The one-day open workshop will have two goals: 1. to discuss categories such as agency, emancipation, revolution, used in the research on social, cultural and political activism of left-wing movements, with emphasis on their actions for women's rights, in twentieth-century Central, Eastern and Southern Europe as well as in Arab and Asian countries; 2. to accelerate the use of inter- and transnational perspective in researching these phenomena, looking at the possibilities (breaking with the hegemony of the national paradigm), but also potential risks (simplifications resulting from the privileging of the Western view) associated with it.
The workshop will bring together scholars conducting research on the activism of left-wing movements/parties/groups, with an emphasis on the actions taken for women's rights. The presented case studies (geographically including Romania, Poland, Turkey, Lebanon, Vietnam, former Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, as well as other countries and regions represented in the International Women’s Democratic Federation (1945–1989)) will examine the strategies of action, as well as the constructions of collective identities of the left-wing female and male activists, inter/generational encounters – continuities and discontinuities, and contemporary memory about the achievements and failures of leftist feminism. The workshop will bring together researchers representing various scientific disciplines: history, literary and culture studies, ethnology, gender studies; both experienced and early-career scholars who will be able to share their findings, discuss categories, methodologies and approaches applied in their research and to capture international connections and interdisciplinary links useful in further work.
PROGRAM
9.00–9.30 Opening & Welcome
Prof. Dr. Nadia Al-Bagdadi (Director, Institute for Advanced Study CEU, Budapest)
Dr. Agnieszka Mrozik (Junior Thyssen Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study CEU, Budapest)
9.30–11.00 Panel I: Memory, Life Narratives, Collective Identities
Panel chair: Prof. Dr. Jasmina Lukic (Department of Gender Studies CEU, Budapest)
Dr. Ștefan Bosomitu (Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, Bucharest)
“Inglorious Victors”: Veteran Communists and the Impossible Apostasy
Dr. Renata Jambrešić Kirin (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb)
What Yugoslav Women Professional Revolutionaries Reveal about Leftist Hesitating Feminism
Dr. Agnieszka Mrozik (Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw/ Institute for Advanced Study CEU, Budapest)
Girls from ZMP: (Dis)remembrance of the Generation
11.00–11.30 Coffee break
11.30–13.00 Panel II: Left, Generations, Gender Politics
Panel chair: Dr. Ádám Takács (Atelier Department of European Social Sciences and Historiography, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)
PhD Candidate Isidora Grubački (Department of History CEU, Budapest)
Left Feminism, Generation and Yugoslavia: Rethinking Feminism in the 1930s
PhD Student Una Blagojević (Department of History CEU, Budapest)
Mediating Marxist Knowledge: Women, “Praxis”, the Korčula Summer School,1963–1974
PhD Candidate Sercan Çınar (Department of Gender Studies CEU, Budapest)
“Legs to the Shoulder against Fascism”: Queer and Feminist Challenges to the Old Left in Turkey
13.00–13.45 Lunch
13.45–15.15 Panel III: Reproductive Rights, Sexual Politics, Symbolic Representation
Panel chair: Prof. Dr. Susan Zimmermann (Department of Gender Studies/ Department of History CEU, Budapest)
Doc. Dr. Stanislav Holubec (Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
Luisa Landova Štychova: A Czech Activist on the Way from Anarchism to Communism 1914-1925
Dr. Luciana M. Jinga (TEMOS: Temps, Mondes, Sociétés, CNRS FRE 2015, Universités d’Angers, Bretagne Sud, Le Mans)
The Evolution of Sexology in Communist Romania
Dr. Denisa Nečasová (Department of History of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno)
Female Tractor Driver as a Pop Icon
15.15–16.00 Coffee break
16.00–18.00 Panel IV: Women’s Activism, Agency, Emancipation
Panel chair: Prof. Dr. Nadia Al-Bagdadi (Director of the Institute for Advanced Study CEU, Budapest)
PhD Student Alexandra Talaver (Department of Gender Studies CEU, Budapest)
Women’s Activism in Soviet Russia: A Case Study of the Soviet Women’s Comittee, 1941-1991
PhD Candidate Sandra Prlenda (Department of Gender Studies CEU, Budapest)
The Group Identity and the Agency of the Activists of the Yugoslav Socialist Women's Organization
Dr. Laure Guirguis (IREMAM – Institut de recherches et d'études sur le monde arabe et musulman, Aix-en-Provence, France/ Institute for Advanced Study CEU, Budapest)
Women, Agency, and Revolution in the 1960s–1970s Arab World
Prof. Dr. Francisca de Haan (Department of Gender Studies/ Department of History, CEU, Budapest)
The Vietnam Activities of the Women’s International Democratic Federation
18.00 Closing of the workshop
The workshop is open to the public but please register here