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• 31 Mar 2013

  Call for papers - History

  Communications and media in the USSR and Eastern Europe

  Technologies, politics, cultures, social practices

  In the social sciences, communications are considered fundamental to the constitution of any society. The technologies and infrastructures for communications are also social institutions in their own right, with their own specific historical trajectories.  With this in mind, we can assume that political regimes that abuse their control of communications engender social atomization, the rupture or weakening of social ties, in that attempts to maintain these ties via communications media may be met with repression.  At the same time, however, it is social relations — “useful” connections – that allow individuals to engage in mutual assistance and to exchange goods and services in the economies of shortage typical of many authoritarian regimes.

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