Call for papers
Deadline: April 30th, 2026
We invite contributions to the edited volume Theorizing Science Studies from Central and Eastern Europe, to appear in Palgrave’s Transnationalizing Theory in Science and Technology Studies series, which is in line with the transnationalization initiatives of the Society for Social Studies of Science. The volume is dedicated to developing theory, understood not as abstract universalism but as the production of concepts, categories, and analytical frameworks capable of intervening in contemporary debates on science and knowledge from the situated standpoint of Central and Eastern Europe.
Where discussions of center–periphery dynamics in science studies have largely been articulated through a Global North–South axis, less attention has been paid to the semi-peripheral positions of regions such as Central and Eastern Europe. We understand this region not as a geographical container but as an epistemic formation shaped by socialist and post-socialist trajectories, by projects of science-based modernization, and by unequal integration into global academic capitalism. These experiences furnish distinctive resources for conceptual work that remain insufficiently articulated within dominant frameworks of science studies. Historically, the region produced notable contributions to the social studies of science–from Fleck’s historical epistemology to the “science of science” of Znaniecki and Ossowskis, from Marxist theories of knowledge by Lukács and Bogdanov to Soviet scientometrics developed in the USSR. Some elements of this legacy have entered Western canons, while others have been forgotten or provincialized. Meanwhile, the post-1990 reconfiguration of knowledge production in the region fostered increasing epistemic dependence, in which imported categories replaced local theoretical invention.
Our wager is that theorizing from Central and Eastern Europe is not a matter of adding new regional content to an existing conceptual map, but of unsettling the categories through which science and knowledge are commonly understood. Concepts are not neutral: they inherit the political ontologies of the worlds that produced them. Rather than relying on categories shaped by particular histories of capitalism, state formation, and scientific autonomy, this volume seeks forms of conceptual innovation that emerge from different historical experiences and epistemic conditions. Such work may both provincialize dominant assumptions within science studies and generate alternative problem-spaces and analytical lenses capable of reframing how science is understood globally.
We therefore welcome contributions that treat historical materials, (post-)socialist experiences, and regional epistemic conditions as resources for theory-building rather than as objects of documentation. To theorize “from” the region does not mean producing regional theory for its own sake, but using situated experiences to think with, and to challenge, prevailing categories in science studies. Authors might engage, for example, with (post-)socialist approaches to science and its organisation; with notions of autonomy and dependency in knowledge production; with semi-periphery and “Global East” as analytical positions; with Marxist theories of knowledge and technology; or with attempts to conceptualize alternatives to academic dependency. These suggestions are illustrative rather than exhaustive. What matters is conceptual ambition and the orientation toward theory as situated practice.
Abstracts (max. 1000 words): April 30, 2026; Decisions: May 15, 2026; Full chapters: November 30, 2026.
Editors: Jakub Krzeski (Nicolaus Copernicus University), Ivan Kislenko (Adam Mickiewicz University), Emanuel Kulczycki (Humboldt University / DZHW), and Krystian Szadkowski (Adam Mickiewicz University).
Please submit abstracts to Jakub Krzeski (j.krzeski@umk.pl) and Ivan Kislenko (ivan.kislenko@amu.edu.pl)