Evgenia Blagoeva

Balkan Life Courses: Family, Childhood, Youth and Old Age in Southeastern Europe’ September 15-17, 2016, Sofia, Bulgaria Organizers: Ebgenia Blagoeva (New Bulgarian U.) and Klaus Roth (Ludwig-Maximian U.) The 8th Conference of the International Association of Southeast European Anthropology (InASEA), ‘Balkan Life Courses,’ received financial support from Wenner-Gren Foundation to defray travel and accommodation for 55 conference participants, keynote speakers, and Executive Committee members. The primary goal of the conference was to produce empirically based knowledge on how the eras of socialism and globalization have influenced the construction of individual life courses; how age based social identities are experienced along the life course; what new life course identities and representations of life periods are produced; and also how the experience of ageing changes during contemporary life courses. One hundred papers dealing with different aspects of these problems in a Balkan context were presented. A collection of best papers, which will pass anonymous reviewing, will be published in the next two volumes of the InASEA journal ‘Ethnologia Balkanica’ – vols. 19 and 20. The conference was an important academic and social event promoting the value of cultural anthropology within the frames of Bulgarian society and Balkans was a whole.