For a session ‘Academia as an arena of elite formation and democratisation’, I am looking for papers (20 min each) that might address some aspects of the following themes:

Ever since the late 18th century, the University has had a dual mission. On the one hand, the University has been intimately linked to the emergence and functioning of the nation-state, offering various ways to unify knowledge and power. On the other hand, the University has also been a locus for critical intelligentsia and socio-political resistance, aiming at democratisation and/or revolution of the society as a whole. As examples we could take academic counter-movements as different as the anti-imperialist Pan-Africans of the late-19th century Liberia, the global Student Revolt of 1968, and the development of Women’s Studies in the early 1980’s as a challenge to the collegial fraternity of white middle-class males.

At the moment, we are faced with a paradox that more people are allowed access to higher education than ever before, but the most valuable rewards of higher education are more concentrated as in the past. The session is thus open for a debate: How the University has acted as an agent of democratisation, or have claims for “democratisation” mainly been presented to legitimate a massive subsidy to the middle and upper-middle classes? To analyse the present situation, a deeper understanding of its historical backgrounds and a comparison of different experiences in various parts of the world is essential.

How to propose a paper

If you want to propose a paper, please send your abstract (ca. 200-300 words) to the session organiser, Dr. Marja Jalava (marja.jalava@helsinki.fi), no later than 23 March 2007. Allow me some time to respond; if I have not replied in a couple of days or a week, please mail again: in a world of spam it is always possible that messages from previously unknown addresses are accidentally deleted. I also ask you to use the word ESSHC in the message heading.

The ESSHC

The European Social Science History Conferences are bi-annual gatherings of historians and social scientists of different fields. The latest conferences in Berlin 2004 and in Amsterdam 2006 were both attended by approximately 1300 scholars. The responsible organiser of
the conference is the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

The seventh ESSHC will take place in Lisbon, Portugal, 27 February–1 March 2008. The conference consists of 28 more specialized, thematic networks, which arrange their own session programme. In a typical session of 120 minutes there are normally four paper presentations, one discussant and one chair. The conference fee is 200 € (if paid in advance, autumn 2007). Please visit the conference website http://www.iisg.nl/esshc for more information.

The Elites network

The Elites network of the ESSHC hosts sessions concerning the history of cultural, political, economic and social elites. At the 2006 conference the Elites network organised 16 sessions. Papers from all over Europe and from the USA were numerous. The network hopes that
this trend will continue also at the Lisbon conference, where the network aims at organising about the same number of sessions as before.

The Politics, Citizenship, and Nations network

In 2008, the networks of Politics and Nations will merge into the new network Politics, Citizenship and Nations, chaired by Ido de Haan (Utrecht University) and André Gerrits (University of Amsterdam). In 2008, the network invites papers and sessions on any issue related to the history of politics, citizenship and nations, yet with a special interest in sessions on the following topics: (1) The history of democracy and democratisation; (2) The history of states and citizenship; and (3) Local, national and cosmopolitan citizenship.

For further information of these networks and other proposed session themes, please visit the web pages http://www.iisg.nl/esshc/elites.php or http://www.iisg.nl/esshc/politics.php