Negotiating the Revolt: Punk in Times of Political Transformation

The conference is organized by the Institute of Czech History at CU FA alongside the project Negotiating the Revolt in Czech and Slovak Postsocialist Transition, supported by the Czech Science Foundation and carried out in collaboration with the Archive of Czech and Slovak Subcultures, the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture and the Punk Scholars Network Slovak and Czech. It will be held on 16–18 May 2025, the deadline for abstracts is on 20 December 2024.

The fall of communist rule in Central Europe has often been interpreted as a long-awaited renaissance of civil society, a national emancipation or “rebirth of Eastern Europe”
characterised by a state of euphoria, at least during and immediately after the political upheavals. Artists and intellectuals who had participated in the broadly contextualised cultural opposition often believed that democracy would bring the creative freedom they had been longing for. Transformations in politics and the economy affected the institutional background of the music and entertainment industry and brought new challenges to social hierarchies by redefining categories such as “alternative”, “underground”, “official” and “unofficial”. With the opening of post-socialist countries to global cultural trends and markets, the youth began to be seen as a key marketing demographic and a target for both material and nonmaterial cultural production.

The time allotment for presentations at the conference will probably be 15–20 minutes and a follow-up discussion.

Thematically, the conference seeks to cover the meanings and actions connected to “punk” on five levels:

1. Punk as discourse practice: performances, locations, texts and clubs. How did different punk actors (individual and collective) present themselves and argue their liminal position towards the mainstream culture and other communities of style?
2. Punk as mainstream: music charts and labels, propagation and TV appearance. How did punk manage to enter the wider pool of mainstream popular culture practices at the turn of the 1990s?
3. Punk and politics: activism and expert approaches, which are also connected to new social movements (vegetarianism/veganism, animal and human rights, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, racism and nationalism, neo-Nazism, ecology, feminism etc.). How were these activist agendas received in the subcultural milieu? How was the approach towards politics negotiated?
4. Punk as a personal issue: individual revolt, hybridity, lifestyle issues and autonomy. Despite understanding the “personal as political”, certain practices have pointed more to the individual than a collective practice. How did the psychology of different actors relate to their “punk revolt”? How did the “punk revolt” relate to different ecstatic practices and aims to achieve personal autonomy?
5. Punk as retro: Long durée reflection, ageing, remembrance, disenchantment, disillusionment, nostalgia, idealising the 1980s and 1990s. How is the “punk revolt” evaluated ex-post? How are punk actors using their punk histories to achieve legitimacy and subcultural capital?

The submission by email to punkconferenceprague@gmail.com must include the following: abstract of 1,600–3,000 characters including spaces; keywords; curriculum vitae; one paragraph of short introduction including name and surname, affiliation, main research topic. The submission will be evaluated by 10 January 2025.

In the future, a selection of conference papers will be presented to an international publishing house and/or academic journal. To enrich the discussion, we would like to kindly ask you to send us the preliminary version of your papers by 30 April 2025. These papers will be made accessible to all conference speakers.

Additional program:

• excursion to the Archive of Czech and Slovak Subcultures
• punk gig
• film presentation and discussion on making of the DIY documentary Garáže (Garage)
  on a significant site of the punk scene in Bratislava (SK)
• exhibition of early 1990s punk and hardcore posters in the Czech Republic and
  Slovakia
• roundtable discussion on punk and transition.

Conference fee for 3 days of the conference: 500 CZK / 20 EUR (covers coffee breaks and snacks during the conference; but lunch, dinner and entry to the gig are not included)
Entrance fee for visitors per day: 50 CZK / 2 EUR

Accommodation: at the participants’ own expense (we will provide basic information and support in this process)