Socialism has left traces — some concrete and obdurate, others spectral and elusive. These endure not only in architecture and infrastructure, but also in affective communities, and collective imaginings, as well as within intellectual and cultural legacies found in literary artifacts, periodicals, film, print media, and other forms of knowledge production. Through these channels, political imaginaries circulated, subjectivities were shaped, and socialist discourse was structured across diverse regions. These material and intellectual inheritances have outlasted the political projects that created them and have actively shaped contemporary realities and subjectivities, influencing how we remember and imagine the past in the cities, landscapes, and social worlds that this ideology has formed. Yet, despite their persistence, too little effort has been dedicated to systematically archiving, classifying, and studying these inheritances. Without such sustained attention, much of their complexity risks being overlooked or lost.

This seminar invites contributions that explore socialist and post-socialist experiences —not as a linear continuation or abrupt rupture, but as overlapping and interpenetrating temporalities. We are particularly interested in recovering neglected histories.

Particular attention merits the case of Cuba, where, although socialism remains officially in place, a pervasive sense of ending marks the present—what might be called living in post-history—and where narratives remain to be researched and brought to light. Comparative perspectives from Eastern European, Soviet, Sino-socialist, and other global socialist experiences are welcome.

Themes and questions may include, but are not limited to:

• Persistent material legacies: infrastructures, landscapes, buildings, monuments, and technologies that resist erasure or repurposing.
• Intellectual and cultural archives: literature, periodicals, film, print media, and other disseminated forms that circulated socialist imaginaries, shaped subjectivities, and mediated political and cultural discourse.
• Archives of subjectivity: everyday life under socialism and post-socialism; subjects who lived, live by, in, and out of socialism.
• Hauntology and spectral politics: socialism as ghost, echo, or unfinished project.
• Narratives and counter-narratives: how socialist pasts are remembered, contested, reimagined, or commodified.
• Institutional residues: archives, pedagogical forms, bureaucratic procedures, political languages.
• Global entanglements: comparative and transnational perspectives on socialist and post-socialist conditions.

We seek conceptual, theoretical, and archival approaches from fields including cultural studies, anthropology, history, political theory, architecture, art history, and literary studies. Papers may engage with specific case studies, cross-regional comparisons, or conceptual frameworks that illuminate how socialism endures, mutates, and is archived —materially and imaginatively.