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Studying the Balkans Globally Workshop Department of Politics Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK) Belgrade - Belgrade, 3 April 2020We are pleased to announce a call for written contributions and an invitation to a one-day workshop at the Belgrade-based Faculty of Media and Communications (FMK). Southeast Europe (SEE) features prominently as an object of study across social sciences. It has proven to be an almost inexhaustive source of materials for topics as diverse as memory, peace and conflict, democratisation, transformations of capitalism, gender politics, justice, and migration. Yet, in many of these discussions, the region remains a source of data, rather than knowledge: local dynamics are interpreted in epistemologies and frameworks residing firmly in the power-centres of international academies, with ‘theory’ happening elsewhere. The workshop seeks to challenge this positioning by situating regional studies of Southeast Europe in larger debates in social science. First, it hopes to develop a SEE perspective torecent efforts to globalise, provincialize, and decolonise social sciences. Despite the proximity between SEE and postcolonial studies from where these efforts emerge, SEE contributions toprovincializing social science have yet to be explicitly formulated. Second, the workshop takes forward the emergence of global and transregional approaches to area studies. In studyingthe Balkans globally, the workshop aims to identify tools for understanding the region in new circuits of migration and networks of economic and political integration. With these twobroad themes in mind, the workshop will bring together interdisciplinary scholars to formulate innovative ways of studying the Balkans globally. We invite contributions related (but not in any way limited) to these questions across disciplines:• What are the current trends in analytical and methodological approaches to the Balkans?• What would it mean to put in conversation area studies with specific conceptual frameworks across different disciplines (political science, history, sociology, international relations, anthropology)?• Can we still talk about ‘the region’ in times of a hardening EU border within it?• What kinds of methodological, analytical, and empirical openings to provincializing social sciences from SEE exist?• What are some of the pathways of critiquing and finding alternatives to Eurocentrism in approaches to SEE?The workshop is convened by Katarina Kušić, Spring 2020 visiting scholar at the PoliticsDepartment and the Centre for Comparative Conflict Studies (CFCCS), and an ESRC post-doctoral fellow at the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University. The workshop is supported by FMK and the Economic and Social Research Council (UK).Please send abstracts of 300-500 words to Katarina Kušić (kak12@aber.ac.uk) by February 15, 2020. Inter/trans-disciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged!The working languages of the workshop are BCSM and English. Participants will be notified of acceptance by March 21, 2020. The workshop format will be based on an interactive discussion of short (2,000-3,000 words) pieces. Possible publications plans will be discussed in the workshop. Regional travel and accommodation will be covered for selected participants.Information: https://fmk.singidunum.ac.rs/konkursi/studying-the-balkans-globally/