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This collection will be the first volume to gather the best writing on socialist and postsocialist entertainment television as a medium, technology, and institution in Eastern Europe.
The book casts a spotlight on Central and Eastern European societies, making their experiences visible and meaningful within the postcolonial discourse. The modernization theory overlooks important aspects of postsocialist transformation. Consequently, sociological knowledge has drifted apart from the social production of knowledge, and sociology has become alarmingly irrelevant to the people it studies. Therefore, the book departs from preconceived notions of “normal” and “modern” to foreground the importance of actual social experience. After all, Central and Eastern Europe is a valuable yet underestimated social laboratory. Thus, the contributors experiment with new theoretical and methodological approaches to bridge the gap between social research and real people. Contributors are: Izabella Bukraba-Rylska, Jacek Burski, Grzegorz Ekiert, Kaja Gadowska, Anna Giza, Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper, Michał Kaczmarczyk, Krzysztof T. Konecki, Mirosława Marody, Adam Mrozowicki, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Anne White, Renata Włoch, Tomasz Zarycki, and Marek Zirk-Sadowski.
The key concepts of the book are media, class, poverty, and shaming. The contributors to this book examine how certain social relations and their cultural meanings in the media, namely class and poverty, are transformed into factual or moral attributes of people and situations. Class and poverty are not understood as certain things and actions, or concepts and numbers; both class and poverty are assumed to be, above all, particular social relationships or a set of relations between people, things and symbols. Without denying that contempt for the destitute Other is an affect found throughout history and in various socioeconomic contexts, the chapters in this book – through their concern with the mediated gaze on class – narrate predominantly the challenges brought about by the media’s spectacular take on poverty and low status as they (at least) coincide with the neoliberal era. This volume will be essential reading for the scholars specialising in the study of media and social inequalities form the vantage points of Media Studies, Sociology, Anthropology or European Studies.
This book draws on wide range of inspirations to provide a well-balanced picture of the popular culture and subcultures of Czech post-socialism. What were the continuities and discontinuities of the post-socialist popular culture, mentalities and society during the period of late state socialism? What were the different mechanisms of ‘creating the Other’ in popular culture and subcultures? This volume shows the diverse trajectories of the late socialist (and older national) cultural practices and the related set of values and beliefs in new transitory circumstances. Whereas many scholars emphasize the tendency to sustain in a more or less adapted form under the new circumstances, the chapters and case studies of this book demonstrate a slightly different, more nuanced development.
The collection of essays in this anthology is divided into three categories, namely “social epistemology”, “epistemology”, and “freedom”, respectively. The first category addresses questions related to the social dimensions of knowledge. Various issues are interrogated, including the lack of attention to testimony in much standard philosophizing, the need for advocacy, and the role of history-making in social reconstruction. The second category deals more directly with some of the concepts that generally crop up in the theory of knowledge, provoking questions such as: How much do we really know about each other? What is the content of the knowledge we think we have, and how far d...
Discusses one of the major currents leading to the fall of communism. Falk examines the intellectual dissident movements in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary from the late 1960s through to 1989. In spite of its historic significance, no other comprehensive survey has appeared on the subject. In addition to the huge list of written sources from samizdat works to recent essays, Falks sources include interviews with many personalities of those events as well as videos and films (including Oscar winners).
Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.
Postcolonial studies is a well-established academic field, rich in theory, but it is based mostly on postcolonial experiences in former West European colonial empires. This book takes a different approach, considering postcolonial theory in relation to the former Soviet bloc. It both applies existing postcolonial theory to this different setting, and also uses the experiences of former Soviet bloc countries to refine and advance theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and presenting insights and material of relevance to scholars in a wide range of subjects, the book explores topics such as Soviet colonality as co-constituted with Soviet modernity, the affective structure of identity-creation in national and imperial subjects, and the way in which cultural imaginaries and everyday materialities were formative of Soviet everyday experience.
Pět, čtyři, tři, dva, jedna, gooooool! zařval celý stát. Byly to poslední sekundy a československý tým uhájil nad Sovětským svazem těsné vítězství 3 : 2 na mistrovství světa v ledním hokeji, které se hrálo shodou okolností právě v Praze. Po letech ponížení, utlačování a vazalství nám alespoň na několik hodin přálo štěstí, i když jen sportovní. Alespoň tady jsme ukázali, že se jen tak nenecháme zlomit. Lidé vycházeli před domy, slavilo se v celé zemi, jako by Československo už opustil poslední sovětský tank. Ráno chlapy trochu bolela hlava, ale co. Stálo to za to. Byl duben 1972 a lidé za sebou měli neradostné roky po vystřízliv...