Transformative Podcast

How have technologies, politics, and social expectations transformed the work of journalists in Central Europe over the past three decades? And which journalistic practices and market forces might combine to characterize a “Central European” media environment?

In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Rosamund Johnston (RECET) speaks to Gerald Schubert, a reporter on Central and Eastern Europe for Austrian newspaper Der Standard. He reflects on a career spanning 20 years in both the Czech Republic and Austria, and on a “worsening” situation for journalists today in both of these states, as well as elsewhere in Europe.

Not many know that Accra, the capital of Ghana, is home to architecture designed by Eastern Europeans. In this episode, Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu (RECET) talks to Prof. Łukasz Stanek about his award-winning book, in which he examines the role Eastern European experts - architects and engineers - played in supporting newly postcolonial states in their efforts to bring about a social transformation through urbanization. How can architecture contribute to, bring about, and document major changes in the global Cold War dynamic? What lessons can we learn from taking a close look at the entanglements between postcolonialism and socialism?

Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Manchester, UK. Professor Stanek is the author of "Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory" (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and "Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War" (Princeton University Press, 2020), which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the SAH GB and the RIBA President’s Award for History & Theory Research.

Free movement of people is a contentious issue. In this episode, moderated by RECET's Scientific Director Jannis Panagiotidis, Cecilia Bruzelius talks about how states deal with the resulting challenges to labor markets and welfare states, what free movement means for European citizenship, and what mass emigration does to East European societies.

Prof. Dr. Cecilia Bruzelius is a Junior Professor of Political Science at Tübingen University. In her research, she focuses on free movement in history and the present, with a particular focus on the issues of citizenship and the welfare state.

In this episode, RECET's Dr. Anna Calori talks with Tobias Rupprecht, Head of the Junior Research Group "Peripheral Liberalism", about Tobias's recent project on peripheral liberalism, economic reform debates in socialist countries, and the history of globalisation in the 1990s.

Dr. Tobias Rupprecht is a global historian with a particular interest in the history of (state) socialism and (neo)liberalism. His research has mostly addressed Soviet and Eastern European encounters with the Global South, and economic reform debates in socialist countries. He taught Russian history in Denmark and the UK before becoming head of the 'Peripheral Liberalism' research group at the cluster of excellence 'Contestations of the Liberal Script' in Berlin.

Talking about sex and educating young people about the challenges and questions related to human sexuality is a sensitive and often controversial topic. In this episode, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Agnieszka Kościańska (University of Warsaw) talks to Lukas Becht (RECET) about the rich and fascinating history of sex education in the XX. century with a focus on Poland. It is a story of transformations and conflicts that requires us to rethink linear, teleological and progressivist concepts of transformative historical change. 

Agnieszka Kościańska is an anthropologist, an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw, and recently Leverhulme Visiting Professor, University of Oxford. Her latest book, published by Berghahn Books in 2021, is "To see a Moose! The History of Polish Sex Education".