CALL FOR PAPERS – Revolutions – A Conference

26/10/2016

September 29 to October 1, 2017
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada

In the 100th anniversary year of the Russian Revolutions, our conference focuses on the theme of revolution. We want to speak to the widespread and widely varying causes, contexts, conditions and consequences of modern revolutions. There are many types, of course, but we are primarily interested in the often spectacular political, social or economic events that confront particular institutional, social and ideological regimes. The revolts of colonized, enslaved and indigenous peoples from Tyrone, Toussaint, Tupac and Tecumseh, through the revolutions which defined the west like the English and the French to today’s Bolivarian, Arab Spring, and colour revolutions, have transformed politics, state structures, economies, cultures and societies. Revolutions require imagination: ideologies motivate actors, events confound them and prompt new explanations. By some accounts, we are still living in age of revolutions; others question their possibility today.

“Revolutions” share a fraught history with the broader democratization of life in the modern world. They reshape the structures of colonialism and imperialism, patriarchy and racism. Theorists from both the left and right—a distinction, in itself, revolutionary in its origins—have made the promotion of, or reaction to, revolutions a central part of social and political thought. Attempts to contain or spread revolutionary ideologies and forces have played, and continued to play, pivotal roles in geopolitics.

Within this broad framework we invite considerations of past and present “Revolutions”, their causes, characters and consequences. We will, however, consider other revolutions (Scientific, technological, artistic etc.) in terms of their association with watershed moments in social, political or economic life.