a panel on 'Strange Individuals' for the CESS annual conference in Michigan, Oct. 28-31

Dear colleagues,

I’m trying to organize a panel on 'Strange Individuals' for the CESS annual conference in Michigan, Oct. 28-31 (http://www.units.muohio.edu/cess/CFP_2010.html). The proposal is given below. Unfortunately, the idea came rather late, the deadline for submissions of proposals is very close: March 5. Would you find it interesting and possible to participate?

Thank you so much for your attention, apologies for possible reappearing of this mail,

Best regards, Olga Bessmertnaya.

Subject:

panel proposal, CESS annual conference, Michigan

From: Olga Bessmertnaya

Date: Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:30:44 +0300
To: CESN-LIST@LISTSERV.MUOHIO.EDU

Dear colleagues,

I’d like to catch the remaining days before the deadline to propose organizing a panel for the annual CESS conference (Michigan) on ‘STRANGE INDIVIDUALS’ across cultures, regions, and periods in Central Eurasia. The ‘strange’ ones include, on the one hand, those taken as such in their milieus: all sorts of adventurers, impostors, and ‘tricksters’ crossing cultural, confessional and social boundaries, those in search of their identities, changing and ‘trading’ them, those making unusual choices, developing original strategies, breaking norms and/or developing them to their extremes, and suggesting new ones. On the other hand, they are those persons in your research area, that you yourself find something strange about, something unusual and unrecognized in existing literature. The topic might be taken through a biography or just a single situation. The aim of the panel is to compare individual experiences in the social contexts that challenge the stable and fixed identities and ways of behavior, exposing an individual face to face with the Other, and/or face to face with the Past and Future – and thus to better understand those broad contexts as such. To see differences in the odd forms of individual behavior in ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ (‘traditional’) societies would be of special interest.

Depending on your topics proposed, the geographical and chronological scope of the panel might be more concretely defined.

My presentation will be on a writer and journalist in late imperial Russia: born Jewish and baptized to Orthodoxy, he reinvented his identity as Circassian and Muslim, and worked as a State agent against Muslim opposition. I’ll consider his choice of identities, strategies of deceit, and reasons for the opposite sides to trust him, so as to analyze, in the context of modernizing processes, the meaning of Muslim belonging/otherness in the different cultural and political settings involved.
If you’d like to present or participate in this panel as chair or discussant, please contact me ASAP at olgabessm@gmail.com

Best regards,

Olga Bessmertnaya, Ph.D.,
Senior researcher,
Russian State U. for Humanities, Moscow