Transformative Podcast

Past and Present: Migration, Crisis and Public History in Poland (Dariusz Stola)

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. 

Sexologists in Socialist Czechoslovakia (Kateřina Lišková)

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.

Churches in Ukraine (Yuliya Yurchuk)

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.

Dialectics of (Im)Mobility: Historical Transformations Through the Lens of Movement (Steffi Marung)

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).

Guns and Globalization (Ned Richardson-Little)

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).

Racism By and Against Eastern Europeans (Ivan Kalmar)

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.

Ukrainian Refugees in Austria (Judith Kohlenberger)

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 Assistance as a Transformation Force (Artemy Kalinovsky)

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.

Ukraine’s Fight Against Corruption in the Sphere of Justice (Iryna Shyba)

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.

Anti-Globalism Between the World Wars (Tara Zahra)

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.