Call for Contributions to a panel of the International Conference: Development, Solidarity and the Mutual Interest, University of Vienna, 2-3 December 2016

Panel: Developing the Others, Improving Oneself

The efforts to develop under-developed areas of the world have recently been given increasing attention in historical research which has re-discovered that the socialist world system had its own corresponding efforts labelled Solidarity. We feel that this new field of research is properly situated within the broader approach of Global History. This means that comparisons and transfers take centre stage.

The activities in the Development respectively Solidarity Sector brought into circulation massive flows of people including experts, advisors, development workers, contract workers and students. That the enterprise of developing others – which is at the core of so called "Technical Assistance" – is not without repercussions for the personality of the developer, and how this experience has been described by such personal actors themselves, shall be discussed in the last panel of the conference: Developing the others, improving oneself. Contributions in this panel are supposed to draw on the vast corpus of self-accounts given by development workers in published (reports, memoirs, diaries) and unpublished (diaries, reports and accounts, self-criticism) form. They focus on situations and narrative figures which link the exercise of development or solidarity on a personal level with an enhancement of the developer's self.

We invite proposals for contributions to this panel (including an outline of 500-700 words accompanied by a short CV and a list of publications) by 20 May to:
berthold.unfried@univie.ac.at; eric.burton@univie.ac.at