About logistics and hotels in Jyväskylä

A short note about traveling to Jyväskylä in June.

We will update more information about these issues later on, but meanwhile, as many of you need estimates about travel costs, hotels in Finland are regrettably expensive. There is a quota for this conference in hotel Alexandra that is opposite to train station and really centrally located. They have rates around 90€ / night. There will be more affordable options available, however, and we will update information about them in the web pages later on.

As for how to arrive to Jyväskylä, there are several options. Company called Flybe offers flights from Helsinki that are in some cases cheaper than trains from Helsinki.
From Jyväskylä Estonian Air offers connections via Tallinn to London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Vienna, Hannover, Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg among others.
Ryanair operates from Tampere to a number of destinations in Britain, Germany, Baltics, and a number of other places.
Wizzair flies from Turku to Gdansk and Budapest.
Helsinki airport naturally connects practically all over the globe. From "Helsinki-Vantaa airport" you need to get either to Tikkurila train station by bus, take a straight bus to Jyväskylä, or take one of Flybe's planes to Jyväskylä airport.

Apart from flying, there are trains to Russia. Trains in Finland are rather expensive, but if you come by train from Russia, there are also frequent buses from Kouvola and Lahti to Jyväskylä that are cheaper and even faster than trains, if you don't wish to go to Helsinki first. You can check timetables at: http://www.matkahuolto.fi/en/ They arrive to same building as trains in Jyväskylä.

More information will follow in due course. Meanwhile, we welcome you to Jyväskylä in June!

Annoucements in January

Deadline for submitting abstracts was reached on December 1.
Amount of submissions for the conference well exceeded our expectations. There seems to be a great amount of very good proposals making it hard to come up with decisions concerning accepted papers. Currently, organizing committee is at work processing all the abstracts and aims at informing everyone of its decisions on the second week of January.
- Organizing Committee

Conference aims

Summary

This multi-disciplinary conference seeks to explore the vast and mostly uncharted role played by cultural
exchange and cultural currents in the development of the Cold War, especially in the context of East-West relations.

Cultural exchange in the Cold War has received little attention compared to traditional areas of Cold War studies: diplomacy, military affairs, and even economics. Although the cultural Cold War has in recent years received growing attention internationally, the research is still very scattered. With this conference we aim to bring together research concerned with cultural exchanges during the Cold War era, both from the East and the West. Furthermore, we hope to encourage a theoretical discussion about the still rather vague definition of the cultural Cold War, and indeed about the validity of the concept itself.

Possible paper topics include, but are not limited to:

·         Soviet cultural diplomacy and cultural initiatives

·         Western tourism in the East / Eastern tourism in the West

·         Everyday experiences of cultural exchanges

·         Trans-national networks across the Iron Curtain

·         Media as an agent in cultural exchange (incl. program exchange)

·         Concrete and imagined borders

·         Material and consumer cultures

·         Festivals and international cultural competitions

- Upload full CfP in PDF form