Transformative Podcast

East Europeans are white - or are they? In this episode, Jannis Panagiotidis (RECET) interviews Ivan Kalmar (University of Toronto) on his new book, in which he contends that the precarity of East European whiteness is one of the drivers of the region's illiberal turn, turning East Europeans into both victims and perpetrators of racism.

Ivan Kalmar is a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of White But Not Quite: Central Europe' Illiberal Revolt, published by Bristol University Press in 2022.

The Russian military invasion of Ukraine that commenced on the February 24, 2022, led to the largest forced migration flows in Europe since WWII. In this episode, Irena Remestwenski (RECET) talks with Dr. Judith Kohlenberger about a rapid-response survey of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Austria. Dr. Kohlenberger sheds light on Ukrainian refugees' sociodemographic background, choice of host country, as well as their return and stay intentions and discusses implications for integration policies.

Judith Kohlenberger a post-doctoral researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) working on forced migration and integration. She was a contributor to the Persons in Austria Survey (DiPAS), one of the first European studies on the human capital of refugees in the fall of 2015, which was awarded the Kurt-Rothschild-Prize. She teaches in the WU masters’ program and at the University of Applied Sciences and is the author of two books, We (2021) and Refugee Paradox (2022).

Development as an approach to policy, as a theoretical paradigm, and as a force that can transform everyday life has been a powerful tool in changing societies on both sides of the Iron Curtain and in the so-called Global South. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Artemy Kalinovsky (Temple University) discusses these and related topics with Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET). In their conversation they touch upon development assistance to Central Asia and its role in contemporary geopolitics as well as the various meanings and scales of development.

Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor at Temple University and a historian of Soviet Union, Cold War, Central Asia, foreign policy, and development. He is the author of two monographs: A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011) and in 2018 he published Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan which won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Currently, he is working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.

According to Transparency International's 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine ranked 122nd out of 180 countries in 2021, the second most corrupt in Europe. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Ukraine's prominent rule of law activist Iryna Shyba talks to Irena Remestwenski, Managing Director at RECET, about the transformations that Ukraine has gone through since 1991, impressive gains made by various anti-corruption bodies, and the state of Ukraine’s court system in times of war.

Iryna Shyba is the former head of Foundation DEJURE, a Ukrainian civil society organization promoting rule of law and reforms in the sphere of justice, and currently Deputy Head of the EU Anti-Corruption Initiative (EUACI). For her fight against corruption in courts and for the development of child-friendly justice, she has been included in the “30 to 30” ranking by Forbes Ukraine and awarded the Georgiy Gongadze Award.

How did anti-globalism give birth to the multinational corporation? And how did complaints about “the global economy” shape mass politics at the very moment of its emergence? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Tara Zahra (University of Chicago) speaks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about the ways in which governments and citizens sought, in the interwar period, to reject global interconnectedness. Zahra charts how anti-globalist ideas were then encoded in the international system following World War II and continue to shape some institutions to this day.

Tara Zahra is Homer J. Livingston Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World, The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II and Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.