a mostly economistic view on informality, we could look at least back to post-WWI debates on economic development. Explorations of the informal sector, as the topic was called at that time, informed a variety of economic and economistic positions (Lewis 1955, 1959) eventually evolving into several other directions: from ultra-liberal views on corruption (Leiff 1964) to the work of anthropologists shifting attention from monetary to non-monetary transactions (Hart 1973), from the tangible and measurable to the symbolic and allegedly intangible.
“Informality” in its many forms – from outright corruption to showing gratitude for going above and beyond the call of duty – has something to teach us, and could even serve as a feedback mechanism for public policy.
by Abel Polese 11 December 2018
When talking about corruption – or, more generally, about practices that are considered illegal or unlawful according to some international standards – the normative positions of state, society, and other main stakeholders do not always fully overlap. Indeed, not all practices considered harmful by international organizations are necessarily noxious, nor are they perceived as such by state or society. By the same token, not all practices which are considered good ones – according to international standards or some other normative position – bring about the desired results.
http://www.laender-analysen.de/zentralasien/pdf/ZentralasienAnalysen125.pdf
We’ve looked at identity markers perpetuated by non-political actors – a new fashion or habit that goes viral nationally, or a social movement with which a large portion of the population identifies. We’ve studied political measures conceived for other purposes that end up affecting the identity of a large percentage of a national population.
But we had never considered nation-building through terrorism – or, more specifically, through an anti-terrorist narrative.
Until a few weeks ago, at least.
From democratic audit blog
A dysfunctional higher education sector, on the other hand, erodes state legitimacy and runs the risk of alienating even more a state from its citizens. Now, citizens will survive somehow and so will the state. It is just easy to imagine that a happy marriage would work better than living separated under the same roof.
..............
Я считаю, что существуют два вида неформальности. Позитивная — работает как механизм социального перераспределения. И негативная — заражающая систему. Разница между ними не только в финансовой природе трансакций. Если государство уходит из определенного сектора, допустим, не выделяя достаточного количества средств, возникает саморегулирование, и говорить там о коррупции становится бессмысленным.
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Я вважаю, що існують два види неформальності. Позитивна — працює як механізм соціального перерозподілу. І негативна — що заражає систему. Різниця між ними не лише у фінансовій природі трансакцій. Якщо держава йде з певного сектора, припустімо, не виділяючи достатньої кількості коштів, виникає саморегулювання, і говорити там про корупцію безглуздо.
These results, and lack of trust towards the state, are contrasted by a growing trust towards fellow citizens or at least a feeling of solidarity. In some regions (Vinnitsa, Ivano-Frankivsk, Kirovograd) up to 100% of our respondents considers it important to help one other.
Can informal payments in higher education be interpreted as an expression of social solidarity? Is it possible to claim that citizens, although unhappy with having to embark in informal payments and considering it a shameful practice, in the end comply with it as they understood that they are needed to keep the system going?
In other words, positive informality complements the state, while negative corrupts the system.
to shed a different light on some of those engaging in diverse transactions. Challenging the vision of a "culture of corruption" (Miller et al 2001) and that “no discount” should be applied to corrupt practices (Papava and Khaduri 2001), the starting question of this chapter is: what makes a practice “corrupt” or
illegal? In this respect I suggest the need to contextualise and de-normativise illegal practices, since they depend on both social and legal norms. From a juridical standpoint a law is a law, but the value and applicability of a law is ultimately decided by people in social practice. What if there is a law and
the state is unable to enforce control or punish anyone because a substantial number of citizens do not follow it? There is a growing body of literature challenging the very significance of a written law in a context where other rules may apply. For instance, Wanner has remarked how a new moral order may
be applied to some spheres of Ukrainian life where the state’s protection is felt to be lacking. How illegal or immoral is it to try to bribe a court if the same court is issuing an order on the basis of false evidence produced against you? (Wanner 2005)
The present chapter raises questions about the validity of international reports and policy analysis on Ukraine, and possibly on the rest of the former Soviet world, that see illegal practices only as a social evil to eradicate. This is the position of a number of strands of developmentalist thought which
uncritically reject possible alternatives (Nederveen Pieterse 2006), positing that it is only a matter of time before transitional countries will adopt a functioning neoliberal model. In contrast to this, it has been argued that that monetary transactions do not encompass or explain economic activity – this is evident from the work of the growing school of diverse economies (Community Economies Collective 2001, Gibson Graham 1996, 2008). In addition, economic effectiveness might not mean the end of non-market oriented transactions (Williams 2005), which may also serve to partially challenge the de-personalisation of power relations in the labour market and the separation between the social and economic sphere predicted by Polanyi (1946, see also Hann and Hart 2009). Empirical evidence has showed that ‘success’ may also be measured by satisfaction of spiritual obligations, being active in social life (Pardo 1996) and that even the meaning of money differs depending on the social and
economic norms of a society (Parry and Bloch 1989).
автор этой статьи предлагает проанализировать и разобрать случаи мелкой коррупции, которая скорее помогает людям выжить, чем обогатиться, — в рамках
теории обмена подарками, предложенной Марселем Моссом (Marcel Mauss).
Основное внимание в статье сосредоточено на наиболее «коррумпированных» местах в Украине: высшее учебное заведение, больница, пост дорожно-патрульной службы,
что имеет целью подробный анализ того, что лежит в основе этих сделок. Помимо этого, рассматриваются роли, которые играют действующие лица этих механизмов, что позволяет распознать так называемую переходную зону между разными видами коррупции, — как это видно из примеров, рассмотренных по ходу статьи.
“If you want to measure academic outputs by results, but measure results through indicators, then academics are just numbers.” (thanks to Artem)
For some time already, academics from a number of regions of the world have been put under increasing pressure to publish in SCOPUS-indexed journals. “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” I was asked once.
It is neither, it is simply the result of a long change in the higher education sector that has been happening for some time now. When the higher education sector was such a scarcely populated world that you did not even need a PhD to be hired as a professor there was little necessity to ask who was better than whom. It was another world back then, romantically slow, less mobile and where word of mouth had functions that have been taken over by the internet now. It was generally assumed that whoever was in the profession, was someone more educated than the others and thus, almost automatically producing smart and quality outputs.
Much has changed since then. The number of people willing to enroll in a university has been constantly growing, a thing that significantly expanded the higher education sector, pushed academic entrepreneurs to establish new universities, expand departments and make higher education a mass phenomenon. If one compares the number of people who had potentially access to higher education fifty years ago and now results are likely to be astonishing. We now work in a sector and there is a necessity to ensure quality control.
One of the consequences of this change is that public funding for the universities is shrinking and not necessarily because budgets are dwindled. Not necessarily budgets are being cut everywhere. With a budget for higher education growing at a certain speed and higher education growing at twice that speed, money becomes simply not enough. We need some criteria to decide whether to give money to that or that university, to that or this discipline. Some criteria have to be used to allocate (limited) funds. The easiest, and possibly most logic, one is quality. Universities, or disciplines, that deliver more quality deserve more money. This faces us with at least two issues. First, how to objectively measure quality? And second, what happens with the universities, or disciplines, that do not make it into the Olympus of state-funded universities?
Foreword: on what criteria to build and sustain an academic career and reputation and how this book was conceived " If you want to measure academic outputs by results, but measure results through indicators, then academics are just numbers. " (thanks to Artem) For some time already, academics from a number of regions of the world have been put under increasing pressure to publish in SCOPUS-indexed journals. " Is it a good thing or a bad thing? " I was asked once. It is neither, it is simply the result of a long change in the higher education sector that has been happening for some time now. When the higher education sector was such a scarcely populated world that you did not even need a PhD to be hired as a professor there was little necessity to ask who was better than whom. It was another world back then, romantically slow, less mobile and where word of mouth had functions that have been taken over by the internet now. It was generally assumed that whoever was in the profession, was someone more educated than the others and thus, almost automatically producing smart and quality outputs. Much has changed since then. The number of people willing to enroll in a university has been constantly growing, a thing that significantly expanded the higher education sector, pushed academic entrepreneurs to establish new universities, expand departments and make higher education a mass phenomenon. If one compares the number of people who had potentially access to higher education fifty years ago and now results are likely to be astonishing. We now work in a sector and there is a necessity to ensure quality control. One of the consequences of this change is that public funding for the universities is shrinking and not necessarily because budgets are dwindled. Not necessarily budgets are being cut everywhere. With a budget for higher education growing at a certain speed and higher education growing at twice that speed, money becomes simply not enough. We need some criteria to decide whether to give money to that or that university, to that or this discipline. Some criteria have to be used to allocate (limited) funds. The easiest, and possibly most logic, one is quality. Universities, or disciplines, that deliver more quality deserve more money. This faces us with at least two issues. First, how to objectively measure quality? And second, what happens with the universities, or disciplines, that do not make it into the Olympus of state-funded universities? The quest for academic quality The first question is the main reason why I am publishing this book and I will try to give an overview here. I have added a short digression on the second question at the end of the section but, as fascinating as the topic is, that should be the subject of a separate book, or at least chapter. How to measure quality? As a general rule you need a controller or evaluator, a benchmark and some indicators, be these qualitative or quantitative. However, at the pace the higher education sector is developing quality control is indeed a challenge. Academia was born as a small circle of people working on things that were unintelligible for the rest of the world. Controlling quality was easier, not least because some criteria that we have now were absent. However, controlling quality
In this book I share my experiences hoping that it will be useful. Comments and feedback are welcome.
I would also be grateful if anyone could do the final copy-edit before going to the print. I plan to publish it with an independent publisher and have to take care of everything myself
Development, in any and each of its forms, consists of applying techniques, tools, approaches that have worked somewhere into a new environment with the expectation, or better hope, that it will somehow work.
Nobody can predict the way the new environment will react to this implantation and, as it was widely argued, "geography matters" but the outcome is a result not only of the choice of a right measure or instrument. It mostly depends on the way two or more parts can deal with a conflict.
Change (and innovation) is met with resistance in virtually every environment and situation. The level of resistance depends on how badly a person, a community, a country is in dire straits. How much they perceive change as necessary, or even desirable.
Pulling out a bad tooth is painful, no matter how necessary you see it...we first have to assume that the tooth we plan to pull out is the right one (sometimes in development, the wrong tooth is pulled...then people ask why a community or country becomes more reluctant to innovation…)
This means that whatever innovation you want to introduce, to maximise your potential effects, you need to get some kind of agreement by the local community, council, political elites and whoever else is involved in the decision.
This means not only to reckon with the formal structures and declarative wishes of a community "of course we want innovation, modernity, change" they will say. But change is disruptive, as Robertson and Acemoglu have argued and few gatekeepers will welcome it easily.
This, in addition to the ethical question “I want to help you...but do you want to be helped?”
What is the ideal balance between your and a community perceived needs? You, as an expert, might think to know what some people need. They, as the target group, think they know what is best for them
As Jobs said “people do not know what they want until they see it”...this might be true for marketing and nicely packaged and assembled laptop might tempt many
But do people really know what they want? And what happens if you see that what people feel they need is only a short-term need but in the long term will kill or harm them? How many interventions have brought short-term benefits but in the long run contributed to the destruction of an environment or a community? I am thinking of the documentary Darwin's Nightmare where the introduction of a new species of fish brought fishermen to catch larger fishes but mortally altered the local ecosystem with mostly predators surviving and no fishes left to eat small plants and insects…
This is difficult in an era where donors (and consequently development workers and organizations) are under pressure to show results already from the first years of an intervention…
and if a community does not see benefits immediately they will increase resistance to the innovation that you are bringing…
and, if you plan to have long-term effects, what should be your timeframe? More reasoned and perhaps beneficial interventions usually need a longer incubation time to maximize the outcomes and minimize the effects on an environment...but interventions usually happen in a situation of (relative) emergency...who has time to wait? And how much can we wait?
No answers today, only questions...but happy to be surrounded by people and situations challenging many of my beliefs….
Does your book take into account the role of middle range actors, such as intellectuals, in nation building processes? Intriguing question by Peter Rutland during the conference “Nationalism and the Market” at Universita La Sapienza, CERU
Time to reflect and give a more complex answer was short so I am uploading it here
Studies on nation building have extensively examined statist perspectives on nation building, which is what we initially tried to move away from with Isaacs and our “New tools and approaches” and that include the work of some middle actors.
However, intellectuals, civil society and other actors can still sign petitions, suggest interpretations and narratives on national identities that eventually make it to the headlines or national narratives.
With the current books we put at the centre of our inquiry events that will not make any noise and remain, in other words, invisible. Think of when a product becomes popular - Gangnam style in Korea or Turkish Cola some years ago, or unpopular - such as boycott of Russian products in Ukraine after the 2014 events. Even if they can be considered expression of national sentiments, their impact on a society will not be easy to grasp.
Companies will have figures and can estimate how much they have gained, or lost but they are not passive actors. Based on these figures they will have to decide on whether to stop, or keep on, selling a product. They might want to rebrand it or replace with some other product that suits the market better at some point.
But these choices can also embed a symbolic choice. Ethnic rebranding (see Zsombor Csaba’s paper) can contribute to reinforce a sense of national pride and thus, eventually, have a macro effect on identity construction. The message, in such case, would not use state official channels or middle actors but commercial ones. However, a simple marketing strategy might end up affecting the perception of national identity and various ethnic groups in a country might choose to consume, or not, a given product based on whether they support a given idea or not, on whether they try to integrate, or reject a national idea by ideologically consuming (or not) the nation (see Fox 2007).
We believe that it is worth paying attention at these phenomena, at the agency of common citizens and the way it creates synergies with market forces broadly defined (consumption, the culture industry, tourism) to be able to better understand some nuances in the construction of national identity in an era when these forces have become, symbolically or economically, as powerful as a state, at least in some cases.
What are the perks of becoming an evaluator or assessor for projects? Some people might see it as an extra income opportunity and in some cases, it is true. You are paid extra. But the cost-benefit analysis is “not the same” for everyone. It basically depends on how fast you are at reading, digesting, commenting. I know people who need 1-2 days to do a peer review for a journal. They still do reviews, but then they lose almost half of the working week to give comments to someone they do not know and, in general, do something they cannot claim any credit for. The same can be said for assessing books or projects. You are often paid but if you are a slow reader, or meticulous thinker, the money is not enough to buy out the time you lose. You ultimately know how fast you read, think and assess so you know how to decide how much you can take on. But in a long-term perspective, evaluations and assessments are an investment in your career.
Peer reviews of articles
There is somehow an expectation that you need to perform a given number of peer reviews per year. They are not formally required but you will be looked at like an alien if you declare that you have never done one, or one for a good journal. There is also a tacit reciprocity expectation: if you want your articles to be reviewed (and get people to spend time thinking of constructive comments for you), you should do the same for other, anonymous, scholars.
Besides, a top journal contacting you to perform a review may be regarded as evidence of the fact that you are visible or sufficiently established in your field to be contacted as an expert on a topic, or area.
Sometimes peer review is also a way to see where research in your area is going, learn about a paper on similar topics submitted. In addition, by spotting mistakes and imperfections, and in general by looking critically at someone’s work, might help you to better identify your own mistakes or understand what are the (potential) weakest points of an article.
Because it is unpaid, a peer review is, in some respects, a favor that you do for a journal. Once you submit an article to that very journal the editor might know your name. At any rate, you lose anonymity and you could simply mention that you reviewed for them when contacting one of the editors to discuss a possible submission and if the topic is suitable. Sometimes this could end up a win by you being invited to be on the editorial board (for instance if you have done many reviews and the journal is happy with your work).
Peer reviews of book proposals
Similar considerations apply to peer review of books: it is a sign that you are becoming established and a contact point with a series editor (sometimes, if the process is managed by an academic; there are cases where you are just in touch with an editorial assistant). The main difference is that you are paid some token that might be worth the effort, or not, depending on how fast you are able to write a review.
Peer reviews of funding applications
This is a much more a complex market and a proposal evaluator might become a full-time job. But, to become an evaluator for jobs that are paying well, you need to show previous experience in evaluation. You might thus want to start from the bottom, that is from donors that offer little or no money just to later claim that you are an experienced evaluator.
From a more strategic perspective, you will have a chance to see how projects are evaluated and, once you want to submit your own proposals, you will know more than a newcomer. You can also see how, and what, other people write, what are the most common mistakes in a project, thus becoming more skilled in spotting your own possible shortcomings.
In some cases, you might be given projects in your area, or topic, so to better understand what the tendencies are. Of course, it is illegal – or at least considered a conflict of interest – to submit your own project to a foundation for which you are doing evaluations for at the same time. But you could still assess one year and submit the next one, when you will be more knowledgeable, or more inspired.
One, two, or (too) many memberships? How many is too much?
The Scopus Diaries and the (Il)logics of Academic Survival
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-scopus-diaries-and-the-illogics-of-academic-survival/9783838211992
Perhaps I am not the most relevant person to explain how to choose a professional organization since I am a polygamous nomad of associations. I mean that I have been a member of many but never followed one regularly or dogmatically. I have colleagues who, more faithfully, attend the same conference(s) every year or refer to the same association all the time. However, my experience might also inspire some to do the same, or to avoid my path.
My strategy has been to go where the wind took me. Sometimes a colleague invited me into a panel, some other times I just decide to test an association or an event. Obviously, I cannot attend all conferences and be involved as a member all the time. But one can alternate. A colleague I met at a conference said, "This is a fine one if you come once every other year, not every year."
In the end, I am not very active in any of the organizations I gravitate towards, but I converse with people from various disciplines, areas and spend a bit of time with this group of people and a bit with that one. The advantage is that I constantly broaden my view on things, I can see my own research from a variety of perspectives, get useful and less useful feedback from a variety of disciplines and I somehow “befriend everyone.” The disadvantage, if I may call it so since I do not miss it, is that I am not progressing in status within any association. Nobody entrusts me with an important task or asks me to join a board or working group within the organization.
There is no best strategy but once a friend told me, and I agree, that people who become good at one thing reach success, or some kind of status, faster than people who invest into several things at the same time. But the latter, in the long run, are more likely to achieve more.
By the same token, I see two ideal-types of patterns of professional development, when it comes to membership and activeness in professional associations.
If you choose an association and start attending all of the meetings, chances are that you will end up mingling with the "right people." You will be asked to perform some tasks, help with organizing events, chair sections and will gain the trust of fellow members. You might eventually also move up to the board or be a part of the organizing committee for some larger events.
People within the association will come to know your name and at least get curious about what you are doing. Now, most associations have members based in several departments, and countries. Because the academic world is relatively small, chances are that within 4-5 years your name will sound familiar to a number of people, and departments, that are somehow related to the association.
But, once your professional life starts rotating around a particular association and you have a certain level of status there, why would you want to try something else? Why try and join another association that could give you a different perspective, and contacts within a different professional milieu, but where you would start from zero? It is still possible that you will be introduced to some key person from another association who already knows your work, so you do not really start from zero. But the general rule is that, if you feel too comfortable in a given environment, you tend to stay and have little incentives to explore the world beyond it.
A "nomadic" lifestyle, that is choosing to experience several conferences and test several associations without really finding a home, will allow you to explore several environments at the same time. But your interaction is likely to be less profound, or intense, than in the case where you invest yourself into one or two associations. You will find yourself often starting from the beginning at a conference, knowing only those who have invited you. You will also have to take part in a number of “graveyard panels” and start from zero again and again at each event.1
Chances are that you will eventually follow the pattern above and settle down with one or two associations. You will get there later than someone who has joined the association five years before but with some understanding of other associations and possibly more confident that this is what you want.
I see a strong analogy with the situation where you want to choose a partner. You can meet someone and think that you feel comfortable enough to commit for some years or you can go on and try several options for some time, before eventually making your choice. If you stop immediately you will have more time to build up and consolidate your relationship. At some point, you might ask yourself if the decision was too rushed, or how would you interact with different people. If you make your decision after trying a few partners, you will become more aware of what the alternatives are. Eventually, once you make your choice, you will start building a relationship "later," compared to those who have started a few years before you.
Making a decision about your position concerning a professional association is a strategic choice that you will have to deal with at some point in your career and it might be influenced by your desire to get a job in a particular place. If there is a university, or better a department, where you would like to work, try to figure out at what conferences, or around which journals, your potential colleagues tend to associate themselves with and try and join them. An informal conversation with a colleague from that department, at a conference dinner, sometimes is worth 1000 recommendation letters when you apply for a position.
#scopusdiaries #strategy #career #academia
Is it “good” or “bad” to have co-authors?
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-scopus-diaries-and-the-illogics-of-academic-survival/9783838211992
Co-authorship is tricky. I know that some universities now ask you, in case of co-authorship, to specify what parts of the paper you have written or contributed. Some other committees will ask your co-authors to sign a statement declaring how much of an effort (30%, 50%) they have put into a paper with you as co-author so to be clear what was your contribution to a study.
I also see the fear in some of the seminar participants' eyes (usually from the humanities) when I suggest that they could co-write, or co-edit, with some other colleagues. It seems like they are afraid of sharing the merits, or purity, of their ideas and that single authorship should be the norm. On the other extreme, there is a wide amount of disciplines acknowledging that multi-authorship is a reality in academia and is, in many respects, well regulated. There are unwritten but established rules to decide on the order of authors, and negotiations to decide who should be inserted where, in a given paper.
There are several possible attitudes towards co-authorship but, in general, co-authorship is not bad per se. There is nothing bad in being the 4th or even the 99th author, especially if we are talking about a highly cited paper. But if you are always the 5th or more author in a publication then someone, at some point, might ask why you are not leading any studies.
As a bottom line, one could take the definition of an independent scholar by the European Research Council. To be eligible for an ERC grant, you need to have at least one paper not jointly written with your supervisor. I have heard of some committees minimizing merits of applicants for a paper if they are listed as the 4th (or further) co-author of a paper. I would also avoid flagging too many papers for which you are listed as the 4th or the 5th author unless you can prove that the order of authors was alphabetical.
I have two principles that I use, with some flexibility, to determine the order of authors of a paper. One is that the person in charge of the paper, to coordinate the work, identify the journal, take the lead in addressing the comments, should go as a first author. The other is that, even if I am inserted as second or later co-author in many influential papers, I should still publish at least once a year a paper of which I am the first author. In my view, the first author is the one who somehow takes the lead in the research group and going as first author demonstrates some kind of initiative, leadership skills and the capacity to remain active (or pro-active, since you bring together authors, manage them and actively look for solutions to issues that arise during the submission process).
For many people that I have met, and who come from disciplines where you claim your credits alone, co-authorship sounds exotic, at best. To some extent, I would tend to agree. If you are an anthropologist who has spent 12 months in the field and want to share your findings, and reflections, you have no room for a second, let alone third, author. But you could first publish a paper based on your novel data and then try and compare them with those by other scholars for a comparative paper. When, how and whether to engage with co-authorship is ultimately your choice. But in an academic sector where citations and h-indexes are crucial to survival, co-authorship is strategically vital to most, not to say all, of us.
As a scholar, you will have to compete with other scholars from cognate disciplines. If many of them take advantage of co-authorship to enhance their profile, then the problem is yours. You might get penalized for a fellowship, a promotion or your department might be put under pressure because it has had not “enough impact” once impact is measured, by the number of citations faculty have.
If you are in science and are used to multi-authored papers perhaps you already know it, but for the social sciences and humanities this is an open market and deserves some reflections. Think about co-authoring with 15 more colleagues and its advantages. At the very basic level, each time one of your co-authors cite themselves you earn a citation that does not count as self-citation. By contrast, if you cite yourself 15 times, it might look as you are the sole person reading yourself. For some grant applications, you are asked to provide the number of citations you attracted but exclude self-citations, which could bring the number significantly down in case few other people cite you. In addition, the more you have co-authors, the more it is likely that some of them might be more known than you and will attract citations and readership to a paper you co-authored.
I was sometimes questioned since, I was told, in the social sciences and humanities it is not a usual thing to have co-authors. But then I still remember my shock when I realized that in my department (when I was in geography) colleagues from medical geography could gather as many as 10-15 co-authors and attract hundreds of citations very quickly. And they would still be competing with other (single-authored, undercited) social scientists. I also remember a friend working in biology complaining about his low number of citations. When I went to check, he had many more than most of the people I knew, at the same career stage, in the social sciences.
In my dream world I am sitting in my room reflecting on some fundamental questions about science and then I receive a call. Someone needs me to deliver a lecture on something and are ready to arrange everything for me to be there. I am not excluding that, at some stage of your career, you will fit into this superhero-like scenario. But it might be a long way off before that happens.
Until then, guest lectures are usually the result of chance. A paper that you have published at the right moment in the right journal, a casual encounter at a conference or on the Internet. I once saw on LinkedIn someone looking for guest speakers and I contacted her. To my surprise, she invited me to deliver a speech at her department's lunch seminar series and paid for everything.
As a scholar, you need guest lectures for at least three reasons.
First, in a number of cases, you are requested to mention on your CV where you have delivered speeches (the higher the university ranks, the better it looks on your CV)
Second, a guest lecture is the equivalent to word of mouth in academia: you engage with a relatively small public (smaller than your potential readers if you published on an Internet blog) but interaction is more intense and engaging
Third, it allows you to get feedback from different publics, scholars from other disciplines or individuals simply unfamiliar with your work. If they like you as a person, it is more likely that they will retain your name and read, or at least notice, your next publications.
A guest lecture has no standard format. At one extreme of the spectrum, there is you delivering a speech in front of ten thousand people at a major event where you are flown in in business class and everything is arranged around you. At the other extreme, you just walk next door from your university (for instance, if your city has two universities) and talk in front of 10-15 colleagues who have never heard of your work (except, perhaps, the one who has invited you to their university).
A guest lecture can be arranged easily and the only pre-requisite is to have someone in the guest institute who thinks it is a good idea to have you over. They can be arranged in the frame of a fellowship you are holding at another university, in a neighboring town, after a conference you have attended at a university, if you stay one or two extra days. They can, of course, result from an invitation from a colleague who has found you through an Internet search and who has funds to invite you. But they can also be done in the course of a journey or a holiday (but make sure the people you are going on holiday with are not against that). You have a colleague working in a city that you need to visit anyway. Your colleague could find a room, some snacks and circulate the message throughout their university.
What do you do when this happens? Should you publish with them?