The personal is politicalCFP: a conference in Cambridge, 26-27 August
"The personal is political": The interfaces between Politics and Culture across Europe in the 1970s
Cambridge, U.K. 08/09
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Erato Basea (University of Oxford)
Kathrin Fahlenbrach (University of Halle-Wittenberg)
Sebastian Gehrig (University of Heidelberg)
Martin Klimke (German Historical Institute and University of Heidelberg)
Christiana Mygdali (University of Oxford)
Nikolaos Papadogiannis (University of Cambridge)
Joachim Scharloth (University of Zurich)
Cambridge, U.K. 26.08.2009-27.08.2009, Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge
Deadline: 15.05.2009
Aims and scope: The collapse of the dictatorial regimes in Spain, Portugal and Greece, the Charter ´77, the activities of the second-wave feminist and of the ecologist movement and the emergence of Interrail train program are some of the multiple facets of the 1970s. The dynamics generated during this period have had an impact on theoretical endeavours, political activism as well as a plethora of social and cultural patterns. Still, to this day the academic treatment of the 1970s in the domain of social sciences in general and historiography in particular remains somewhat modest. As historians Axel Schildt and Detlef Siegfried argue, the historiography of the 1970s basically constitutes a "no-man´s land" suffering from two major deficits: Most works consist of national case-studies (mainly of the Federal Republic of Germany, France and Italy), and are predicated on the assumption that politicization in the 1970s should be judged solely against the metaphorical "1968," either as an "afterlive" or its "discontinuity"- with the latter mainly understood as a "retreat to the private". In this vein, the analysis of particular political and social subjects, namely radical left-wing organizations, terrorist groups and "counter-cultural" actors, such as rock music bands, is prioritized, even though there are still many lacunae in the examination of these actors as well.