Transformative Blog

The third History and Social Sciences Festival organized by the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) in Vienna tackled the topical question of “green transformations”. This conference report focuses on its contents and highlights.

In this blogpost, our researcher Daniel Jerke writes about his visits to the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax in the province of Nova Scotia as well as the National Immigration Museum on Ellis Island in New York City.

In this blog post, our Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellow Katarzyna Nowak reflects on her first visit to the Vatican Apostolic Archives, where she conducts research for her project "Knocking on the Vatican’s Gates. Refugees, the Holy See, and the Spectre of Communism, 1945-1958”.

Private enterprises founded by diaspora Poles with seed capital from the West produced a range of consumer goods for the domestic market in the late Polish People’s Republic, blowing a ‘wind of change’ into the planned economy over a decade before the transformation.

Despite Lithuania’s Europeanism, its policies on LGBTQ rights are sometimes closer to Russia’s. At the end of 2023, the Lithuanian parliament voted against amending the country’s notorious ‘gay propaganda’ law, in defiance of the European Court of Human Rights.

Socialist reform and modernization in post-WWII Poland opened the higher-education gate to underprivileged students. But early streaming to vocational school and societal expectations remained as barriers. What became of the working-class freshers who made it to the lofty heights of academia?

Vienna has many stories to tell. Take for instance the city’s long and rich history of immigration – Join our Daniel Jerke on his walk through the Austrian capital!

Business as usual was no longer an option in the former GDR post-1989. Liberation opened up previously state-controlled technological production to globalized markets. Uncompetitive operations soon led to closures. But some workers took the crisis into their own hands, combatting exponential unemployment by regrouping and taking a resourceful lead.

The euphoria of anti-fascists from WWII-occupied countries, meeting at international events, was a short-lived reprieve from oppression. Hungarian socialist groups, bringing women from all social classes together, went from publishing starstruck articles to testifying in Stalinist show trials, their solidarity forced into betrayal.

When a neighbourhood collapses into a warzone, from one day to the next, citizens become refugees. Securing safety and caring for those who remain creates a dual burden. Ukrainians, turning to their diaspora, have experienced both support and tension. Returning or remaining has become a political and deeply personal dilemma.