Events

Welfare Work Without Welfare argues that women activists, wage workers, and homemakers in the Romanian capital Bucharest ensured others’ well-being in the interwar period through their "austerity welfare work".

Imagine a world without corruption. A world in which politicians disregard private interests and are committed to a better future for the people they serve. State socialist political elites in Cold War East-Central Europe promised to build such a world. Now imagine the same elites being caught profiting from their offices, building private homes using state…

It is a usual practice to place an embargo on the disclosure of testimonies of individuals at risk, such as during an ongoing military conflict, following an act of violence or of those dissenting an authoritarian regime. This lecture shows how to safely disclose testimonies while at the same time protecting individuals at risk. We present a secure…

The digital age is conventionally narrated as a Western story, one in which liberal capitalism's institutional flexibility enabled the technological transformation that state socialism's rigidity precluded. This talk challenges that narrative by arguing that the intellectual and institutional history of computing's social promise was a genuinely global one,…

In Europe, discussions about China often revolve around state power, geopolitical rivalry, and economic strength. But who built China’s rise? Drawing on the concept of infrastructural power of labor, hundreds of millions of Chinese workers whose labour has powered one of the most profound economic transformations of our time.

This Transformative Seminar will feature Prof. Paul Betts (Oxford). Seminar abstract tbc.

Hosted by the University of Vienna’s Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), this two-day international conference aims to bring together scholars from two fields that too often work separately: Soviet/post-Soviet history and Jewish studies. Its aim is to challenge the dominant narratives of both fields by telling the story of Jewish…

Building on (and critically updating) Albert O. Hirschman’s classic exit–voice–loyalty framework, the conference invites contributions that explore how migration relates to political circumstances, labour, and agency—across contemporary as well as historical perspectives, and across multiple migration routes (not only “East–West”).