Thinking beyond “the national” is here to stay. Though recent events in Central and Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space have brought the continued relevance of borders into stark relief, we are more than ever in need of a toolkit that makes sense of processes, events and patterns occurring and recurring beyond the nation-state. At the same time, when dealing with the already-ambiguous and contested limits of “Central Europe”, “Eastern Europe”, “the Balkans”, or “the Caucasus”, thinking transnationally may also transform previous notions of “region”. As such, the overarching aim of our conference is to debate both the concrete and the theoretical issues that stem from de-centring and re-contextualising both the nation-state, and other sub-ordinate and super-ordinate levels of analysis.

We look forward to submissions that are cross-cultural, cross-national, and multi-disciplinary: historical, cultural, political, economic, social, linguistic and beyond. We are particularly interested in papers addressing the conference theme but also welcome other research dealing with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, South-East Europe and the former Soviet Union, as well as papers exploring the relationships between these regions and actors outside them. Topics can include but are not limited to the following areas:

› research methodologies and (inter)disciplinary challenges in a transnational context;
› networks of knowledge, ideologies and in uence: regional versus transnational;
› migration: global issues, transnational patterns, national responses;
› making sense of “ flows”: what gets transferred – ideas, objects, people, and how going beyond/across borders transforms their interrelationships;
› institutions and economies: inter-, supra- or trans-national?
› recontextualising “nationalism” in light of the transnational turn;
› cosmopolitanism and the transnational: ideals and practices of global citizenship;
› aesthetics of transnationalism: visual culture and cultural critique;
› the politics and linguistics of CEE languages: national entanglements, regional and local perspectives.

The conference invites applications from postgraduate students and early career researchers from the Social Sciences and Humanities. Please send a 250-word abstract and an academic CV to
postgraduateconference2016@gmail.com by 9 December 2015.

The language of the conference is English. We invite submissions of papers of no more than 20 minutes in length. Please contact us should you wish to propose a fully-formed three-speaker panel, attaching the relevant documents for all participants. Successful applicants will be noticed by 18 December 2015. Some travel expenses may be covered for non-UK applicants, but please seek alternate sources of funding beforehand.

For more information on research at SSEES please visit: www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/research.