The Transformative Blog provides informative insights for a global intellectual audience. Read about social, economic, and cultural transformations in the region with a global perspective and wide scope of interest: from current affairs to historical analysis on Central and Eastern Europe, East Asia and the co-transformation of Western countries.
We invite contributions in history, sociology, economics, cultural and social anthropology, political science as well as from all interdisciplinary approaches. Expected length: 1200-1400 words. If you would like to become an author, please contact Jannis Panagiotidis at jannis.panagiotidis(at)univie.ac.at.
Refugees in the Early Cold War: Doing Research in the Vatican Archives
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”.
Forerunners of the Free Market
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.
Legally Sanctioned Homophobia in the EU
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.
Bleaching Blue Collars
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?
A Walking Tour through Vienna’s Forgotten History as a Transit Hub During the Cold War
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!
Sudden Entrepreneurs
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.
Women under the Banner of Friendship
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.
The Way Home
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.
Children of the Twenty-First Century
Youth, culturally associated with the future, seems increasingly afflicted by uncertainty and crises. Can looking ahead be informed by past moments of transition? In 1960s Poland young people’s ‘futurological’ outlooks uncovered the microsocial ambivalences of technological progress, revealing cracks in mass communist ideology.
Wording of Trauma, Recording Memory
Writing is a known tool for healing trauma. And poetry lends itself to rapid responses under pressure. Forced into migrating to flee war, many Ukrainian women turn to the short form as a call of solidarity, a weapon and solace.
