Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West

The seventh session of Area Studies under Discussion will take place on Monday 2 February (15:00 UK | 16:00 CET | 10 a.m. EDT) via Zoom | No registration required

Anti-Atlas: Critical Area Studies from the East of the West is an open access volume published by UCL Press in 2025. It is co-edited by a team of UCL scholars who will all be part of this online panel:

• Tim Beasley-Murray (Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture)
• Wendy Bracewell (Professor Emeritus of Southeast European History)
• Michał Murawski (Associate Professor in Critical Area Studies)

Beáta Hock (Senior Researcher at the GWZO Department of Entanglements and Globalization) will be discussant, offering her critical insights on the volume, with Sofia Gavrilova (Researcher in Geovisualisations at the IfL) will chair the discussion. We also look forward to contributions from further contributing authors to the volume.

About Anti-Atlas | The invasion of Ukraine is the latest in a series of upheavals that have made eastern Europe a telling point from which to consider the place of area studies in the construction of knowledge about the world. The politics of academic knowledge about ‘areas’ now feels more urgent than ever.

Anti-Atlas plays with the politics of the conventional atlas, with its assumptions about knowledge and power, its hierarchies of value, and its simplifications. It presents a collection of essays written by an eclectic mix of authors from Europe, both east and west, the UK and North America. These entries analyse a necessarily incomplete selection of topics, but they all engage with the question of how an approach to area can be ‘critical’ – and each entry demonstrates different aspects of criticality. The editors develop a manifesto for such criticality, calling attention to positions that are heterodox, area-informed or vernacular, ‘undisciplined’, and collaborative. Through a variety of genres, including the scholarly article, the travel guide, autobiographical reflections and data visualisations, Anti-Atlas provides readers with a diverse series of intellectual resources, asking them to think critically about the ways in which we construct the world by dividing it into pieces.

This session is organized by Sofia Gavrilova (IfL), Lena Dallywater (IfL/ EEGA) and Paul Vickers (LSC Regensburg). It takes place in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig, the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL) in Leipzig, the ScienceCampus Eastern Europe – Global Area (EEGA) in Leipzig, and the Leibniz Science Campus Europe and America in Regensburg. We are delighted to be partnering with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London (UCL SSEES) on this event.