Konstanz, October 9–10, 2025 / CfP Deadline: December 10, 2024

Organizers: Katerina Suverina (U of Konstanz), Tatiana Klepikova (U of Regensburg), Nikolay Lunchenkov (TU Munich)

Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, the HIV/AIDS virus has caused one of the longest-lasting and deadliest pandemics in human history.[1] This pandemic has had vastly different fates across the world, shaping the image of whole continents (Africa),[2] animating identitarian movements (gay and lesbian movements in the US, the UK, and Western Europe),[3] or facing silence in the public discourse (socialist and post-socialist countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia).[4]

While primarily situated in the domain of medical science, in Western countries, this pandemic has drawn close attention of researchers focused on the cultural, historical, and anthropological analyses of the phenomenon of HIV/AIDS. They emphasize that the virus has played a central role in challenging not only the healthcare system but also academia, especially the humanities. As Stuart Hall rightly observes, HIV/AIDS “challenges us in its complexity, and in so doing has things to teach us about the future of serious theoretical work.” [5]. American researcher Paula A. Treichler, echoing Hall’s ideas, characterizes HIV/AIDS as an “epidemic of signification”[6] and so does Susan Sontag who famously speaks about “AIDS and its metaphors” in an eponymous essay, where she points out that the question of the new virus is a question of language and representation[7]. In advancing these theorizations of the pandemic, these and other scholars urge us to pause in response to a crisis that creates confusion, panic, and an acceleration of fear, and to diagnose societies, not patients.

Our conference orients this call for building up theoretical work in the humanities and social sciences in relation to the HIV/AIDS pandemic towards Eastern Europe and Central Asia. This region has infamously been a hotspot of the pandemic in Eurasia,[8] with the situation worsening steadily. UNAIDS reports foreground ideological rather than medical reasons behind the growing number of HIV-positive people in Eastern Europe.[9] Since the very arrival of the virus in the region during the socialist era, local governments and religious authorities have played a crucial role in silencing the HIV/AIDS-related discourse, obscuring the situation from the public, or weaponized it.[10]

While biomedical professionals and the NGO-sector have been attuned to the growing numbers and have addressed the situation in professional forums,[11] researchers in the humanities and social sciences with expertise in our region are yet to develop comprehensive theoretical approaches to this virus and its role in the socialist and post-socialist context. To this end, we invite researchers and artists to consider the following questions:

What do we know about HIV/AIDS outside the Western world – in Eastern Europe and Central Asia? What happens when we look at the history, culture, and politics of these regions through their relation to the HIV/AIDS? How have these regions imagined HIV/AIDS, and how have they, in turn, been imagined by others through the virus? What was the role of socialism and the post-socialist condition in the development of the pandemic in our region? What do transnational and transregional solidarities in treating the virus and/or silencing it tell us about global flows of power, ideology, and capital? What stigmas has the pandemic fostered? What are the affective histories of this virus? How does the HIV/AIDS lens contribute to our understanding of histories of violence and vulnerability in Eastern Europe and Central Asia? And how can it shape the advancement of critical theory in our Area Studies?

We invite academic and artistic contributions from Cultural Studies, Anthropology, the History of Law, the History of Sexuality, Gender and Queer Studies, the History of Medicine, Media Studies, and other disciplines that look at cultural, social, and biopolitical aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that align with the questions above and go beyond them.

Please submit an abstract of about 250 words and a short bio by December 10, 2024
to katerina.suverina@uni-konstanz.de AND tatiana.klepikova@ur.de. Following the selection of participants in December 2024, organizers will be applying for third-party funding to cover travel and accommodation costs – in particular, we are endeavoring to offer support to early-career researchers and colleagues from lower-income countries.