Transformative Podcast

To what extent were Soviet engagements with the Third World characterized by solidarity during the Cold War? And to what extent did these same engagements conceal imperial ambitions? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alessandro Iandolo (UCL) talks to Rosamund Johnston (RECET) about how concrete development projects could be viewed quite differently by the different actors involved. He also talks about how his own perspective on these projects has changed, as he approaches them in his new research from different angles. If all of those involved came to be almost in agreement on one point, he argues, it was that the world-building exercises they were involved in were somehow second best when compared to the material and intellectual resources of an imagined West.

Alessandro Iandolo is a lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, specializing in the history of the Soviet Union in the world. His first book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968, explored the Soviet Union's economic partnership with three newly-independent countries in West Africa during the Khrushchev era, winning the W. Bruce Lincoln prize for the best first monograph in Russian History, and the Marshall D. Shulman prize for the best monograph on the internationalrelations of the USSR from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Studying social justice reveals the promises a regime - liberal or otherwise - makes to its citizens. It also reveals how citizens interpret these promises. But to what extent should we use the term “social justice” to understand societies excluding entire cohorts - most notoriously Jews and Roma in territories occupied by the Nazis during World War II? By focusing on exactly this period, and taking the example of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Radka Šustrová discusses not only how welfare states (as much as culture, literature, or media) have historically cemented nationalist projects, but also how thoroughly illiberal concepts of social justice have historically been. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, she reflects moreover on the extent to which this wartime inheritance impacted the postwar welfare states celebrated in Central Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Radka Šustrová is the author of Nations Apart: Czech Nationalism and Authoritarian Welfare under Nazi Rule (Oxford, 2024). She is a researcher at RECET and a lecturer in social history at Charles University in Prague. Her research focuses on the history of the welfare state, social justice, social and labour rights, women's activism, and nationalism in twentieth-century Central Europe. From 2020 to 2022, she was a British Academy Newton International Fellow and supervisor in history at the University of Cambridge. In 2022, she was awarded a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Vienna. Her further publications include three books, several edited volumes, and articles in English, German, and Czech.

Who were the communist women who designed and implemented the socialist project of women’s emancipation not only in Poland, but around the world? How did they conceptualize emancipation? How to write about them today, when any association with communism arouses resistance, and communists are either erased from history or stereotypically captured as traitors to the nation? We talk with Agnieszka Mrozik about her book "Female architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist women, literature, and women’s emancipation in postwar Poland" (2022).

Agnieszka Mrozik is an Associate Professor of literary studies at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is affiliated with two research units: The Center for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism, and the Women’s Archive. She was a fellow of the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena (2017), the Institute for Advanced Study CEU (2018/19), and the DAAD program at the University of Hamburg (2019). In the summer semester of 2023/24, she was a guest professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). She is the author of Architektki PRL-u: Komunistki, literatura i emancypacja kobiet w powojennej Polsce [Female architects of the Polish People’s Republic: Communist women, literature, and women’s emancipation in postwar Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2022) and Akuszerki transformacji: Kobiety, literatura i władza w Polsce po 1989 roku [Midwives of the transformation: Women, literature, and power in post-1989 Poland] (Wydawnictwo IBL PAN, 2012). She has co-authored and co-edited several collective volumes, including Reassessing Communism: Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland, 1944–1989 (CEU Press, 2021), Gender, Generations, and Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond (Routledge, 2020), and Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism (Routledge, 2018).

Vienna’s walls are full of signs, stickers and graffitis in South Slavic languages. How does this come about? – In this episode, Leonid Motz (RECET) talks to Prof. Katharina Tyran (University of Helsinki) about Vienna’s linguistic landscape and how it is shaped by Post-Yugoslav migrants. What can we learn about power dynamics from the linguistic practices in which they engage? Katharina highlights how – often subversive or subcultural – linguistic signs are rooted in transnational cultural contexts that transcend the linguistic borders of the modern nation-state.

Katharina Tyran is an Associate Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research focuses on South Slavic languages. Tyran’s interests include sociolinguistic topics with a focus on minority languages, language and identity, linguistic landscape research, language commodification, writing systems and orthography. 

In this episode, Małgorzata Mazurek (Columbia University) engages in a discussion with Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ (RECET) on how Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau, Polish economists in the interwar period, responded to local and global challenges such as poverty and the Great Depression. Embedded in the Second Polish Republic—a fragile political entity—the economists in question generated innovative ideas about mass employment and economic development.

Małgorzata Mazurek is an associate Professor in Polish Studies in the History Department at Columbia University. Her interests include the history of social sciences, international development, the social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland, and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with the history of social inequalities under state socialism. Her current book project, Economics of Hereness, revises the history of developmental thinking from the perspective of interwar Poland and its problem of multi-ethnicity. She has recently written about the idea of full employment in interwar Poland for the American Historical Review, history of social sciences for a survey handbook, The Interwar World, and the university as the Second-Third World Space in the Cold War for the volume Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular edited by Kristin Roth-Ey.