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Lecturer(s)
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Oates-Indruchová Libora, prof. Ph.D.
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Course content
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Lecture: "Women in Red: Communist Mass Women's Organizations and International Feminism during the Cold War" Workshop: Ethnography, Religion, and Eastern Europe Lecture abstract: This lecture examines the lasting influences of women from the former Eastern Bloc countries on the development of women's movements in Africa. Using ethnographic interviews and archival research, my project is an interdisciplinary exploration of the forgotten links between Africa and Eastern Europe through the lens of women's organizing. During the Cold War, the women's committees in state socialist countries developed rich bilateral relationships with women in many newly independent nations as part of a larger program of political, economic, and cultural exchanges between the "Second World" and the "Third World." Using the case study of the Committee for the Bulgarian Women's Movement (CBWM) and the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), the book recuperates the history of international socialist women's activism during the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Bulgarians engaged in a wide variety of capacity building exercises with African women. These include the hosting of training seminars and courses, the provision of travel stipends for African women to attend international conferences, and the funding of scholarships for African girls to pursue university studies in Bulgaria. By mobilizing women from the developing world, women from the Eastern Bloc may have instigated Cold War competition over which economic system could provide more de facto and de jure equality to women. This was a rivalry that benefitted all women in the long run, whether they lived in the communist, capitalist, or developing worlds. Workshop content; A discussion of ethnographic research methods and the study of religion in postsocialist Eastern Europe. Literature: There are 2 readings for the lecture and 2 for the workshop. These will be circulated to the participants after enrolment. The course is supported by the project CZ.1.07/2.2.00/28.0179 Diverzifikace a systematizace postgraduálního studia na FF UP Olomouc.
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Learning activities and teaching methods
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unspecified
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Learning outcomes
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A short course (1-2 days, preliminary dates: 29-30 October 2014) taught by prof. Kristen Ghodsee (Bowdoin College, USA). Expected length: 1 lecture + 1 seminar discussion on assigned literature. The objective of the course is to expose students to the diversity of scholarship on postsocialist Eastern Europe. The course will consider the value of participant observation and ethnographic analysis of the transformation from communism to capitalism. Kristen R. Ghodsee is an ethnographer and a professor of gender and women's studies at Bowdoin College. She has her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and is the author of five books, including: The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Duke University Press, 2005), Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton University Press 2009), Lost In Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism (Duke University Press 2011), and The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Ghodsee has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 2012, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Anthropology and Cultural Studies. She is currently a senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). Prof. Ghodsee's profile: http://www.bowdoin.edu/faculty/k/kghodsee/
- Learn the definition and value of ethnographic methods - How participant observation differs from other quantitative and qualitative research methods - Be exposed to examples of ethnographic research in East Europe in the last 25 years
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Prerequisites
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unspecified
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Assessment methods and criteria
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unspecified
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Recommended literature
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