Transformative Podcast

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). 

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.