Humans, Animals, Nature: Everyday Life in (Post-)Conflict Societies in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the Caucasus since 1989

The Early Career Researchers of the GSOSES/UR are pleased to inform you about their 8th Annual Graduate Workshop. The workshop will focus on the topic 'Humans, Animals, Nature: Everyday Life in (Post-)Conflict Societies in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the Caucasus since 1989'. It will take place from February 4-5, 2027, in Regensburg. The deadline for paper submissions is 20 November 1st, 2026.

13 October 2026

8th Graduate Workshop

Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies (University of Regensburg)

Humans, Animals, Nature: Everyday Life in (Post-)Conflict Societies in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the Caucasus since 1989

4–5 February 2027

Regensburg

The Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies at the University of Regensburg, in cooperation with the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World, is pleased to announce the upcoming 8th Graduate Workshop.

As we were drafting this call for papers, travellers from a train from the east to the west of Ukraine were forced to get off in the middle of the night and seek for shelter from a Russian airstrike. This has become part of everyday life for many Ukrainians for the past four and a half years. What struck one of the observers was that small children, as well as pets, were silent: no cries, no barks, no meows. Similar scenes could be witnessed in Bosnia or Chechnya, in Kosovo or Georgia, in Nagorno-Karabakh or Transnistria, and elsewhere in the region. Everyday life does not end after the first airstrikes or the first burst of machine-gun fire. It continues. But is it still “normal”? Can we still speak about everyday life during armed conflict and afterwards for people, animals, and their environment affected and altered by war?

War does not simply interrupt everyday life but transforms how it is experienced and organised. Research on “everyday war” and on violence becoming incorporated into the “ordinary” has shown how people across generations, genders, and social and geographical settings negotiate and reconstruct “normal” life during and after armed conflict. Alongside this focus on human experience, posthumanist thought has prompted scholars to reconsider animal agency and to place animals at the centre of narratives of everyday life. Beyond human–animal relations, “warfare ecology” treats preparations, war, and postwar activities as overlapping stages with consequences for both natural and social systems. Recent studies further show how landscapes and ecosystems both shape and are transformed by military conflict, how wartime changes in soundscapes reveal its effects on human and non-human life, and how war waste leaves ecological legacies extending well beyond the end of fighting.

Building on these perspectives, this workshop seeks to explore how military conflicts transform natural, cultivated, extractive, and engineered environments, how people perceive and use war-affected landscapes, and how ecological damage and efforts at restoration continue to shape everyday life during and after armed conflict. Rather than asking only how war destroys everyday life, we ask how it is reconfigured through and after military conflict, and whether it can still be understood as “normal”. Over two days, we aim to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among early-career scholars, including doctoral researchers and postdocs working across history, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, literary studies, film studies, environmental studies, and human–animal studies, and related fields. We welcome contributions addressing any of these dimensions, as well as their intersections.

We invite contributions on, but not limited to, the following themes:

(1) “normality” and the normalisation of everyday life during and after armed conflict, across age, gender, and place;

(2) animals’ experiences during and after armed conflict, including the everyday lives of pets, zoo animals, stray animals, farm animals, and wild animals, as well as human–animal relations, trauma, care, and adaptation;

(3) the “everyday” of nature, including the destruction, transformation, and restoration of war-affected environments as well as the perception and use of nature in society;

(4) outsiders’ perspectives on everyday life in (post-)conflict societies, including international news media and accounts by diplomats, intelligence officers, humanitarian volunteers, travellers, occupying soldiers, and mercenaries and foreign combatants;

(5) visual representations in film, graphic novels, survival computer games, and other art forms and cultural productions.

Practical information

Date: 4–5 February 2027

Venue: University of Regensburg and online

The workshop will be held in English.

The organisers in Regensburg will cover accommodation costs and can contribute to travel costs.

Submission

To apply, please submit:

• an abstract (250–300 words and 5 keywords), and
• a brief biographical note (approximately 100 words)

in a single PDF document by 20 November 2026 to: gsoses.conference@ur.de.

Applicants will be notified of the outcome by 30 November 2026.

The deadline for submitting full papers is 22 January 2027. Details will be communicated to approved participants. The papers will be circulated prior to the workshop.

Organisers:

Rebecca Fisch, Predoctoral Researcher, MA in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Bleona Kurteshi, PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology

Oleksandr Nadtoka, PhD Candidate in Southeast and East European History

Renjie Xiong, PhD Candidate in Southeast European History