Civil Wars: Narratives, Memories, Identities.

The Laboratory of Social and Migration Studies of the University of Western Macedonia invites paper proposals for a bilingual conference (English and Greek) to be held in Kastoria, Greece on 14-15 December 2024.

Call for Abstracts

Civil Wars: Narratives, Memories, Identities

This Conference calls for researches from a variety of disciplines (History, Political Science, Social Anthropology, Sociology, Social Psychology) that give ‘voice’ to all those who are not represented in the archival material (which usually focus on the more privileged voices and higher-ranking members, socially and politically, in local societies). Thus, we wish to enable a sense of empowered history-making by those who are not depicted in official historical sources.

Through the study and analysis of memory and the layers of such constructions of remembering and forgetting, invaluable information as regards lived experiences in Civil Wars are unveiled for those generations still alive today, but also subsequent generations, through inter/intragenerational transmission and storytelling.

The Conference invites research on Civil Wars in the 20^th century worldwide and aims to provide a comparative lens in order to ascertain both similarities and differences across chronological, spatial and temporal contexts and within regional diversities. Here, the focus is not just on the nation-state as territorial signifier, but rather on the historical parameters of such cultural geographies.

The conference invites papers investigating:

• political identities and action
• ethnic and national identities
• everyday life
• childhood
• population movements
• gender and generational relations
• memories and trauma in relation to civil wars
• reconciliation and development
• the (re)construction of civil war through (contemporary) public discourse
• conspiracy theories/disinformation about civil wars
• methodological and theoretical issues

The conference will be hybrid with live and online presentations through zoom and will be live streamed via YouTube.

The conference is supported by an ISRF Award for the Project entitled “Narratives of the Greek Civil War: Memory and Political Identities as Public History” (2023-2024) https://www.isrf.org/fellows-projects/narratives-of-the-greek-civil-war/

Abstract submission

Academics, researchers, and professionals are invited to submit a 250-300 word abstract of their papers/presentations, either in English or in Greek, by Sunday 15 September 2024, at the following email: civilwarsconference2024@gmail.com.

Each abstract should include the title of the paper/presentation, the purpose and objectives, the methodology, and the main findings/conclusions of the paper (where possible).

Each abstract should also include a brief bio (up to 100 words) with institutional affiliation and email address.

Evaluation of abstracts

Each abstract submitted will be subjected to the anonymous judgment of Scientific Committee reviewers on the basis of scientific ethics, quality, and originality.

The outcome of the evaluation may be acceptance of the paper for presentation at the conference, conditional acceptance with amendments, or non-acceptance.

All accepted papers will be presented during the conference either in English or in Greek. Each presentation will be up to 15 minutes in length and there will be 5 minutes for discussion at the end of each presentation.

Important dates

Submission of abstracts: September 15, 2024

Notification of acceptance of abstracts: October 31, 2024

Registration deadline: November 30, 2024 (early bird registration by November 15)

Conference days: December 14-15, 2024
Submission of papers for the Conference proceedings in English only (optional): 30 April 2025

Conference participation fees: 

• Graduate, postgraduate and PhD students: No fees
• Onsite participants: 150 Euros (early bird registration 120 Euros)
• Online participants: 100 Euros (early bird registration 80 Euros)

Conference Proceedings

Each full paper submitted by April 30, 2025, will be considered to be included in the Conference Proceedings and will be published after evaluation. Selected papers will be included in a collective volume published in U.K.

Each paper must be first presented at the Conference in order to be eligible for publication in the Conference Proceedings and the collective volume.

Any paper submitted for publication in the Conference Proceedings needs to be original and not published or submitted simultaneously in the proceedings of other conferences or in a journal, fulfilling the conditions of “no plagiarism”.

Detailed submission instructions will be provided after the confere