The literature of postsocialism and postcolonialism have sought to challenge what is accepted as “known” and “true” in the West by looking to the way in which those truths failed to operate as expected in other places. For example, much scholarship on the post-Soviet world has focused on how capitalism actually functions. This panel seeks to reconceptualize the critiques leveraged by postsocialist and postcolonial studies by asking how the notion of value has been constructed, reconstituted and re-made across Europe in the wake of large political, economic and/or social upheaval.

Graeber (2001) argues that the term value is often ambiguous, but because the notion of market value so heavily permeates everyday usage, it is then necessary to ask how economic value comes to accommodate a broader set of social values. If most conceptions of value are entangled with individual, rational, market-based notions, what other ways of constituting value are foreclosed?  How do western metanarratives about the value of life and property interact with particular experiences and local knowledges? How have the value of things, events and places been reconfigured in response to upheaval, and to what extent have past constructs of value maintained a stubborn presence today? What can we learn from places and cultures that have operated under different value regimes, and what assumptions underlie systems of evaluation?