Welcome to the Transformative Podcast, which takes the year 1989 as a starting point to think about social, economic, and cultural transformations in the wake of deep historical caesuras on a European and global scale.
Can there be an open, liberal, democratic society behind closed borders? In this episode, Frank Wolff argues that erecting ever higher walls and implementing violent border regimes has a corrosive effect on democracy and rule of law in the societies ...
Can there be an open, liberal, democratic society behind closed borders? In this episode, Frank Wolff argues that erecting ever higher walls and implementing violent border regimes has a corrosive effect on democracy and rule of law in the societies these measures are allegedly meant to protect. Frank Wolff leads the research group "Internalizing Borders: The Social and Normative Consequences of the European Border Regime" at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF: Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung) at Bielefeld University. Together with Volker M. Heins, he recently published the book Hinter Mauern: Geschlossene Grenzen als Gefahr für die offene Gesellschaft ("Behind Walls: Closed Borders as a Danger for the Open Society", Suhrkamp 2023).
Erschienen: 06.12.2023
Dauer: 15:18
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Closed Borders and the Open Society (Frank Wolff)"
What do the life trajectories of Yugoslav experts abroad and students from the Global South in Yugoslavia tell us about Yugoslav connections with the postcolonial world? In this episode, Peter Wright (University of Illinois) zooms in on the actors of...
What do the life trajectories of Yugoslav experts abroad and students from the Global South in Yugoslavia tell us about Yugoslav connections with the postcolonial world? In this episode, Peter Wright (University of Illinois) zooms in on the actors of Yugoslav socialist internationalism with Jelena Đureinović (RECET). Discussing the positionalities of experts, political activism of students, and questions of racism and anti-racism, Wright argues that the experts and students help us see Yugoslavia’s relationship with the postcolonial world a little bit differently than how it is usually represented. Peter Wright is an assistant professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. His work revolves around Yugoslavia‘s relations with the Global South during the Cold War, focusing on development aid, education, and racism and racialisation.
Erschienen: 15.11.2023
Dauer: 18:32
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Actors of Yugoslav Socialist Internationalism (Peter Wright)"
The memory of how neoliberal economic policies were implemented in Eastern Europe after 1989 is still relevant to the region’s politicians, blue-collar workers and white-collar managers, and cultural producers. In this episode of the Transformative P...
The memory of how neoliberal economic policies were implemented in Eastern Europe after 1989 is still relevant to the region’s politicians, blue-collar workers and white-collar managers, and cultural producers. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Veronika Pehe tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how political, vernacular, and cultural memories of the “neoliberal turn” sometimes overlap, sometimes do not, and how this continues to generate forms of social cohesion and division today. While stressing the diversity of experiences within the region (with "memory wars" relating to the 1990s sharper in some places than in others), Pehe argues that by understanding the events of the period under the rubric of the “neoliberal turn,” historians can bring East European history into conversation with economic processes such as deindustrialization taking place in other global regions at the time. Veronika Pehe is the head of the Research Group for Historical Transformation Studies at the Czech Institute of Contemporary History in Prague. With Joanna Wawrzyniak, she is the editor of Remembering the Neoliberal Turn: Economic Change and Collective Memory in Eastern Europe after 1989 (New York: Routledge, 2024). Additionally, she is the author of a monograph, Velvet Retro, published by Berghahn in 2020, and is shortly to release a Czech-language volume on the 1990s in Czech society titled Věčná devadesátá.
Erschienen: 25.10.2023
Dauer: 14:40
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Remembering the Neoliberal Turn (Veronika Pehe)"
Does international sport foster capitalist economics and political liberalism among participating states? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Leslie Waters (University of Texas, El Paso) tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about the Olympics’ ...
Does international sport foster capitalist economics and political liberalism among participating states? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Leslie Waters (University of Texas, El Paso) tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about the Olympics’ “mixed” record in this regard.Barcelona 1992 introduced to global audiences a host of new European states. But the games also showcased the enduring legacy of state socialist sporting prowess. Lustration tore through some national Olympic committees while, in others, post-socialist elites used the institutions of international sport to rebrand as political liberals. Ultimately, Waters argues, sportswashing is not new, and was undertaken here by hosts Spain alongside countries with a not-so-distant socialist past. Leslie Waters is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas, El Paso. In addition, she is the managing editor of Hungarian Studies Review. Her first book, Borders on the Move: Territorial Change and Ethnic Cleansing in the Hungarian-Slovak Borderlands was published in 2020 by University of Rochester Press.
Erschienen: 04.10.2023
Dauer: 15:35
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 t...
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.
Erschienen: 02.08.2023
Dauer: 15:18
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Economic Memories of Transformation (Till Hilmar)"
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.
Erschienen: 12.07.2023
Dauer: 15:42
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 (Univ...
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.
Erschienen: 21.06.2023
Dauer: 17:25
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Minority Languages in Russia (Jeremy Bradley)"
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...
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.
Erschienen: 31.05.2023
Dauer: 19:17
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Transformative Power Of Utopias (Kristen Ghodsee)"
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).
Erschienen: 10.05.2023
Dauer: 17:19
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Why Studying Migration Matters (Jannis Panagiotidis)"
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 Nationalism will be published by NIU Press/Cornell University Press in August 2023.
Erschienen: 19.04.2023
Dauer: 23:10
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Banal Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine (Fabian Baumann)"
