In this episode, we explore the newly published book Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’s Rights in East-Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century (CEU Press, 2024) edited by Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz. Our conversation with the editors delves into the book’s aim of highlighting the often-overlooked contributions of East Central European women to global feminist thought and activism. We discuss the selection process of a diverse range of texts and artworks that challenge the dominant political and intellectual canons, focusing on the importance of including works that don’t necessarily self-identify as feminist but engage with themes of systemic oppression. The discussion also touches on how socialism and the post-socialist transitions shaped feminist movements in the region, notable figures and texts from the volume, encountered controversies during the process of editing as well as the books’ reception, and finally, the book’s potential to inspire future feminist research and activism in East-Central Europe.
Zsófia Lóránd is Assistant Professor at the Department of Contemporary History and RECET at the University of Vienna. Earlier, she was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Faculty of History and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge, and had held positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the Lichtenberg-Kolleg of the University of Göttingen. Her book, The Feminist Challenge to the Socialist State in Yugoslavia focusing on the intellectual history of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s was published in 2018 and got translated into Croatian in 2020. Whilst living in Hungary, she worked for 8 years as an SOS helpline volunteer and trainer in the field of domestic violence. Currently, she is working as PI on her ERC-funded project HERESSEE “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929 – 2001”.
Adela Hîncu is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History in Ljubljana and a researcher in the project “Philosophy in Late Socialist Europe: Theoretical Practices in the Face of Polycrisis,” at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She is also an affiliate researcher in the ERC-funded project HERESSEE at the University of Vienna. Her research spans the history of Marxism, the social sciences, and women’s political thought in socialist Eastern Europe and the history of social expertize in the postsocialist period. She has co-edited the volume Social Sciences in the “Other Europe” since 1945 (2018).
Jovana Mihajović Trbovc is a research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU), and assistant professor in cultural history at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia. She extensively published on the topics of social memory in relation to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s and World War II. She has been researching the history of feminism and women’s intellectual work during socialism, while working on issues related to gender equality in academia. Recently she edited a collection of biographies How women co-created scientific development in Yugoslavia (in Slovenian, Založba ZRC, 2023).
Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz -an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a member of the Women’s Archive research team. She is also a member of the Committee of Women’s History (a section of The Polish National Historical Committe). She has a Ph.D. in Literary Studies and an M.A. in History. Her interests range from gender and women’s history in post-war Poland to the history of popular culture and popular discourse analysis. She is the author of the book Real-life Stories. Confession Narratives in Polish Popular Women’s Magazines in XX century (Warsaw 2010), and co-author of the monograph Women in Poland 1945-1989. Modernization, Equality, Communism”/ Kobiety w Polsce 1945-1989. Nowoczesność, równouprawnienie, komunizm, Warszawa 2020), ) soon to be published in English. She is currently working as a researcher for the project HERESSEE “The History of Feminist Political Thought and Women’s Rights Discourses in East Central Europe 1929 – 2001”.
Una Blagojevic conducted the conversation. Lilit Hakobyan edited the audio file.
