The ASEEES Annual Convention 2022 will open a broad discussion on this year’s main theme Precarity in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, as well as within the academic institutions that study these regions. It will focus on the increasingly unstable and uncertain conditions shaping work, life, and knowledge production—conditions that will continue to extend far beyond employment alone, shaping mobility, health, social inequality, and the politics of cultural production.
While precarity will often be framed as a contemporary outcome of global economic transformation, the event will also emphasize its deeper histories and long-term trajectories. In Eastern Europe and Eurasia in particular, societies will have developed diverse ways of experiencing, responding to, and navigating these vulnerabilities—offering critical perspectives on how precarity is lived and contested across time and space.
At the same time, the discussion will turn inward toward academia itself, where precarious employment conditions will remain both widely criticized and structurally embedded. Universities will continue to rely on forms of insecure labor even as scholars and students highlight their human and intellectual costs, revealing a tension that will shape academic life across institutions.
Dr. Piotr Goldstein will present his paper ‘Everyday Activism, Activist Agency, and Democratic Backsliding in Serbia’, as well as present his ethnographic documentary ‘Spółdzielnia/Cooperative‘ within the convention’s film programme.