Helsinki, Finland
1-2 October 2026
Deadline for proposals – 30 May 2026
The workshop seeks to bring together scholars working on reproduction in Eastern Europe, the (post)Soviet space, and (former) socialist countries across the Global South to explore how (post)socialist societies negotiated their identities and futures through reproductive politics and practices. The aim is to analyze knowledge production, connections between government policies and individual reproductive choices as well as differences, entanglements and conflicting positions among the countries of the socialist bloc.
A non-exhaustive list of topics to be discussed might include:
- Reproduction and health care: Expansion and management of prenatal and maternal health care
- Demographic concerns and reproductive politics: Pronatalism, mortality rates, populational health concerns, eugenic tendencies
- Pregnancy and birth from a perspective of micro history, everyday history or history of the body
- Cultural (re)production: representations of sexual relations, childbearing and birth in literature and film
- Family planning and abortion
- Gender as an aspect of reproduction and reproductive politics,
- (Technical) materialities of reproduction and maternal health care
- Medical sciences and reproduction: perinatal medicine, prenatal diagnostics and reproductive medicine
- Protection of reproductive health and pregnancy: environmental and occupational health concerns
Papers that focus on so-called peripheral regions and/or that address a transnational or global dimension of reproduction and/or its politics are especially welcome. In terms of time, the workshop is planned to span the long 20th century, with a focus on the era of socialism, but also the decades before and after.
Read the full Call for Papers here.
The workshop will take place in Helsinki on October 1st-2nd, 2026. It is organized by the Helsinki office of the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO) The organizers will cover the accommodation and travel costs (up to a maximum amount) for the invited participants.
Please submit your paper proposals (ca. 300 words) and a short CV to Birte Kohtz at [email protected] by May 30th, 2026
Applicants will be informed about participation in late June 2026.
