Call for Papers: Postsocialism and Financialization: Transforming order and our lives

The journal Sociální studia / Social Studies is announcing a call for papers for a monothematic issue with a working title Postsocialism and Financialization: Transforming order and our lives, edited by Karel Němeček (Masaryk University) and Mária Mokrá (Comenius University)

The special issue aims to make sense of the direct as well as more subterranean impacts of financialization that accompanied the processes of post-socialist transformations. Financialization refers to finance not only increasingly permeating everyday lifeworlds (van der Zwan 2014) but also presenting a nexus of power outside the regulatory capabilities of nation-states (Koddenbrock and Braun 2013). With “dismantling [of] welfare states and democratic processes and institutions” (Chatzidakis et al., 2020), the times when capitalism and democracy were thought to go together are long gone (Ther 2022). While Western critical scholarship on neoliberal financialization is manifold, the perspectives focusing on the former Eastern bloc remain overlooked (Gagyi and Slačálek 2022). Thus, this issue gives space to manifestations of financialization within the post-socialist context, bringing attention especially to its impacts on the transformation of everyday life, broader cultural regimes, and narratives ordering our lives.

In this special issue, we welcome contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• The postsocialist transformations and financialization of socio-political, economic and cultural regimes.
• The impact of financialization on everyday experience, especially with a focus on personal stories, narratives and memories in postsocialist countries.
• Transformation of discourses, policies and practices beyond finance impacted by the logic or language of finance (e.g. dating, health care, media framing).
• Manifestations of financializations in different forms of crises: crisis of democracy, environmental crisis, crisis of care, housing crisis, energy crisis, etc.
• The acts of resistance or alternative imaginaries that challenge dominant practices and narratives under financialization.
• Concrete historical sociological studies of contexts and impacts of financialization.
• Theorising financialization specifically from the postsocialist contexts.

​​Abstracts should be sent to the journal address (socstud@fss.muni.cz). The deadline for abstract submission is 20^th January 2026; full papers are expected by 15^th August 2026.

Social studies/Sociální studia (print ISSN 1214-813X, online ISSN 1803-6104) is a fully open-access journal, indexed in SCOPUS and ERIH PLUS. The journal has been published since 2004 at the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, both in print and electronically. Read more about the journal at its website: https://journals.muni.cz/socialni_studia