Call for Papers Negotiating Marginalization and Belonging
Petitions and Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe 1918-1990
Apply by May 4 to the seminar “Negotiating Marginalization and Belonging: Petitions and Minorities in Central and Eastern Europe 1918-1990“ at the Lessons and Legacies conference in Chicago, Illinois, from November 12 to 15, 2026. The seminar is organized by Émilie Duranceau-Lapointe (Fritz Bauer Institut) and Verena Meier (Research Center on Antigypsyism).
This seminar creates an interdisciplinary forum to examine petitioning as a political and social practice and to reconsider concepts of marginalization and belonging in Central and Eastern Europe throughout the twentieth century with a focus on petitions as acts and instruments of response and expressions of agency during the Holocaust.
By situating petitioning within shifting historical and political contexts, the seminar explores how these written performances reflected and reshaped relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. Petitions illuminate shifting notions of identity and belonging, as well as contestations of state-imposed categorizations across regimes.
Participants are invited to present case studies illustrating how marginalized groups—such as Jews, Sinti and Roma, and other minorities—navigated bureaucratic and legal institutions to challenge categorizations and assert their rights. Beyond acts of resistance, these petitions frequently emerged as crucial strategies for negotiation and survival, particularly during the Holocaust.
Welcoming scholars working across disciplines and methods, this seminar encourages transnational, comparative, and cross-temporal perspectives. Bridging history, sociology, gender studies, legal studies, and critical race theory, it approaches petitioning not merely as a bureaucratic process but as a dynamic site of interaction between individuals and state authorities. Addressing issues from release from concentration camps to the contestations of racial classifications, petitions reveal how petitioners maneuvered state mechanisms to shape their social and legal identities and contest their marginalization.
By foregrounding the contexts, connections, and (in)consistencies of petitioning practices across different political regimes, the seminar offers a framework for understanding how ordinary acts of writing illuminate extraordinary moments of rupture and (dis)continuities. Bringing together innovative and interdisciplinary research perspectives, it seeks to connect early career and established scholars and to foster collaboration.
Applications consist of the filled-out online form, a paper title and proposal (maximum 300 words), and a curriculum vitae (1-2 page).