This paper connects current studies of post-socialist nostalgia to the issue of feminist genealogies in the contemporary European context. Studies of post-socialist nostalgia can prove significant ...not only for the former socialist East - to which they have traditionally been limited - but also for the “former West”, that is post-Cold War Western Europe. In the first part of my paper I draw a connection between feminist genealogies and post-socialist nostalgia in the former East, looking in particular at the phenomenon of Yugonostalgia from a gendered and feminist perspective, and taking my research on the 1978 Belgrade feminist conference Drugarica Zena/Comrade Woman as a point of departure. The narrative about Yugoslavia being closer to Western Europe and to Western European feminist movements in the 1970s, in comparison to today’s marginalization of post-Yugoslav successor states, indicates that changes in gender regimes are deeply connected to shifts in ideological and geopolitical relations, including the shifting boundaries of Europe after 1989. In the second part of this essay I transpose the study of post-socialist nostalgia to the former West. When looking more closely at Western European countries, particularly at those who had significant communist parties such as Italy and France, it is clear that even in the West certain articulations of post-socialist nostalgia for radical pasts have emerged, helping us to unravel women’s and feminist movements’ genealogies that have been made invisible. I take the case of the recent Italian movie Cosmonauta as a symptom of post-socialist nostalgia in the former West.
Despite the impoverishment of prospects for those employed in the industrial and agricultural sectors in post-Soviet Russia, young people in vocational education colleges continue to be trained for ...'poor work' in traditional large-scale enterprises. This article draws upon qualitative, case-study research in exploring young people's subjective orientations to a route to adulthood that is at once available and yet unviable, as well as their orientations to new forms of education and service sector employment. The article highlights the disjuncture which has emerged between the collectivist, class-based identities and modalities young people construct around transitions into initial vocational education and training (IVET) colleges and the individualized, choice-based narratives they use to describe experiences of later transitions into work. This shift from 'inheritance' to 'individualization' mirrors that among working-class youth elsewhere in the world, for whom the principal dimension of 'reflexivity' in the late-modern context has been the individualized attribution of blame for 'wrong choices'.
In the former Soviet Union, the upbringing of children in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist values was central to the project of societal transformation. More than 20 years after the collapse of the ...Soviet Union, it is important to understand how the education of young children in this region has changed in response to a world rapidly globalising and increasingly driven by market economic policies. Just how much have post-socialist states, as others across the world, reoriented their educational projects to ensure the development of individuals maximally adapted for the information economy of late capitalism? This study probes this question through the critical discourse analysis of a genre of early literacy textbooks - bukvari - used widely throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet education system. Through comparison of literacy texts published in the late Soviet era with those used over the past two decades in independent Latvia and Ukraine, we explore how discourses representing children and their behaviors - what we call 'literacies of childhood' - have evolved during post-socialist transformations. In contrast to the predominant assumption that values common to socialism should have given way to cosmopolitan, neoliberal principles, we find surprising flows and modifications between visions of the 'Soviet' and 'post-Soviet' child. Most significantly perhaps, our analysis reveals that even the most recent textbooks reject assertions of a global and future-oriented citizen, instead idealising visions of a distinctly national Latvian or Ukrainian citizenry, growing up in a trapped-in-time, ethnically and linguistically homogenous homeland.
Článek se zabývá českou post-socialistickou kulturou a transponuje rozdíly mezi kulturou tranzice a intelektuální kulturní formací na rovinu kolektivní paměti. Zatímco kultura tranzice je spojovaná ...spíše se zapomínáním, intelektuální kulturní formace představuje nositele traumatické formy paměti. Tento proces konstrukce kulturního traumatu je sledován na příkladu národní kinematografie, v níž intelektuálové figurují jako tvůrci. Čtyři úspěšné hořké komedie o normalizaci natočené po roce 1989 jsou podrobeny analýze pomocí sémiotické redukce. Klíčové politické termíny jsou mapovány v sémiotickém čtverci a navzdory danému žánru poukazují na komplexní reprezentaci státně-socialistické minulosti. Pro konstrukci traumatu je klíčové odmítnutí utopického překonání binární opozice mezi komunismem a antikomunismem. Zdůrazněny jsou póly bezmoci a odpovědnosti k rodině, jež odkazují na problém morální volby. Tento způsob připomínání minulosti může paradoxně kultuře tranzice prospívat tím, že ve veřejné sféře nabízí alternativu oficiální politice paměti.
This paper makes an intervention in the debates on postmodernism as dominant social and cultural order of the present from the perspective of post-socialist transformation. Grounded in an analysis of ...theoretical discourses and of qualitative interviews, it highlights the hierarchical time/space constructions and universalizing tendencies inherent in many proclamations of the postmodern epoch and contests the uncritical acceptance of the 'end of history' metanarrative. Post-socialist transformation is shown to be a complex process that fits uneasily into pre-given categories and disrupts an ordering logic that divides between a western, postmodern 'us' and 'the rest' of the world. My argument is formulated on the basis of research on the transformative processes in former east Germany.
ABSTRACT IN FRENCH: L'idée que la parenté relève de « l'ordre naturel des choses » est inscrite autant dans les codes légaux que dans le cycle de la vie familiale. Sur la base d'une enquête ...qualitative, cet article explore les relations entre les politiques publiques et la transformation des idées relatives à la façon d'être parent en Allemagne de l'Est après 1989. Confrontés aux nouveaux idéaux publics de la parentalité, les Allemands de l'Est se les approprient, mais aussi y résistent ou s'y adaptent selon leur âge et leur sexe. Bien que ces changements après le socialisme soient souvent interpretés comme une modernisation, cette enquête souligne que les processus sont plus ambivalents et que le rôle des acteurs sociaux au plan local est souvent plus important que les grandes politiques publiques d'assistance. // ABSTRACT IN ENGLISH: Notions of kinship as 'the natural order of things' are embodied in legal codes and appropriated during the life-course. On the basis of qualitative data, this article explores the connection between state policies and changing individual notions and practices through the example of parenting in eastern Germany after 1989. Confronted with new state ideals of parenting, eastern Germans appropriate, resist or adapt their concepts and practices according to age and gender. Although post-socialist changes are often interpreted as modernisation these data point to more ambivalent processes thereby also questioning the formerly assumed 'great divide' between East and West. At the same time the presented examples highlight the importance of 'small' local state actors rather than 'big' welfare policies.
The Czech Republic is experiencing a growing trend of health-care worker emigration. Although some emigrate for long periods of time, many return after a few months or years abroad and re-enter the ...Czech health system. The nurses’ narratives in this study draw on experiences in Czech, British, and Saudi hospitals to explore the role standardised medical policies, procedures, and protocols play in the development and maintenance of a nurse’s professional identity in the post-socialist context. The author suggests that performance of protocols versus informality of practice in health-care settings provides a lens through which to view professional identity in post-socialism. In fields such as health care, standards operate as measures of security that create normative rules of governmentality, regulate behaviour, and prevent harm. The nurses in this study describe the majority of Czech hospitals as lacking standard protocols for patient care. Encountering strict rules of practice in foreign hospitals leads them to evaluate the professionalism and quality of Czech health care and their own selves as nurses. Their assessment is often based on their own ability to effectively perform within the standardised system. The author’s primary analysis for this presentation will concentrate on the ways that standardisation relates to ideas about professionalism and nursing autonomy and status.
This article focuses on migrant workers' agency through exploring the relationship between working and employment conditions, on one side, and labour mobility, on the other. The study is based on ...qualitative research involving workers from Moldova and Ukraine working in the Russian and Italian construction sector. Fieldwork has been carried out in Russia, Italy and Moldova to investigate informal networks, recruitment mechanisms and employment conditions to establish their impact on migration processes. Overcoming methodological nationalism, this study recognises transnational spaces as the new terrain where antagonistic industrial relations are rearticulated. Labour turnover is posited as a key explanatory factor and understood not simply as the outcome of capital recruitment strategies but also as workers' agency. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article analyses teachers' experience in the period of educational change in Estonia from 1989 to 2010. We review the introduction of the new national curricula and national exams. We show how, ...in the teachers' experience, the period of change can be divided into two distinct periods. Firstly, the period of freedom and chaos in the early 1990s and, secondly, the period of tightening regulations and decreasing autonomy after the introduction of the national exams in 1997. Based on life history interviews with 24 teachers, we identify seven different responses to educational innovation. We assume that for a new educational policy to be successful, or to create social innovation, it has to be accepted by teachers not only on the regulative level but also on the normative level of values and social roles. We look at which of these responses can be classified as social innovation and assess the usefulness of the theory of social innovation in education studies.
In our environment there exists a special kind of intergenerational connectedness within the family in the form of a strong commitment of the parents to support their children in the course of their ...entire life (financial assistance, paying for education, providing for housing/shared housing, attending to and care of offspring). The Socialist system had recognized this role of the family and the social care was directed towards the family (allocation of flats according to the number of members of the household, cheap holidays for employee families provided by trade unions etc) In the turbulent times of the post-socialist period, social care and safety from the previous Socialist system vanished. The family became the most important and only source of support for young people. This led to so-called extended childhood or delayed growing up, which is expanding so as to involve increasingly more generations and age groups, including even persons from 16 to 35 years of age.
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