Call for papers
Scientific Utopias in Soviet Union
Fiction, science and power
(1917-1991)
International
Conference
Paris
23-24
SEPTEMBER 2016
Organization: Grégory Dufaud, Ioulia Podoroga, Larissa Zakharova
Scientific
committee: Anna Åberg (FMSH/CERCEC),
Korine Amacher (Geneva University), Catherine Depretto (Univeristy Paris-IV),
Leonid Heller (Lausanne University), Alexei Kojevnikov (University of British
Columbia), Nikolai Krementsov (University of Toronto), Valéry Pozner (CNRS), Egle Rindzeviciute (SciencesPo-Paris), Alexandr Dmitriev (Higher School
of Economics - Moscow)
Since the fall of the Soviet Union,
history of science has made significant progress. One topic however was
disregarded: scientific utopia, fascinating and intriguing, because situated on
the border between literature and science. Nikolai Krementsov is one of the few
historians to deal with this topic. In Revolutionary Experiments, on the basis of several literary
works, he focuses on medicine in the 1920s, further extending the reflections
exposed in his book on Aleksandr Bogdanov. Unsuccessful rival of Lenin,
Bogdanov abandoned political life to devote himself to writing. Through science fiction,
he did not only expose his vision of socialism, but also theorized the role of
medicine and blood transfusion in the transformation of the social world. As
suggested by the example of Bogdanov, scientific utopia, as social utopia,
offers an imaginary model for a new type of society and wishes to facilitate
its realization.
This
conference aims to understand how fiction, thanks to its heuristic function,
managed to participate in the transformation of scientific activity and
reconfigure science and power relation. First of all, we will focus on the
relation between fiction and science, in order to explore how literature and
film have taken over and readapted some of the concepts based on scientific
discoveries and, conversely, how science used the imagery proposed by fiction
to sustain its discourse, challenge its findings or launch the brand new
experiments. This double movement is clearly mediated by power. This is why we
will be attentive to the social command and the mechanisms of censorship at
work.
Through this relation between fiction, science and power we also wish to
explore the idea of progress and its meaning during this period. If Soviet
authorities made of science mother of progress, the belief in the impending
communism started fading in the sixties. To what extent have scientific utopias
reflected this evolution? What kind of imagery did they offer to the public?
Utopias are rooted in the reality of their time and reveal its concerns. Then,
what are the concerns they convey? Have they developed a discourse on risk that
scientists would then reappropriate? For what reasons?
This conference addresses all the disciplines in the humanities and
social sciences (history, sociology, philosophy, literature studies, etc.).
Every field of Soviet science, the best known as well as the most marginal, are
to be examined. All works of fiction can be analyzed, as long as they fall
within literature or cinema. Our focus is not one genre in particular (utopia,
fantastic or science fiction), but a body of works of different status, whose
common feature is the use and the reappropriation of scientific discoveries in
order to imagine the future.
We invite
contributions dealing with following questions:
1.
Scientific concepts and discoveries
in fiction
–
variety
of imagery proposed by scientific utopias;
–
discoveries
and innovations at the heart of this imagery;
–
meanings
given to the idea of progress;
–
fears
and concerns expressed by scientific utopias.
2. Scientific utopias and science:
–
the
role of fiction in scientific thinking and controversies;
–
the
role of fiction in the reconfiguration of relations between scientific
disciplines;
–
scientific
ethics with regard to scientific utopias;
–
the
use of scientific utopias in order to obtain recognition of a project by
authorities or a scientific institution.
2.
Scientific utopias tested by the society:
–
spreading
of scientific utopias and its audience;
–
scientific
utopias and popularization of knowledge and techniques;
–
scientific
utopias and power, the role of censorship.
If you
are interested in presenting a paper at this conference, please send a 300
word-long abstract and a short bio to the following e-mail addresse: sovietscienceandfiction@gmail.com
by November 30th, 2015
