Announcement criteria

We publish announcements on this page that meet one of the following criteria:

1. Announce grants, research funding, fellowship or scholarship opportunities in Eastern Europe
2. Announce academic or professional meetings in social sciences that focus on Eastern Europe or have a session on the region (the meetings don't have to take place in Eastern Europe)
3. Announce new research initiatives, organizations or academic programs focusing on Eastern Europe

If you wish to post an announcement, please contact László J. Kulcsár.

Call for papers: “Whatever Happened to Hajnal's Line. ‘East-European' Family Patterns, Historical Context and New Developments”

A special issue of THE JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE FAMILY STUDIES

http://soci.ucalgary.ca/jcfs/

Guest editor: Cristina Bradatan (Texas Tech University)

THE JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE FAMILY STUDIES hereby invites contributions for a special issue on the topic: “ ‘East-European' Family Patterns, Historical Context and New Developments”

More than forty years ago, John Hajnal introduced the notion of an ‘European' pattern of marriage/ household, characterized by high age at marriage, women and men working as servants before marriage and establishing their own households upon marriage. He called this pattern ‘European' for brevity, although it applies only to the Northwestern Europe, west of an imaginary line connecting ‘Leningrad' (Saint Petersburg) to Trieste.

Interestingly enough, Hajnal's line followed quite closely the Iron Curtain, then dividing Europe into capitalist and socialist societies. As Churchill put it in a speech he gave at Westminster College , Missouri, in 1946, an iron curtain has descended after the World War II ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic'. Within a larger context of ideas, the 1950s – 1960s were the times when Rostov's theory of modernization was quite popular in the academic world. Hajnal's line brought to life the older Weberian idea that the West is somehow different (in this case, in terms of family formation patterns) and it might very well be that the other regions of the world would not follow a similar route, anytime soon, simply because their history followed a different path.

Although the notion of a ‘Western' as opposed to ‘Eastern' type of family is currently related to Hajnal's work, his research relied on the studies coming from the Cambridge Group for the Population History, and, in particular, from Peter Laslett and Peter Czap. Eastern European countries, falling East of the Hajnal's line, were characterized as having a non-European household formation system. The concept of an ‘European pattern' of family formation remained popular over the years, to such an extent that even today a Google search returns more than 11,000 hits for this concept.

In the meantime, however, a series of political, social and economic changes affected Eastern Europe and the whole notion of a Western versus Eastern type of household/family seems to have taken a different path. First, in his earliest article on the topic (1965), Hajnal defined this pattern as unstable, since he saw the post-WWII Europe as moving toward an earlier age at (and high rates of) marriage. Secondly, studies on Eastern European countries initially excluded from the ‘European' marriage group yielded unexpected results. Multi-generation households are a rarity in these countries (Botev, 1990) and age at marriage presents high variation between different regions of Eastern Europe (Sklar,1974), making it difficult to simply divide Europe into an ‘European' and ‘Non-European' type of household. Thirdly, Ruggles (2009) using data from 97 historical and contemporary censuses, argues that, when variables such as demographic structure and level of agricultural employment are taken into account, the ‘Western' family pattern does not seem to be an exceptional case anymore.

This special issue proposes a discussion of the validity of an ‘Eastern' versus ‘Western' type of family as a distinct analytic category in family studies in Europe. Specifically, we seek to address, among others, the following questions:

- How useful is this distinction nowadays within the European context?

- Does history continue to play an important role in shaping the household and family characteristics in Eastern as opposed to Western Europe?

- Is there (has ever been) an Eastern European pattern of family?

- Do countries from Eastern Europe have a common family pattern?

- How are they different from the Western European ones?

- How does history shape family systems in Eastern Europe?

- How have the post-1990s changes affected the family ties in these countries?

- How relevant is Hajnal's line today?

Rather than separate case studies, a comparative (in terms of time span, between countries of the region or in comparison with other regions) and interdisciplinary perspective is preferred.

For the purposes of this special issue, Eastern Europe is considered to include Albania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and former Yugoslavian countries.

1. All submissions should be in English.

1. When using e-mail, articles must be put into the MICROSOFT WORD format. Include: a TITLE PAGE with your name, title of article, and affiliation with complete postal mailing address, telephone number, and email address. NO pdf files please.
2. Manuscripts should be usually about 5000 words (20-30 pages), line spacing 1-1/2, text in Times Roman, font 12. It must have an English Abstract of about 250 words on a separate page. MAIN headings should be UPPER-CASE, bold lettering and centered. Sub-Headings are in bold and lower-case. Subset headings in Italics , not bold.
3. Any ‘Notes' must be Endnotes, placed at the end of the text on a separate page.
4. Each Table, or Figure, must be camera ready, or done on a laser printer, very clear, each on a separate page at the very end of the entire manuscript after the references, etc. Always indicate at the exact place within the text where it is to go, i.e., "Table 2 about here," "Figure 1 about here". ( Note : Publishing done only in black/white.)

1. REFERENCES: Each listed reference must be cited within the text , and vice versa. Single spaced, no indentations, with one blank line between each reference listed. Follow the American Psychological Association (APA) reference style guide (except follow #3 above as your Footnote example). For information on APA Editorial Style, please go to www.apastyle.org .

For more information on manuscript preparation, please go to:

http://soci.ucalgary.ca/jcfs/welcome/submission-guidelines

Cristina Bradatan
Guest Editor - Journal for Comparative Family Studies
Assistant professor of Sociology, Texas Tech University
http://www.webpages.ttu.edu/crbradat

Announcing a publication: Childbearing Trends and Policies in Europe

Results of a three-year international comparative project on “Childbearing trends and policies in Europe” were published in the online journal Demographic Research as a Special Collection on 1 July 2008. http://www.demographic-research.org/special/7/

Covering 86 percent of the continent's population, the publication consists of eight overview chapters and 19 country studies (approximately 1,200 pages). All European countries with more than 15 million inhabitants, as well as a number of smaller countries, are included. The goal of this publication is to provide readers with an informed portrayal of how almost all aspects of childbearing behaviour and values in Europe have undergone continuous change in recent decades. At the turn of the millennium in most of the countries studied, fertility was lower than ever before, families had become smaller, unions were being formed later in life, and partnership forms were varied and less stable. In addition, entry into paren thood occurred later, means of regulating fertility were changing, immigration had been modifying fertility, and the involvement of governments and other public institutions varied considerably from one country to another. Increasingly, policymakers have been voicing concerns about these developments, and the research community has been analyzing these trends and their causes. To expand upon the relatively scant existing knowledge about childbearing in the formerly state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, this publication devotes special attention to recent developments in those countries.

Social Science Research Council

http://programs.ssrc.org/dpdf/

The Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)

The Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF) is a strategic fellowship program designed to help graduate students in the humanities and social sciences formulate doctoral dissertation proposals that are intellectually pointed, amenable to completion in a reasonable time frame, and competitive in fellowship competitions.  

The program is organized around distinct “research fields,” subdisciplinary and interdisciplinary domains with common intellectual questions and styles of research.   Each year, an SSRC Faculty Advisory Committee selects five fields proposed by pairs of research directors who are tenured professors at different doctoral degree-granting programs at U.S. universities. Research directors receive a stipend of $7500.  Graduate students in the early phase of their research, generally 2nd and 3rd years, apply to one of five research fields led by the two directors; each group is made up of ten to twelve graduate students.  Fellows participate in two workshops, one in the late spring that helps prepare them to undertake predissertation research on their topics; and one in the early fall, designed to help them synthesize their summer research and to draft proposals for dissertation funding.  Fellows are eligible to apply for up to $5000 from SSRC to support predissertation research during the summer. 

The program is administered by the Social Science Research Council and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Central and Eastern European Online Library

C.E.E.O.L. is an online archive which provides access to full text PDF articles from 206 humanities and social science journals, electronic books and re-digitized documents pertaining to Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European topics. Texts are accessible via www.ceeol.com in digital format, and it can be used by individual clients registering for a personal user account, and as well as by universities, public libraries, NGOs, by subscription access. This year, C.E.E.O.L. is proud to have added 35 new publications, especially on politics, sociology, and history topics.