Transformative Podcast

Economic Memories of Transformation (Till Hilmar)

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.

Beyond Political History: Social and Cultural Dynamics of Socialist Poland (Małgorzata Fidelis)

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.

Minority Languages in Russia (Jeremy Bradley)

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.

Transformative Power Of Utopias (Kristen Ghodsee)

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.

Why Studying Migration Matters (Jannis Panagiotidis)

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).

Banal Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine (Fabian Baumann)

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.

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).