Transformative Podcast: Recent Episodes
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Welcome to the Transformative Podcast, which takes the year 1989 as a starting point to think about social, economic, and cultural transformations on a European and global scale.
This podcast is produced by the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) and its managing director Irena Remestwenski. Our patron is Philipp Ther, and we could not do it without Jannis Panagiotidis, Anastassiya Schacht, Rosamund Johnston, Sheng Peng, and Elias Neuburger.
Economic thinking is far from the preserve of central bankers and policy wonks. In dozens of interviews in the Czech Republic and the former East Germany, sociologist Till Hilmar asked healthcare workers and engineers about their experiences of the transformation period to understand how economic shifts are remembered, and what memories can tell us about processes of economic change. As a result, he gained a picture of transformation “from below.” In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Hilmar tells Rosamund Johnston why people’s views of the 1990s still matter now. He explains how his work sheds light on how people respond to crisis, both in the short and long term.
Till Hilmar is a postdoctoral researcher in the University of Vienna’s Department of Sociology. He is the author of Deserved. Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain, which was recently published by Columbia University Press. He received his PhD from Yale University in 2019. His research has been published in numerous outlets, including the European Journal of Sociology, East European Politics and Societies, and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.
In recent years, the narrative of the history of Polish socialism has changed as it moved beyond a narrow scholarly focus on political elites and party-state structures. In this episode, Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ (RECET) speaks to Małgorzata Fidelis (University of Illinois at Chicago) about her work that examines everyday socialism through the prism of social and cultural history across various political moments in Poland. Zooming in on ordinary people and practices, Fidelis adds new layers to how the ebb and flow of socialism and transformation in Poland are understood.
Małgorzata Fidelis is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland (Cambridge UP, 2010) and Imagining the World from Behind the Iron Curtain: Youth and the Global Sixties in Poland (Oxford UP, 2022). She also co-authored a book in Polish Kobiety w Polsce 1945-1989 Nowoczesność - równouprawnienie – komunizm (Universitas, 2020). Małgorzata Fidelis’ articles have appeared in journals including Slavic Review and the Journal of Women’s History.
How can the challenges faced by minoritized languages of the Russian Federation and their speaker communities be understood through the lens of Russia’s colonial expansion? In this newest episode, Leonid Motz (RECET) talks to Dr. Jeremy Bradley (University of Vienna), exploring the historical and social transformation of minority language use and study in Russia and the threats of Russification and assimilation. How do communities overcome the considerable obstacles posed by the present-day Russian state to maintain and revitalize their languages successfully?
Jeremy Bradley is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna’s Department of Finno-Ugrian Studies. His research interests include linguistic convergence in the Volga-Kama Region, corpus building, and the creation of didactic and reference materials for low-resource languages.
What brings together Pythagoras and Wonder Woman? In her dazzling new book, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Professor Kristen Ghodsee shows how, throughout history, humanity has felt the need to imagine and experiment with alternative ways to organize daily life, and offers a radically hopeful vision for how to build more content and connected societies. In this new episode, RECET’s own Anna Calori had the pleasure to sit with Professor Kristen Ghodsee and discuss about the transformative power of utopias and the militant significance of hope in the darkest of times. Kristen R. Ghodsee is a Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the critically acclaimed author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, which has been translated into fourteen languages. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Jacobin, among other outlets, and she’s appeared on PBS NewsHour and France 24 as well as on dozens of podcasts, including NPR’s Throughline and New York magazine’s The Cut. She lives outside of Philadelphia.
In this thought-provoking conversation, Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET) and Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET) dive deep into the question of why migration — as a scholarly field and an intrinsic aspect of contemporary world — deeply matters to historians and policy makers. Panagiotidis and Nguyen Vu also explore new research avenues such as the examination of precarious Whiteness of Eastern Europeans and the importance of migrant perspectives in the debates on migration.
Jannis Panagiotidis is the Scientific Director of the Research Center for the History of Transformation. From 2014 until 2020, he was Junior Professor for Migration and Integration of Germans from Russia at the Osnabrück University Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS). At RECET, he works on a project investigating liberal global orders and freedom of movement and guides a research project on post-Soviet immigrant communities in Germany. He wrote the books: The Unchosen Ones. Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana UP, 2019) and Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: Eine Einführung (Beltz/Juventa, 2021).
In this episode, Fabian Baumann (RECET) talks to Irena Remestwenski (also RECET) about ‘banal’ forms of nationalism and visual representations of Ukrainianness employed by postwar Soviet propaganda, as well as the role of the economy in constructing Soviet Ukrainian identity in late socialism. Baumann sheds light on national narratives that were permissible under socialism and those that were out of bounds and also attempts to contribute to the pre-history of the 1991 referendum, in which Ukrainians overwhelmingly chose national independence.
Dr. des. Fabian Baumann is a visiting postdoctoral researcher at RECET and holder of a Postdoc.Mobility grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Following studies in Geneva, Saint Petersburg, and Oxford, he completed his PhD in history at the University of Basel in 2020. From 2021 to 2022 he was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. His first book Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalismwill be published by NIU Press/Cornell University Press in August 2023.
With the unfolding crisis at the Polish-Belarussian border, and the Russian war against Ukraine, Polish society, public opinion and policy-makers have been confronted with critical challenges of migration and displacement. This is a new stage in Poland's rich history of migration, which until recently was dominated by large outflows and limited inflows. In this episode, Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu talks to prof. Dariusz Stola (Polish Academy of Sciences) in order to unpack the historical entanglements of migration, Jewish history, minority studies, and contemporary public history in Poland. Dariusz Stola is a historian and professor at the Institute for Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. He has researched Poland's political and social history in the twentieth century, particularly Polish-Jewish relations, international migrations and the communist regime, as well as the memory of these pasts. He has authored numerous articles and six books. In 2014-2019 he was the director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Experts enjoyed a great deal of authority in state socialist Eastern Europe - but some experts were more equal than others. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, sociologist Kateřina Lišková charts the changing ways in which medical experts held “the ear of the state” throughout the socialist period, and analyzes what they did with their room to maneuver. Focusing on the work of sexologists in particular, Lišková tells host Rosamund Johnston (RECET) what sex and home life can ultimately reveal about the political priorities of socialism. Kateřina Lišková is a researcher at the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she heads a project investigating expertise in authoritarian societies called ExpertTURN. She is the author of Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945-1989, which was published with Cambridge University Press in 2018 and won the Barbara Heldt Prize. This book has been adapted into a series of short, critically-acclaimed documentaries for Czech Television called Kronika orgasmu [Orgasm Chronicle] (2022), in which Lišková features as an expert.
Part of Ukraine's ongoing struggle for independence from Russia is the establishment of a Ukrainian Orthodox church independent from the Moscow Patriarchate. Already before the full-scale Russian invasion of 24 February 2022, this resulted in a fragmented church landscape, which in the wake of the invasion has become ever more politicized. In this episode, historian Yuliya Yurchuk (Södertörn University) will discuss the origins and implications of this complex situation, as well as the role that the different Ukrainian churches have played in the process of nation-building. Yuliya Yurchuk is a Senior Lecturer of History at Södertörn University, Sweden. She specializes in memory studies, history of religion, history of knowledge, and the study of nationalism in East European countries. She is the author of the book Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Acta 2014) and one of the editors of “Memory and Religion from a Postsecular Perspective” (Routledge, 2022, co-edited with Zuzanna Bogumil). Her articles have appeared in Memory Studies, Nationalities Papers, Europe-Asia Studies, Nordisk Østforum, Baltic Worlds, Ukraina Moderna, etc. In 2022 Yurchuk was granted funding by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies for her research project "From Sweden with Love: Circulation and interpretation of Ellen Key’s ideas about sexuality, love, motherhood, and education in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union (1890-1930s)". She will be working on the project from 2023 to 2026.
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced governments across the world to rethink (free) movement of peoples and things, and to revise mobility regimes in the face of new constraints. This is not a new phenomenon, argues Steffi Marung (University of Leipzig) in this episode of the Transformative Podcast. To a certain extent, each moment of major socio-economic or political transformation in the 20th century has been also characterised by a change in our understanding of, and attitudes towards, mobility. In conversation with Anna Calori (RECET), Dr. Marung reflects on how we can better understand historical transformations and caesuras by looking at mobilities. Dr. Steffi Marung is director of the Global and European Studies Institute of Leipzig University. Currently, her research addresses socialist mobilities of activists and experts from Eastern Europe and the Global South during the 20th century, while she works on a book project investigating Soviet African Studies during the Cold War. Together with James Mark and Artemy Kalinovsky, she has co-authored and co-edited the volume Alternative Globalizations: Encounters between the Eastern Bloc and the Postcolonial World (Indiana University Press, 2020).
If arms exports often rely on production processes and transportation networks spanning multiple countries, then their regulation has historically taken place at the level of the state. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Ned Richardson-Little (University of Erfurt) discusses this paradox and its effects on different groups involved in the arms trade with Rosamund Johnston (RECET). He also reflects on why it makes little sense to view the officially-sanctioned and “illicit” arms trades through separate lenses, and on how historians might take morality into account when writing about global arms sales. Ned Richardson-Little is a Freigeist Fellow at the University of Erfurt. He leads a team investigating “The Other Global Germany: Deviant Globalization and Transnational Criminality in the 20th Century,” in which he is researching the export and regulation of arms and narcotics. Richardson-Little has a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is the author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany (Cambridge University Press 2020).
East Europeans are white - or are they? In this episode, Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET) interviews Ivan Kalmar (University of Toronto) on his new book, in which he contends that the precarity of East European whiteness is one of the drivers of the region's illiberal turn, turning East Europeans into both victims and perpetrators of racism. Ivan Kalmar is a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of White But Not Quite: Central Europe' Illiberal Revolt, published by Bristol University Press in 2022.
The Russian military invasion of Ukraine that commenced on the February 24, 2022, led to the largest forced migration flows in Europe since WWII. In this episode, Irena Remestwenski (RECET) talks with Dr. Judith Kohlenberger about a rapid-response survey of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Austria. Dr. Kohlenberger sheds light on Ukrainian refugees' sociodemographic background, choice of host country, as well as their return and stay intentions and discusses implications for integration policies.
Judith Kohlenberger a post-doctoral researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) working on forced migration and integration. She was a contributor to the Persons in Austria Survey (DiPAS), one of the first European studies on the human capital of refugees in the fall of 2015, which was awarded the Kurt-Rothschild-Prize. She teaches in the WU masters’ program and at the University of Applied Sciences and is the author of two books, We (2021) and Refugee Paradox (2022).
Development as an approach to policy, as a theoretical paradigm, and as a force that can transform everyday life has been a powerful tool in changing societies on both sides of the Iron Curtain and in the so-called Global South. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Artemy Kalinovsky (Temple University) discusses these and related topics with Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET). In their conversation they touch upon development assistance to Central Asia and its role in contemporary geopolitics as well as the various meanings and scales of development.
Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor at Temple University and a historian of Soviet Union, Cold War, Central Asia, foreign policy, and development. He is the author of two monographs: A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) and in 2018 he published Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan which won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Currently, he is working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.
According to Transparency International's 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in 2021, the second most corrupt in Europe. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Ukraine's prominent rule of law activist Iryna Shyba talks to Irena Remestwenski, Managing Director at RECET, about the transformations that Ukraine has gone through since 1991, impressive gains made by various anti-corruption bodies, and the state of Ukraine’s court system in times of war. Iryna Shyba is the former head of Foundation DEJURE, a Ukrainian civil society organization promoting rule of law and reforms in the sphere of justice, and currently Deputy Head of the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative (EUACI). For her fight against corruption in courts and for the development of child-friendly justice, she has been included in the “30 to 30” ranking by Forbes Ukraine and awarded the Georgiy Gongadze Award.
How did anti-globalism give birth to the multinational corporation? And how did complaints about “the global economy” shape mass politics at the very moment of its emergence? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Tara Zahra (University of Chicago) speaks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about the ways in which governments and citizens sought, in the interwar period, to reject global interconnectedness. Zahra charts how anti-globalist ideas were then encoded in the international system following World War II and continue to shape some institutions to this day. Tara Zahra is Homer J. Livingston Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II and Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
How did the revolutions around Central and Eastern Europe transform higher education? Less than you might think, suggests Jan Surman (Czech Academy of Sciences). In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, he talks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about the disappearance of Marxism-Leninism--if not those who taught it--from universities around the former Eastern Bloc. While often understood as catalysts of revolution, Surman argues that the region’s universities have proved far more resistant to change over the decades that followed than other institutions. Dr. Jan Surman is a Lumina quaeruntur fellow at the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Universities in Imperial Austria 1848-1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2018).
Who has the power of command over the (in)famous Azov regiment, which until recently defended the Ukrainian city of Mariupol under siege and was, at last, captured by the Russian forces? What kind of ideology is really followed by the Azov fighters? How popular are right-wing ideas in Ukraine in general, and how fascist is Russia? In this episode, Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov (Center for Democratic Integrity) talks to Irena Remestwenski (RECET) about the transformations of right-wing ideas both in Russia and in Ukraine. He explains the ambiguous history of the Azov regiment, breaks down the "de-nazification" narrative followed by Russia in justifying its war of aggression in Ukraine, and questions the ideology of both the Russian regime and its population. Anton Shekhovtsov is the Director of the Center for Democratic Integrity, based here in Vienna. He acts an expert for the European Platform for Democratic Elections, edits the book series Explorations of the Far Right for the publishing house ibidem, as well as the open access journal Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies. His last book is titled Tango Noir: Russia and the Western Far-Right (Routledge 2018).
Western non-governmental organizations such as the World Bank played a crucial role in China’s economic reforms during the 1980s and 1990s. They facilitated dialogues between Chinese economists and their western counterparts, as well as brought in western known-how on free market economy to China, where Soviet-style planned economy had dominated the economic activities since the 1950s. In this podcast, Dr. Federico Pachetti (RECET) and Dr. Sheng Peng (RECET) discuss both the expectations and realities, which western NGOs faced during their participation in China’s great economic transformations.
Federico Pachetti is an associated researcher at RECET and a post-doctoral fellow at Corvinus Institute of Advanced Studies (CIAS), Budapest. Previously, he held positions at New York University (NYU) Shanghai and at London School of Economics (LSE). Federico researches and teaches 20th century international history, with a focus on how shifting dynamics in global political economy shaped the evolution of Sino-American relations during the final decades of the century.
Overshadowed by the military aggression against Ukraine, "Memorial" was banned and forced to close in Russia. The oldest non-governmental organization in the region, dating back to the late Soviet era and Andrey Sakharov's engagement, "Memorial" has been a prominent actor in Human Rights and memory politics.
Anna Dobrovolskaya is a former Executive Director of the Human Rights Center "Memorial". In this episode, she is talking to RECET's Managing Director Irena Remestwenski on roots, activities, heritage of the movement, and not the least on hope and perspectives for democracy in Russia.
United Europe has many dimensions. In the history of European unification, liberal projects of economic integration have coexisted and competed with ideas of social justice & solidarity, but also of Europe as a power. In this episode, RECET's Scientific Director Jannis Panagiotidis discusses the book "Europe contre Europe: Entre liberté, solidarité et puissance" with its author Laurent Warlouzet. Laurent Warlouzet is professor at Paris Sorbonne University, chair of European history. A former postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute and at the London School of Economics, he has published a book entitled "Governing Europe in a Globalized World. Neolibearlism and its Alternatives after 1973" (Routledge 2018). Based on British, French, German and EU archives, it explores the debate between social-democratic, neoliberal and neomercantilist policies in Western Europe between 1973 and 1986. He has also published on the history of competition and industrial policies.
Putin´s aggression against Ukraine released a landslide change in international politics, economy, academia, and public culture. Within Russia itself, it triggered an avalanche of repressive policies, which are the culmination of Russia's long-term crackdown on any form of opposition to the regime. Russia's ideological program behind the invasion re-appropriates and re-writes history, while the country itself returns to its authoritarian past.
In this episode, Anastassiya Schacht (RECET) is talking to Prof. Dr. Sergey Radchenko, Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a scholar of Cold War and Sino-Soviet security politics.
Die russische Invasion in die Ukraine ist ein Angriff auf ganz Europa. In diesen bestürzenden Zeiten steht das Forschungszentrum RECET unseren ukrainischen KollegInnen bei, die gezwungen sind, sich in Luftschutzkellern zu verstecken und für Ihre Freiheit kämpfen. In der heutigen Sonderausgabe veröffentlichen wir neu das Interview des preisgekrönten Osteuropa-Historikers und RECET-Gründers Philipp Ther mit Einordnungen zur Lage in der Ukraine, zu den historischen Hintergründen des Konflikts und zu den Ambitionen Russlands. Die Diskussion hat Ulrich Kühn geführt. Zuerst veröffentlicht bei: "Das Gespräch"| NDR Kultur | 27.02.2022
Ukrainians went from being a nation of occasional voters whose rights existed mainly on paper in the 1990’s to a society with strong civil society institutions and a vibrant democracy post Maidan Revolution of 2013/14. In this episode moderated by Irena Remestwenski (RECET), Valeria Korablyova (Charles University in Prague) reflects upon the concept of performative citizenship, the role of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the new empowered Ukrainian citizen who is willing to make a difference in the political field.
Dr. Valeria Korablyova is Senior Research Fellow at Charles University, Department of East European Studies. She received her habilitation in 2015 from Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, where she worked as Professor of Philosophy. Her research interests include post-Communist transformations in Ukraine and East Central Europe with a specific focus on mass protests and nation-building.
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the world the importance of coordinating health policies at a global level. What can we learn from the history and politics of global health? In this episode, moderated by Anna Calori (RECET), Dora Vargha reflects upon the role of the socialist world in shaping the recent history of medicine, as well as current approaches to global health and epidemics. Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter and at Humboldt University, Berlin. She is principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Socialist Medicine: an Alternative Global Health History”, and the “Connecting3Worlds” Wellcome Trust collaborative project.
The first week of January 2022 was largely shaped by news of protests rapidly escalating all across Kazakhstan. In the span of only a few days, the situation changed from nationwide peaceful protests citing economic reasons, over demands for political change, violent rallies and lootings in the country´s largest city, to what appears as a coup, resulting from a power struggle between the former and the current presidents. With the latter calling in the foreign troops, and Russia significantly involved yet again - the week has seen a landslide change in the political landscape of the world´s 9th largest country - and of the whole Central Asian region. Anastassiya Schacht is an associated researcher at RECET. Here, she speaks with Viktoria Morasch, a journalist working for newspapers Die Zeit and Tageszeitung.
In the last days of the Habsburg monarchy, Vienna vied with Prague for the title of the largest Czech city. Today, a tiny fraction of the Austrian capital’s population would identify as Czech. Nonetheless, community centers and clubs established during the heyday of Czech migration continue to exist. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Rosamund Johnston (RECET) speaks to two of those most involved in their maintenance, Mojmír Stránský (RECET) and Dr. Věra Gregorová. Introducing Czech Vienna’s landmarks and associations, Stránský and Gregorová reflect upon why these spaces continue to be relevant, and indeed upon these sites’ new significance in a city once again characterized by multilingualism and migration. Mojmír Stránský is completing a dissertation on voluntary organizations in Czechoslovakia and Austria (1980-2000) at the University of Vienna. He also works in the history department at the Komenský Gymnasium. Dr. Věra Gregorová is the director of Vienna’s Hotel Post and the Czech Heart association based in this building.
How did the discovery of oil in Persia transform Persian society and British imperialism in the Middle East at the turn of the century? In this episode moderated by Dr. Sheng Peng (RECET), Leonardo Davoudi explores the formal and informal dealings of politicians, investors, civil servants, and intermediaries during the development of the Persian petroleum industry from its uncertain beginnings to becoming one of British Empire’s most valuable pocessions in the Middle East. Dr. Leonardo Davoudi is an associate member of Oxford University’s History Faculty and a researcher with the Global History of Capitalism project at the Oxford Centre for Global History. He is the author of “Persian Petroleum: Oil, Empire and Revolution in Late Qajar Iran” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). His research interests lie at the intersection of imperialism and capitalism.
How have technologies, politics, and social expectations transformed the work of journalists in Central Europe over the past three decades? And which journalistic practices and market forces might combine to characterize a “Central European” media environment? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Rosamund Johnston (RECET) speaks to Gerald Schubert, a reporter on Central and Eastern Europe for Austrian newspaper Der Standard. He reflects on a career spanning 20 years in both the Czech Republic and Austria, and on a “worsening” situation for journalists today in both of these states, as well as elsewhere in Europe.
Not many know that Accra, the capital of Ghana, is home to architecture designed by Eastern Europeans. In this episode, Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET) talks to Prof. Łukasz Stanek about his award-winning book, in which he examines the role Eastern European experts - architects and engineers - played in supporting newly postcolonial states in their efforts to bring about a social transformation through urbanization. How can architecture contribute to, bring about, and document major changes in the global Cold War dynamic? What lessons can we learn from taking a close look at the entanglements between postcolonialism and socialism? Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Manchester, UK. Professor Stanek is the author of "Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory" (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and "Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War" (Princeton University Press, 2020), which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the SAH GB and the RIBA President’s Award for History & Theory Research.
Free movement of people is a contentious issue. In this episode, moderated by RECET's Scientific Director Jannis Panagiotidis, Cecilia Bruzelius talks about how states deal with the resulting challenges to labor markets and welfare states, what free movement means for European citizenship, and what mass emigration does to East European societies.
Prof. Dr. Cecilia Bruzelius is a Junior Professor of Political Science at Tübingen University. In her research, she focuses on free movement in history and the present, with a particular focus on the issues of citizenship and the welfare state.
In this episode, RECET's Dr. Anna Calori talks with Tobias Rupprecht, Head of the Junior Research Group "Peripheral Liberalism", about Tobias's recent project on peripheral liberalism, economic reform debates in socialist countries, and the history of globalisation in the 1990s.
Dr. Tobias Rupprecht is a global historian with a particular interest in the history of (state) socialism and (neo)liberalism. His research has mostly addressed Soviet and Eastern European encounters with the Global South, and economic reform debates in socialist countries. He taught Russian history in Denmark and the UK before becoming head of the 'Peripheral Liberalism' research group at the cluster of excellence 'Contestations of the Liberal Script' in Berlin.
Talking about sex and educating young people about the challenges and questions related to human sexuality is a sensitive and often controversial topic. In this episode, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Agnieszka Kościańska (University of Warsaw) talks to Lukas Becht (RECET) about the rich and fascinating history of sex education in the XX. century with a focus on Poland. It is a story of transformations and conflicts that requires us to rethink linear, teleological and progressivist concepts of transformative historical change.
Agnieszka Kościańska is an anthropologist, an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, and recently Leverhulme Visiting Professor, University of Oxford. Her latest book, published by Berghahn Books in 2021, is "To see a Moose! The History of Polish Sex Education".
What can translations tell us about the societies in which they are published? In this episode, moderated by Rosamund Johnston (RECET), Dr. Eva Spišiaková (University of Vienna) reflects upon one hundred years of Shakespeare's sonnets in Czech and Slovak translation. Spišiaková uses the "love poems of all love poems" to uncover shifting attitudes towards gender and sexuality in Czechoslovakia, and measure changes accompanying the country's Velvet Revolution in 1989.
Eva Spišiaková is a REWIRE postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vienna's Center for Translation Studies. She is the author of Queering Translation History: Shakespeare's Sonnets in Czech and Slovak Transformations (Routledge, 2021). Her current research explores how disability has historically been represented in translation.
Which factors play a leading role in the transformation and collapse of modern autocracies? In this episode, moderated by Anastassiya Schacht (RECET), our guest Prof. Sergei Guriev (Sciences Po) talks about the methods used by modern autocracies to convince their voters, their relationship with the economy and economic crises, and about what it takes to co-opt the country's elites. Sergei Guriev is professor and Scientific Director of the Master and PhD programmes in Economics at SciencePo (Paris). He received his Dr. Sc. (habilitation degree) in Economics and PhD in Applied Math from the Russian Academy of Science. His research interests include political economics, labor mobility, corporate governance and contract theory.
Milan is a city that is synonymous with industry, as well as with style. In this episode, moderated by Dean Vuletic (RECET), we take a tour of Milan with Prof. Anne-Marie Jeannet as we discuss her research on de-industrializing societies and the political consequences. From the glamorous square of the city centre to the industrial chic of other neighbourhoods, Prof. Jeannet explains how Milan has been transformed by de-industrialization, while still remaining an industrial powerhouse.
Anne-Marie Jeannet is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan. She studies how changes in the social structure, such as deindustrialization or immigration, alter political life. She is the principal investigator of "Deindustrializing Societies and the Political Consequences" (DESPO), a project funded by an ERC Starting Grant (2020-2025).
Governments in East Central Europe have long relied on radical neoliberal reforms as a strategy to leave socialism behind. In this episode, moderated by RECET's founding director Philipp Ther, our guest Prof. Dr. Dorothee Bohle discusses how neoliberalism became resilient once again. She examines the relationship between authoritarianism and neoliberalism and argues for a gendered perspective on the topic. Dorothee Bohle is a professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the European University Institute. She is co-author of Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery (2012), for which she won the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research.
Is the legacy of dissidence, rather than the legacy of communism, driving the current illiberal turn in some East Central European states' politics? In this episode moderated by Rosamund Johnston (RECET), our guest Michal Kopeček (Institute of Contemporary History, Prague/ Imre Kertész Kolleg, Jena) discusses how dissidents shaped political discourse in the region both before and after the revolutions of 1989. Following the "legacies of dissidence" to the present, Kopeček considers how dissident ideas provide the fuel for culture wars ongoing in East Central Europe today. Michal Kopeček is a historian, co-director of Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena and, since 2003, the head of the Late- and Post-Socialism Studies Department at the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague. He is the co-author of A History of Modern Political Thought in East Central Europe (Oxford, 2018).
Is the era of neoliberal globalism over? In this episode moderated by Prof. Dr. Jannis Panagiotidis (Scientific Director, RECET), our guest Assoc. Prof. Dr. Quinn Slobodian (Wellesley College) considers the history and current state of global capitalist governance and asks what directions it may take in the future.
Quinn Slobodian is a historian of modern German and international history with a focus on North-South politics, social movements, and the intellectual history of neoliberalism. His most recent book is "Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism" (Harvard University Press, 2018).