Transformative Podcast (recet)

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). 

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 is land central to socialist and postsocialist transformations in Southeast Europe? In this episode, Katarina Kušić (University of Vienna) tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about land as more than an object of policy, the perspectives on studying it and the importance of rural areas and marginalised actors. Dr. Katarina Kušić is a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow at the Research Platform “Transformations and Eastern Europe” at the University of Vienna. Her current project investigates the relations that make and remake the meaning of land in political, social, ecological, and economic transformations, looking at policymaking, everyday experiences and alternative political imaginaries in Southeast Europe. The project is funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her book “Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia” is coming out with the University of Michigan Press in early 2025. 

Once a “hub of anti-colonialism,” the Czech capital Prague might be viewed today a “hub of anti-Communism” instead. How did this shift take place? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Mikuláš Pešta (Czech Academy of Science + Charles University, Prague) guides Rosamund Johnston (RECET) through the sites and organizations associated with student and Marxist activism in the city, and reflects upon the limited legacies of both. How did the international activists resident in Prague during the Cold War shape the city? And to what extent did their individual views matter within organizations often understood as mere fronts for Soviet policy? Mikuláš Pešta works as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University and as a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Science. He has published in the International History Review, the Journal of Contemporary History, Central European History, and Intelligence and National Security, as well as authoring both works of fiction and non-fiction in Czech. His research focuses on the contacts between Czechoslovakia and African and Asian countries and national liberation movements in the fields of education, cultural diplomacy, ideology, and the secret services. Currently, he is researching the role played by Prague-based international organizations and student internationalism during the Cold War and beyond.

What does radio tell us about state socialism and the post-1945 history of Czechoslovakia? In this episode, Rosamund Johnston (RECET) tells Jelena Đureinović (also RECET) about radio and politics in socialist Czechoslovakia, highlighting the role of radio reporters and reception among listeners and discussing the contemporary implications of the study of Cold War radio.   Rosamund Johnston is a postdoctoral researcher at RECET. She is the author of Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969, published by Stanford University Press. She also co-authored one book of public history, Havel in America: Interviews with American Intellectuals, Politicians, and Artists, released by Czech publisher Host in 2019. Her work has appeared in Central European History, the Journal of Cold War Studies, East Central Europe, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Scottish newspaper The National, and on public broadcaster Czech Radio. She is currently researching the global history of Czechoslovakia between 1954 and 1994 through its arms trade.

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. 

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).

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.

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).

Freedom movement just means removing migration barriers and letting people move around freely - or does it? In this episode, Madeleine Dungy of NTNU Trondheim discusses the complicated making of European free movement in the 1960s and 1970s with RECET scientific director Jannis Panagiotidis. At a time of reinforced national social welfare behind the border, she argues, governments, social actors, multilateral institutions, and NGOs had to work hard to reconcile the goals of broad regional mobility and deep social protection.

Madeleine Dungy is an Associate Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She works on the history of international organizations, with a particular focus on trade and migration. She is the principal investigator of the ERC Starting Grant InternalFortress: Regulating European Freedom of Movement within the Nation-State, 1950-1980 and is the author of Order and Rivalry: Rewriting the Rules of International Trade after the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Ukrainian refugees make up a staggering number - over 6 million globally. Millions more left before 2022 as labour migrants. What are these people's intentions for returning? Who will return, and who will stay? In this episode, Daniel Jerke (RECET) discusses with Olena Yermakova (Jagiellonian University/RECET) insights from her fieldwork data that were presented in a recent article on the RECET blog. Yermakova goes deep into the interpersonal dynamics and psychological factors, explaining why survey answers might differ from actual outcomes.

Olena Yermakova is an interdisciplinary researcher focusing on migration. She is doing her PhD at the Jagiellonian University in Poland and is currently a Ukraine fellow at RECET. She recently published a fieldwork-based article, "The Way Home", at Eurozine, republished by Transformative Blog.

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.

Is there such a thing as racism against people from Eastern Europe–people who in their majority would be considered "white" in terms of skin color? Drawing on historical and contemporary insights, in this episode RECET scientific director Jannis Panagiotidis and his co-author Hans-Christian Petersen discuss key findings of their new book Antiosteuropäischer Rassismus in Deutschland (Anti-East European Racism in Germany).

Hans-Christian Petersen is a researcher at the Federal Institute for Culture and History of Eastern Europe (BKGE) Oldenburg and a lecturer at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. His research interests include Russian-German history, the post-migrant present and the history of German “Ostforschung”. He is the author of An den Rändern der Stadt? Soziale Räume der Armen in St. Petersburg (1850-1914) (Böhlau 2019).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

Who were the communist women who designed and implemented the socialist project of women’s emancipation not only in Poland, but around the world? How did they conceptualize emancipation? How to write about them today, when any association with communism arouses resistance, and communists are either erased from history or stereotypically captured as traitors to the nation? We talk with Agnieszka Mrozik about her book "Female architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist women, literature, and women’s emancipation in postwar Poland" (2022).   Agnieszka Mrozik is an associate professor of literary studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is affiliated with two research units: The Center for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism, and the Women’s Archive. She was a fellow of the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena (2017), the Institute for Advanced Study CEU (2018/19), and the DAAD program at the University of Hamburg (2019). In the summer semester of 2023/24, she was a guest professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). She is the author of Architektki PRL-u: Komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce [Female architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist women, literature, and women’s emancipation in postwar Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2022) and Akuszerki transformacji: Kobiety, literatura i władza w Polsce po 1989 roku [Midwives of the transformation: Women, literature, and power in post-1989 Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012). She has co-authored and co-edited several collective volumes, including Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944–1989 (CEU Press, 2021), Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond (Routledge, 2020), and Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism (Routledge, 2018).

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.

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.

In this episode, Kateryna Ruban talks with Zsófia Lóránd about how the history of abortion in Ukraine and Soviet Union can help us understand contemporary reproductive struggles and modern Ukrainian history. Kateryna’s future book tells a story of a female obstetrician-gynecologist in a postwar Transcarpathian hospital who performed abortions during Stalinism when abortion was illegal and later, showcases a doctor who insisted on professional autonomy despite the desire of political leaders to fully control the procedure. Abortion was a matter of intense public debates before 1917 and particularly in the 1920s, when many doctors argued that abortion was a part of female emancipation and a part of justified desire of women to regulate their reproduction. What happened next is usually seen as overwhelming Soviet pronatalism, but Kateryna shows a different picture of how women were able to maneuver within official policies and gain access to abortion. She focuses on Ukrainian and Transcarpathian contexts, thus departing from traditional portrayal of Soviet women as a whole and the Soviet history of abortion as based on central Russian archives.

Kateryna Ruban is a historian who received her Ph.D. from New York University in September 2022. In 2022-2023, she was a fellow at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University. Earlier, Kateryna earned master’s degrees at Central European University in Hungary and at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine. She was a part of the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv. Kateryna Ruban was a Ukraine Fellow with RECET in 2024.

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.

In this special edition of the RECET transformative podcast, we revisit the recent RECET festival, where speakers from around the globe discussed ‘Green Transformations.’ In this excerpt, three panelists charted the history of nuclear energy—from its ‘dark past’ to, perhaps, its ‘green future.’

Stephen Gross is the author of Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms and Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 2023). He was joined by Elisabeth Röhrlich, author of Inspectors for Peace: A History of the International Atomic Energy Agency (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022). They spoke alongside Anna Weichselbraun, from the University of Vienna, who is currently finishing a manuscript on knowledge production at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The discussion was moderated by Rosamund Johnston (RECET).

Stephen G. Gross is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center of European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. After working at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (Department of Commerce) in Washington DC, he received his PhD in history from UC Berkeley. He is the author of Energy and Power: Germany in the Age of Oil, Atoms, and Climate Change (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890-1945, which explores the political economy of the Nazi Empire. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Fellowship, the German Academic Exchange Program, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, and the Andrew Mellon New Directions Fellowship, through which he earned a certificate of sustainable finance at Columbia University.

Elisabeth Röhrlich is Associate Professor at the History Department of the University of Vienna and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies. Her expertise is in twentieth century global and international history, the history of international organizations, the history of the nuclear age and the Cold War, and Austrian contemporary history. She received her PhD in history from the University of Tübingen, Germany, and has held fellowships at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, the German Historical Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (both in Washington D.C.), and Monash University South Africa. She is the author of a prize-winning book about the former Austrian chancellor Bruno Kreisky (Kreiskys Außenpolitik, Vienna University Press, 2009), and her writings on the history of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been published in journals such as the Diplomacy and Statecraft, Cold War History, and the Journal of Cold War Studies. Her monograph "Inspectors for Peace" on the history of the IAEA was published with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2022.

Anna Weichselbraun is a postdoc researcher at the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. She works at the intersection of historical anthropology of knowledge, semiotics and science and technology studies with an empirical focus on the global governance of technology in the long 20th century. She is currently revising her book manuscript on nuclear knowledge practices at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Rosamund Johnston is the Principal Investigator of Linking Arms: Central Europe´s Weapons Industries, 1954-1994 at RECET. She is the author of Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 which appeared with Stanford University Press in March 2024. Her research has been published in Central European History and a number of edited volumes. She has also written for the Journal of Cold War Studies, East Central Europe, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Scottish newspaper The National, and public broadcaster Czech Radio. Johnston is the author of one book of public history, Havel in America: Interviews with American Intellectuals, Politicians, and Artists, released by Czech publisher Host in 2019.

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.

The always growing knowledge production about socialist Yugoslavia has not sufficiently or adequately addressed the histories of Albanians in Yugoslavia. During the socialist period, many Albanians migrated in search of work from Kosovo and Macedonia to other parts of Yugoslavia, mostly to the country's northwest. In this episode, Rory Archer (RECET/Research Plattform "Transfromations and Eastern Europe") tells Jelena Đureinović (RECET) about the social history of Yugoslav Albanian labour migration during socialism, focusing on its background, perception, and the heterogeneous nature of the Albanian micro-communities across Yugoslavia. Dr. Rory Archer is a social historian of 20th century Southeast Europe whose work focuses on labour history and gender history in socialism, housing, everyday life and popular culture. He leads a research project about the intra-Yugoslav Albanian migration funded by the Austrian Science Foundation at the University of Graz.

Studying social justice reveals the promises a regime - liberal or otherwise - makes to its citizens. It also reveals how citizens interpret these promises. But to what extent should we use the term “social justice” to understand societies excluding entire cohorts - most notoriously Jews and Roma in territories occupied by the Nazis during World War II? By focusing on exactly this period, and taking the example of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Radka Šustrová discusses not only how welfare states (as much as culture, literature, or media) have historically cemented nationalist projects, but also how thoroughly illiberal concepts of social justice have historically been. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, she reflects moreover on the extent to which this wartime inheritance impacted the postwar welfare states celebrated in Central Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Radka Šustrová is the author of Nations Apart: Czech Nationalism and Authoritarian Welfare under Nazi Rule (Oxford, 2024). She is a researcher at RECET and a lecturer in social history at Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on the history of the welfare state, social justice, social and labour rights, women's activism, and nationalism in twentieth-century Central Europe. From 2020 to 2022, she was a British Academy Newton International Fellow and supervisor in history at the University of Cambridge. In 2022, she was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Vienna. Her further publications include three books, several edited volumes, and articles in English, German, and Czech.

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).

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.

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.

Who were the Yugoslav Casanovas of mass tourism? What are the practices of othering and meanings behind romantic and sexual encounters of local young men and foreign female tourists in the Yugoslav Adriatic? In this episode, Anita Buhin tells Jelena Đureinović about so-called galebovi (seagulls) in socialist Yugoslavia and various economic, cultural and social aspects of this phenomenon, typical for the broader Mediterranean region and the development of mass tourism.

Dr. Anita Buhin is a cultural historian of socialist Yugoslavia in the Mediterranean context whose work focuses on the relations between popular culture and tourism. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at the NOVA University of Lisbon and holds a PhD from the European University Institute. Her book Yugoslav Socialism ‘Flavoured with Sea, Flavoured with Salt’: Mediterranization of Yugoslav Popular Culture in the 1950s and 1960s under Italian Influences was published with Srednja Europa in Zagreb in 2022.

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.

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.

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 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. 

Who are the people who left Russia after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022? Is this an exodus of politically active liberals in opposition to the regime? What role does the military mobilization of young men play? Where do people go, and what do they do in their places of exile? In this episode, Félix Krawatzek (ZOiS Berlin) discusses some key insights of his research on the topic with RECET scientific director Jannis Panagiotidis.  

Félix Krawatzek is Head of the Research Unit Youth and Generational Change at the Center for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) and Associate Member at Nuffield College (University of Oxford). His research focuses on the comparative analysis of politics in Eastern and Western Europe, with a particular interest in the role of youth, the significance of historical representation in political processes, and issues of migration and transnationalism. Since September 2022, he has been leading the ERC-funded project Moving Russia(ns): Intergenerational Transmission of Memories Abroad and at Home (MoveMeRU).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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.

Over the past year and a half, RECET has carried out its very first youth project titled "Knowledgeable Youth: Science Communication in Times of War". Together with our partners Eurozine and Radio Orange, we reached out to Ukrainian refugee youngsters living in Vienna and invited them to get to know the world of academic research and science communication.

You are listening to the first of four podcast episodes produced by Ukrainian youths who arrived in Vienna following the start of the Russian invasion. The youngsters interview the founder of their school Iryna Khamayko and share insights into their lives and diverse school experiences after arriving in Vienna as refugees.

Project lead (RECET): Irena Remestwenski Project lead (Eurozine): Carine Chen Youngsters: FREE PEOPLE School  Organisational assistance & PR: Leonid Motz

Originally produced by Margit Wolfsberger and Mischa Hendel for Radio Orange. Remixed by Leonid Motz.

Funded by the Cultural Department (MA7) of the City of Vienna.

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.

What obstacles did first generation students face in socialist Poland? And how might their biographies help us design affirmative action drives today? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Dr. Agata Zysiak tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how political reform of higher education is never enough by itself to overhaul membership of a country’s intellectual elite. Instead, these reforms rely on interpretation and implementation at multiple levels—both within and beyond the university’s walls. Ultimately, Zysiak explains that there came to exist a “clash of privileges” in socialist Poland, between state-support for working class and peasant students on the one hand, and the intelligentsia protecting their privileged claim to the university on the other, with the effect that both limited each other.

Dr. Agata Zysiak is a historical sociologist at RECET, University of Vienna, and the University of Łódź. She is the author of the award-winning book, Punkty za pochodzenie (Points for Social Origin); coauthor of the main publication about Łódź available in English, From Cotton and Smoke; and the author of Wielki przemysł, wielka cisza (Great Industry, Great Silence), which maps Łódź industry and its collapse. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Wayne State University (Detroit), Free University (Berlin), and Central European University (Budapest), and she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton between 2017 and 2018.

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.

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 

Vienna’s walls are full of signs, stickers and graffitis in South Slavic languages. How does this come about? – In this episode, Leonid Motz (RECET) talks to Prof. Katharina Tyran (University of Helsinki) about Vienna’s linguistic landscape and how it is shaped by Post-Yugoslav migrants. What can we learn about power dynamics from the linguistic practices in which they engage? Tyran highlights how – often subversive or subcultural – linguistic signs are rooted in transnational cultural contexts that transcend the linguistic borders of the modern nation-state.

Katharina Tyran is an Associate Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on South Slavic languages. Tyran’s interests include sociolinguistic topics with a focus on minority languages, language and identity, linguistic landscape research, language commodification, writing systems and orthography.

In this episode, Małgorzata Mazurek (Columbia University) engages in a discussion with Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ (RECET) on how Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau, Polish economists in the interwar period, responded to local and global challenges such as poverty and the Great Depression. Embedded in the Second Polish Republic — a fragile political entity — the economists in question generated innovative ideas about mass employment and economic development.   Małgorzata Mazurek is an associate Professor in Polish Studies in the History Department at Columbia University. Her interests include the history of social sciences, international development, the social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland, and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with the history of social inequalities under state socialism. Her current book project, Economics of Hereness, revises the history of developmental thinking from the perspective of interwar Poland and its problem of multi-ethnicity. She has recently written about the idea of full employment in interwar Poland for the American Historical Review, history of social sciences for a survey handbook, The Interwar World, and the university as the Second-Third World Space in the Cold War for the volume Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular edited by Kristin Roth-Ey.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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). 

This podcast episode is partly a summary of the main points Prof. Todorova developed in her book "Imagining Utopia: The Lost World of Socialists at Europe's Margins", partly a chronological extension into the decades that were not covered by the book. This is done by focusing on the life and activities of Christian Rakovsky (1873-1941), as well as the assessments in the aftermath of his death. The change of the scales of analysis would allow Todorova to demonstrate the interplay between center and periphery, especially the "paradox" of socialism in agrarian societies and the attitude to the national question, the mechanisms of how socialist ideas were generated and received, and to emphasize the benefits of microhistory through the biographical method. The book ended with the demise of the Second International. In this talk, Todorova is taking the narrative further by stressing the activities of Rakovsky in the Soviet Union and particularly in the Ukraine, as well as his diplomatic work and his place in the Left Opposition. It thus highlights the move from the realm of the "utopia of the future" to the reality of "utopia on earth."

Maria Todorova is the Gutgsell Professor of History Emerita and Professor Emerita, Center for Advanced Study at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in Eastern Europe, specifically the Balkans in the modern period. Her research focuses on historical demography, nationalism, socialism and post-communism.

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.

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. 

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).