Thanks everyone for participating last year in helping us co-innovate this workshop into the Zoom era with our new host, CUNY’s Center for European Studies. This year, we’d like to continue to innovate with a schedule that alternates between online transnational events and in-person events in NYC at the CUNY Graduate Center. In these ways, we hope to continue this workshop founded in 1993, driven by the exploration of questions related to gender in postcommunist countries of East, South and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, including the Baltic countries and Central Asia, and their relationship to Europe and the European Union.

Theme

While we remain open to any related topics, it is hard not to think about the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Thus, this year, we are most interested in proposals that consider the impact of Russia’s aggression on gender in the region, state gendered violence inside and outside the state borders, and the role of state propaganda in fostering ultranationalism and war. We also hope to have one session celebrating and considering Ann Snitow’s last book, Visitors: An American Feminist in East Central Europe, as COVID preventing us from doing so since its publication. The book is also coming out in Polish this year.

Details

• Meet monthly on Fridays, at the CUNY Grad Center in New York City or via Zoom, 2-3 PM New York time (8-9PM Poland time)

• Presenters share a 10-15 page paper in advance to those who have registered. The workshop presentation will be limited to 20 minutes to allow maximum time for conversation.

We will moderate the sessions so that we check in with what we are all thinking about, hear and see the key ideas of the paper, and have lots of time to discuss collaboratively.

The purpose is to continue as an informal and friendly gathering for feminist scholars, activists, and journalists to discuss recent theoretical and/or critical work, empirical research, and critical and scholarly reflections on activism.

If you would like to present, please fill out this google form: https://forms.gle/QFvM1QRn83R5mJah9

We regret that, as of this year, we have no funds for an honorarium.

All are welcome to participate. We will start reviewing proposals on Aug. 1, 2022.

“We always also did this for our children”:  Motherhood in the GDR between Socialism and Opposition

Yanara Schmacks, CUNY Graduate Center

Friday, May 13, 2022 2-3PM New York City time via Zoom

Register in advance using this Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIlcu-vqDMoH9bzRWIdC2tUd1VgkbLHkJkY

Looking at the ways in which GDR women activists and writers dealt with motherhood, this paper explores how they, in conversation with and sometimes opposition to the state, renegotiated socialist modernity. East German women writers drew up alternative, socialist versions of maternity, framing the mother-child relationship as a platonic partnership between mother and child and, in stark contrast to their Western counterparts, deemphasizing the bodily elements of motherhood. These positions toward motherhood and children were often ultimately politically in line with culturally hegemonic ideas about the socialist family that were promoted by the state. Yet, in the 1980s, motivated by intense maternal concern for their children in the face of growing Cold War tensions and environmental destruction, GDR women’s activists tried to actively intervene at the state level to improve the future of their children instead of focusing on their own identities as mothers, thereby becoming involved in oppositional activities and ultimately contributing to bringing about the Wende in 1989.

Participants are asked to read the paper in advance. After a brief presentation by the speaker, most of the workshop will be devoted to discussion. Please email mara.lazda@bcc.cuny.edu for the paper.

About the speaker

Yanara Schmacks is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. She is working on a cultural-intellectual history of motherhood in the three postwar German states from the 1970s to the early 2000s, exploring how the maternal served as a space for the renegotiation of both the German past as well as the East-West divide and reunification. She has received a BA in Liberal Arts & Sciences from University College Maastricht and an MA in Interdisciplinary Antisemitism Studies from Technical University Berlin. Her research on conceptualizations of motherhood in the West German 1970s and 1980s has been published in Central European History and Psychoanalysis and History. She is currently a fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University in Berlin.

“Shades of Protracted Displacement:
Reconciling citizenship and the status of internally displaced in Eastern Ukraine”

Organized by the European Studies Center at the CUNY Grad Center; co-sponsored by the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, HURI

Oleksandra Tarkhanova, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland
Discussant:  Olga Sasunkevich, University of Gothenburg, Sweden 
 
With introductory remarks by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

Register in advance for this meeting.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
The paper will be shared one week in advance.

About the Speaker

Dr. Oleksandra Tarkhanova is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe at the University of St. Gallen. Her research is on citizenship negotiations, displacement, and war in eastern Ukraine. She received her PhD in Sociology at Bielefeld University, where she worked on social welfare and gender politics in Ukraine. Her book “Compulsory Motherhood, Paternalistic State? Ukrainian Gender Politics and the Subject of Woman” came out with Palgrave in 2021. See also: Russia-Ukraine War, Contemporary Ukraine, Co-Sponsored Event