Deadline: August 11, 2022
The Central Asia Research Cluster seeks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine the roots of knowledge production and preservation in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia. The project recontextualizes cultural heritage, histories, and memory that illuminate and complicate the many layers of center-periphery relations at local, national, and regional levels. This cluster aims not only to focus on “peripheral” stories and archives in a geographical sense, but also to engage with the diversity of genealogies of thinking, remembering, performing, and producing knowledge in Central Asia.
All disciplines are welcome. Graduate students, emerging scholars, and scholars based in the region are especially encouraged to participate in the research cluster. The cluster organizers are committed to creating a supportive environment for all contributors. We have secured funding to provide limited support for translation and editing services. This transnational collaboration is further supported by two academic journals and a scholarly press.
Preliminary Stage
To increase collaboration with scholars in the region, the cluster organizers will be hosting an Author meet and greet event through Zoom on Thursday, August 4, 2022. Participation in the author meet and greet event is strongly encouraged (sign up by filling out this form). At this event, prospective authors can identify potential collaborators. However, applicants can also choose to work with current collaborators, or submit an abstract as the sole author on a project. Through a blind review process, the Central Asia Research Cluster editorial board will evaluate abstracts for appropriateness and overall suitability of the proposal to the unifying conceptual framework of this project.
Manuscript Submission and Review Process
The manuscripts created for this project can either be co-published, or submitted by individual researchers. Only original research that has not previously been published will be considered. Each manuscript will be evaluated through the normal review processes of Slavic Review and Slavic & East European Information Resources to see whether it is acceptable for publication on its own merits. Articles not selected by Slavic Review and Slavic & East European Information Resources to be part of the cluster issues will undergo a separate review process performed by the Central Asia Research Cluster editorial board and upon selection, be published as part of a collective monograph.
Article manuscripts should highlight the conceptual impact and analytic and interpretative themes of the work. Manuscripts should be around 8,000 words. Footnotes may additionally make up about 3,000 additional words. Manuscripts must be 3,500 words at minimum; submitting a manuscript much shorter than 8,000 words, however, will limit possible avenues for publication. Authors specifically hoping to submit to Slavic Review should aim to write 8,000 words of body text and 3,000 words of footnotes (around 11,000 words total).
Abstracts (250 words) with a short bio must be submitted by August 11, 2022, to the cluster organizers (centralasiaresearchcluster@gmail.com). In addition, please indicate the language you will be using to write the manuscript. In order to foster collaboration, we are accepting abstracts in English and Russian. We welcome submissions from authors based in any country. Those abstracts given the green light must be developed into papers by January 31, 2023.