The three-day workshop “On The (Im)Possibility of Conceptualizing Social Change in Eastern Europe” will gather researchers from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory in Belgrade. Much has been said and written over the past decades on the impossibility of even imagining, let alone conceptualizing in institutional terms, any kind of more radical social change at the global level, in conditions of the “exhaustion of utopian energies”. The main question that the workshop will address is: to what extent is this problem aggravated in the context of postsocialism, where the experience of the breakdown of utopian projects is direct and lived? Does such experience paralyze us even when it comes to having confidence in the possibility of partial, non-radical changes or does it, quite to the contrary, contain certain components that are necessary preconditions for getting out of the global conceptual and political dead-end we find ourselves in? The language of the workshop is English, and the programme is enclosed.

Programme