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  • Do
    30
    Jan
    2025
    Vrij
    31
    Jan
    2025

    Workshop: ‘The social experiences of urban space in socialist cities of Eastern Europe’

    Ghent University, Belgium - Campus Boekentoren
    Colloquia en conferenties

    This workshop brings together urban historians and scholars of cognate disciplines for a discussion of the variegated social experiences of the socialist city in Eastern Europe. The contributors to the workshop cover a thematically and geographically wide range of case-studies, from extractive urbanism in Western Siberia to the nightlife of socialist Zagreb. Notwithstanding this diversity, the workshop papers all put emphasis on the constitutive role of urban space in the social history of the region.

    Workshop programme

    The workshop kicks off with a keynote by Heather D. DeHaan, Associate Professor of History and Director of Russian and East European Studies at Binghamton University. The lecture is open to the public.

    keynote - Heather DeHaan (Binghamton University)

    'How Socialist Citizens Fabricated Cities: Making Neighbourhoods in Soviet Baku'

     

    Sociologist Richard Sennett defines the city as “a place where strangers meet,” a framing important to his commentary on urban life and yet a concept somehow alien to research on cities of the socialist East. Surely, strangers met there, too, and even became friends, acquaintances, or – more salient to this talk - neighbours? This lecture explores the temporal, geographic, and material dimensions of social interaction – and memories of that interaction – in Soviet Baku, using this to ask how we might productively rethink our concept of “the social” and “the urban” in both the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

     

    Date: 30 January 2025          Time: 16:30-18:00          Place: Campus Boekentoren, Blandijnberg - Auditorium 4 Jaap Kruithof

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  • Din
    18
    Feb
    2025

    Between transformation and marginality: Post-socialist and post-war urban life

    18:00Blandijn, Leslokaal 1.13
    SEELECTS

    Vjollca Krasniqi (University of Prishtina)

    Abstract

    This presentation focuses on urban life at the fringe of Prishtina, the capital city of Kosovo. It discusses the histories, practices, and processes of urban transformation and marginality and how urban margins have evolved in the post-war and post-socialist contexts of the city centre. Grounded in the framework of large-scale political transformations, including post-socialism, post-war, and state-building processes, it explores their impact on urbanisation. In particular, it examines urban sprawl as a result of informal and ‘un-designed’ urbanism, providing an impetus for myriad urban scapes. These not only profoundly shape the urban social fabric, but also give rise to conflicting narratives and imaginations of city life. Adopting a critical lens on the dialectic of center-periphery and the production of scapes in Prishtina’s contested public spaces it demonstrates tensions, conflict, and contestation accompanying the urban sprawl - a by-product of the neoliberal economy - and the dynamics of post-socialist and post-war urban life in Prishtina and Kosovo as a whole.

    Bio

    Dr. Vjollca Krasniqi is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, and Faculty of Arts, at the University of Prishtina. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Ljubljana, an M.Sc. degree in Gender, Development, and Globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and a BA degree in Philosophy and Sociology from the University of Prishtina. Her main research interests are gender, nation-building, collective memory, post-war justice, and human rights. She has been teaching at the University of Prishtina, Faculty of Philosophy courses on research methods, contemporary sociological theories, ethics, gender studies, and human rights. Currently, she also teaches at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Prishtina courses on gender studies and sociology of art. She was a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College, US (2016). She is the co-founder of the University Program for Gender Studies and Research (2013-) and also served as the co-chair (2014-2018). She is a member of the steering committee of the Memory Studies Association Regional Group South East Europe (2020-). She is the co-chair of the Working Group on Training and Capacity Building of the COST Action Slow Memory (2021-). She serves on the boards of Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo (2019-), and Atifete Jahjaga Foundation (2018-), and is the chair of the Board of Directors of Save the Children Kosovo (2021-). She has worked on numerous projects on gender issues and has been active in the women’s movement in the Balkans.

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  • Do
    27
    Mar
    2025

    Soviet literature going global: 'International Literature' (1932-1945) and its 'foreign' audiences

    18:00Blandijn, Leslokaal 1.13
    SEELECTS

    Yelena Ostrovskaya (University of Strassbourg)

    Abstract

    The International Literature journal was conceived by the International Union of Revolutionary Writers as an “organ of revolutionary militant thought” published in the four main European languages, Russian, English, German and French. In reality, however, it gave birth to four editions, united by title and editorial board, but differing in their aims and audiences, especially between the Russian and ‘foreign’ versions. While the ‘foreign’ editions originally published authors from different countries in an attempt to create a ‘commons’ of communist world literature (Clark), in the late 1930s they virtually became the mouthpiece of Soviet literature. The paper discusses the journal as a project, with a special focus on the English version and its route to foreign readers.

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