Deadline: November 15, 2025
Health, social welfare, and the organization of family and social life have been central concerns for historians of socialist states. This conference invites a fresh perspective, examining how intimacy—as both concept and practice—offers new insights into how socialist institutions fostered, reimagined, or contained bonds between parents and children, patients and practitioners, and citizens and the state itself.
How might foregrounding intimacy reshape our understanding of health, medicine, and welfare in Europe under state socialism? We particularly welcome work that explores the role of expertise and caregiving practices within diverse institutional spaces. We are interested in a breadth of state socialist institutions, spanning hospitals and clinics, nurseries and retirement homes, asylums and sanitoria, maternity wards and childcare centers, among many others. By centering intimacy in institutional settings, this conference seeks to generate new histories of medicine, society, and the everyday that reveal socialism’s distinctive social worlds.
Continue reading “CFP: Intimate States: New Histories of Medicine, Welfare, & Care under Socialism”