“Visegrad Scholarship at OSA” presentations
Date: 10:00 a.m., Thursday, May 4, 2023
On-site: Blinken OSA Archivum, Meeting Room
Online: https://bit.ly/425tobx
Women’s encounters regarding women’s rights and development in the context of the Cold War by Yulia Gradskova, Associate Prof. in History and Research Coordinator at the Center for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden
The project is dedicated to women’s encounters as part of the international events organized by the transnational Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), often addressed as the “communist front organization” (including in many OSA archival files). In particular, I am interested in differences in presentations and evaluations of these encounters that took place at women’s congresses, seminars, and study trips. In my presentation, I will briefly present the WIDF work with and for women in the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and discuss in general terms some of my findings concerning the representation of women’s issues in the archive.
AND
The Romanian Anti-communist Dissidents Reflected by Radio Free Europe
by Camelia Runceanu, PhD in Sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, CESSP
This research focuses on how Radio Free Europe viewed the Romanian anti-communist dissent before and after the fall of state socialism in order to evaluate the subversive role of intellectuals under communist rule and during the transition to democracy.
While intellectual dissent under the Romanian communist regime appeared to be a rather accidental phenomenon, after 1989 a whole array of previously unrecorded dissidents emerged in the public realm.
Since the mid-1970s RFE provided a platform for Romanian exiles to create a cultural “resistance” movement and intellectual “opposition” in Romania and served as a legitimizing institution for dissident intellectuals, both in exile and at home. The reactions of the Romanian communist authorities in the face of criticism during the 1980s are closely linked to the degree of access their critics had to foreign platforms of recognition.
RFE was highly instrumental in shaping the political identities of many prominent Romanian intellectuals and in producing (re)presentations of what is anti-communist dissent both before and immediately after the demise of communism.