In this interview with documentary filmmaker Apolena Rychlíková, Anna Šabatová, one of the most remarkable figures of modern Czechoslovak history, considers not only the intellectual foundations of Charter 77 and the dissident movement, but also what shaped Šabatová’s personal background. The interview introduces an often-overlooked continuity between dissent and critical approaches to the post-communist era. This continuity is present in the humanistic, left-wing thought of Anna Šabatová, stemming from the tradition of the Czechoslovak democratic left, which permeates her whole life, not only philosophically and intellectually, but above all practically. Anna Šabatová’s lifelong efforts for a more just society have never stopped, connecting the period before 1989 with the period that followed.
As soon as the socialist regimes failed in East-Central Europe, there disappeared from the public sphere the positive, a priori understanding of the offi cial, public discourse of the socialist era. What the author of this article calls “premisunderstanding” has become part of the new anti-communist consensus and ethos. Th is premisunderstanding is rooted not only in an ideological and moral antipathy toward the socialist regime but also in the fact that the regime’s discourse diff ers signifi cantly from other types of discourse, including, not least, liberal discourse. When this kind of premisunderstading is applied to texts originating in the socialist era or to texts or statements that represent this era, the author calls this “reading in the spirit of the post-Velvet-Revolutionary consensus.” In the more extreme forms of this premisunderstanding, the interpreter presumes that the historical actor is lying, is dishonest, or is mistaken. Although this tendency toward premisunderstanding has become weaker in the face of revisionist conceptions in historiography, and in the face of increasing nostalgia throughout society, this ideological barrier to understanding the recent past survives to this day in various forms of anti-communist rhetoric.
The article aims to give a concise overview of the development and background of gender studies programs as they can be found at European universities today. As the final institutionalized forms of such programs differ according to the specific goals, strategies and conditions at the given university, the article finishes with the presentation of two different gender studies programmes. Namely, the gender studies bachelor's program, running since the academic year 2004/2005 at Masaryk University in Brno and the master's program at the University of Vienna, starting in the academic year 2006/2007. The framework of my considerations is based on the assumption that the roots of gender studies go back to the second wave women's movement, which developed within a - political and societal - non-communistic context of the 1960s and 1970s. For this reason, the article first adresses the origins and developments of gender studies within this non-communist context, then takes a short look at the communist context and finally deals with the reception and criticism of gender studies within a post-communist context.
V minulém roce byla na stránkách periodika Naše společnost publikována empirická stať s názvem „Náboženské vyznání v České republice z perspektivy inter a intragenerační transmise“ [Paleček, Vido 2014]. Tato práce představila možný metodologický postup, jehož prostřednictvím je možno zjišťovat míru úspěšnosti přenosu religiozity ve společnosti během neustálého procesu generační obměny. Je obecně známo, že současná ČR se v tradičních formách religiozity řadí mezi nejvíce sekulární nejen mezi zeměmi post-komunistickými, ale i v kontextu celé Evropy [Hamplová 2000; Lambert 2004; Meulemann 2004; Need, Evans 2001; Nešpor 2010a; Tomka 2010]. Avšak, i když je ČR pouze jednou ze zemí, jejichž historie byly poznamenány 40ti lety komunistické státní moci, přesto se mezi těmito zeměmi řadí k nejvíce sekulárním. Je možno uvažovat, zda se protináboženská politika v ČR lišila oproti této politice v dalších zemích s komunistickou totalitní mocí nebo se lidé v těchto zemích naopak lišily odolností vůči této politice. V náhledu výše citovaného metodologického postupu může otázka znít, zda a jak se lišila úspěšnost předávání tradiční religiozity mezi generacemi v ČR oproti dalším post-komunistickým zemím a jaké byly možné příčiny těchto rozdílů. Sledovanými formami tradiční religiozity budou v této práci deklarované náboženské vyznání a návštěvnost na bohoslužbách v kostelích., This paper is focused on changing rates of church affiliation and church attendance in the course of intergenerational and intragenerational transmission on the cases of four post-communist countries of central Europe: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. It is a generally accepted fact that the rates of traditional forms of religiosity in the Czech society declined continuously during the second half of the 20th century, while such an enormous decline was not indicated in other post-communist countries of Central Europe. These differences and their causes are main question for this analytical work. Contemporary religiosity is dependent on rates of its reproduction between generations. Inter- and intragenerational transmission was influenced by two basic factors: First, by an anti-religious policy, which varied between the communist regimes, and second by the resistance of some people and families against that concrete anti-religious policy. The rapid secularisation of Czech society was due to those two factors., Antonín Paleček., and Obsahuje bibliografii
This paper questions the uncritical transfer of neoliberal concepts, such as financialisation and overreliance on conceptual dichotomies like formal/informal, as the lenses through which to understand practices of housing provision and consumption in the post-communist space. To this end, it introduces the newly-established ‘diverse economies’ framework, which has been used elsewhere to reveal existing and possible alternatives to advanced capitalism. Applied to the Romanian case, the lens of diverse economic practices helps shed light on the ways in which the current housing system was historically constituted, with implications for how housing consumption is now stratified across some related housing typologies. The paper invites debate on the theoretical usefulness of the diverse economies framework to study housing phenomena, particularly its implications for understanding patterns of inequality and poverty, its potential to devise useful analytical categories, and its effect of directing attention to acts of resistance to neoliberal capitalism.
In the following essay-manifesto, Contradictions editor Joseph Grim Feinberg lays out his view of the journal as a platform for confronting the central contradictions of post-communism, working through the problems of Central and Eastern Europe in global context, and seeking the continued contemporary relevance of the history of emancipatory and critical thought. Contradictions, he writes, should enable philosophy and its neighboring fields to engage with this region, at this moment, while telling world history something that no other time or place has told it before.