[Commlist] Call for Papers: Eurasian Information Age Conference

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Call for Papers: Eurasian Information Age
Conference
October 16th-17th, 2026
Yale University

Perennially understudied, Eurasia – as both a geographical and 
conceptual constellation – opens up a novel and fertile space for 
scholarly contributions. This call for papers invites submissions that 
engage with the region’s alternative media, information, and 
communications histories, bridging past and future frameworks, 
methodologies and forms.

Before the formation of the Relcom network catapulted the socialist 
sphere into the Digital Age in 1990, the Tashkent Cybernetic Institute 
in Uzbekistan served as one of the primary hubs of technoscientific 
research in the region. From Bulgaria’s unique early computing culture 
and electronic trade with India in the 1970s, to the ghostly half-life 
of Soviet ternary computing in the Eastern Bloc, we invite research that 
reflects on, challenges, and subverts dominant paradigms of the 
Socialist Information Age. The way technoscientific discourses and 
technologies were received in the Soviet periphery, Central Asia, and 
the Far East transformed their content in a mutually constitutive 
encounter. By prioritizing scholarship that explores the outer bounds of 
what the cybernetic revolution meant for Eurasia and its cultural 
production of the time, we hope to unearth a range of distinctly 
alternative aesthetic and technological possibilities that emerged in 
the region in the latter half of the 20th century (and sometimes 
before), as well as the foreclosed futurities that those possibilities 
implied. While the paradigm of alternative modernity remains, in our 
view, too limiting, we ultimately believe that other ways of relating to 
and being with technology afford us a valuable counterpoint to our own 
algorithmically scripted epoch, where the future increasingly appears 
predetermined and fait accompli.

Potential topics include:
• The advent of the Russian internet in Siberia
• Eurasian ecologies (writ broadly)
• Cybernetics in Eastern Europe or Central Asia
• Eurasian algorithmic and procedural art
• Computer aesthetics (writ broadly)
• Transnational intellectual exchange with Central Asia, China, and 
other East-Asian nation-states
• Chinese and Soviet experiments with / literature / films about AI
• Central Asian Science Fiction
• Sino-Soviet technological transfer (e.g., rail)
• Algorithms from al-Khwarizmi (Persian past) to Present
• Akademgorodki (Academic cities) of the Far East
• Trans-Siberian information flows
• The transnational development of the Soviet computer

Conference dates:
Friday, October 16th, 2026 - Saturday, October 17, 2026

DEADLINE: Send abstracts to (eurasianinformationage /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(eurasianinformationage /at/ gmail.com)> by Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 
11:59PM EST
Need-based travel assistance available on a first come, first serve basis.
Queries may be directed to Anna Tropnikova ( (anna.tropnikova /at/ yale.edu) 
<mailto:(anna.tropnikova /at/ yale.edu)> )  and Sasha Karsavina ( 
(alex.zabela-zabelin /at/ yale.edu) <mailto:(alex.zabela-zabelin /at/ yale.edu)> )
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