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Current Projects

A Land of Joiners. A Gender History of Volunteer Fire Departments in a Three-Border-Region of East Central Europe in Times of Political Transformation, 1918-1989

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Fellowship

Dr. Ana Kladnik
(support: Prof. Libora Oates-Indruchová)

Project duration: März 2023 - Februar 2025

Funding amount: 184.000€

This project looks at East Central European (ECE) history by focusing on non-state actors and particularly on voluntary associations. Challenging the received view that Western Europe (WE) and the Atlantic World are the authentic cradle of associations and of an appropriate and healthy civil society, e.g. the USA often epitomised as the “nation of joiners”, this project interprets voluntary associations in ECE as variation of and not deviation from a unique-but-universalized WE and Atlantic model. New studies on associational life in ECE suggest that well-established theoretical dichotomies like state/non-state, governmental/civil, public/private need to be overcome and argue that voluntary associations always actively interacted with the political context and contributed to shaping it (Giomi/Petrungaro 2019). This research seeks to revisit these theses by focusing on a particular voluntary association, Voluntary Fire Departments (VFD), which in ECE exists almost uninterruptedly since the mid-19th century under democratic, authoritarian or dictatorial regimes alike. Focusing on social history from below and transnational connections, this research will interrogate the question in what way did political ruptures from the end of the First World War until the end of the Cold War in ECE alter membership structure and gender policies of VFDs as well as how did VFDs interact and react with the political ruptures in regard to social inclusion and exclusion along the lines of gender? The project covers the territories of today's Austria, Hungary, and Slovenia, but more specifically three regions: Burgenland, Vas, and Prekmurje, where the concentration of VFD is the largest worldwide. By seeking to counter the marginalisation of volunteering within the social histories of ECE, and of ECE within the global histories of voluntary associations, the project contributes to the current debates about gender equality and equal participation in the European Union.

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Reckoning with dictatorship: the Czech Republic after 1989

Elise Richter Programme (FWF)

Dr. Muriel Blaive 
(seconded by Prof. Libora Oates-Indruchová)

Project duration: Sept 2022 - Aug 2026

Funding amount: 350.000€

This project’s aim is to historicize the Czech post-1989 policy of dealing with its communist past by studying and analyzing what happened, and, equally importantly, by reflecting on what did not happen. It proceeds from the assumption that a deep knowledge of the communist past is necessary to fully understand the country’s memory politics after 1989. Academic historians are only starting to turn to this policy of dealing with the past. Hence the project will seek the help of disciplines such as political science, sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and transitional justice studies. It will build on their findings, relate them to one another, and add the historical contextualization that the historical discipline is best equipped to produce. The project will ask two main research questions: how representative is the apparently dominant anticommunist narrative of society’s attitude concerning the communist past? And if justice was the goal, why not resort to the category of “crime against humanity” to bypass the legal problems arousing from judging a past regime?

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Everyday Creativity in (Post)Socialism: Theoretical and Methodological Scoping

Elisabeth List Fellowship (University of Graz)

The project intends to map current approaches to everyday creativity and its gendered aspects, with the specific regard to state-socialist and post-socialist East Central and Southeastern Europe. Each of the team of three senior and two junior fellows works on an individual research project. These include, among others, space and spatial creativity as a narrative medium of social critique and political action in the post-socialist landscapes, and the intersection of creativity in the fields of textile production and literary theory.

Project start: January 2022

Team members:

Prof. Libora Oates-Indruchová, Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Local Senior Fellow

Dr. Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová, Department of History, Charles University, Czech Republic, Incoming Senior Fellow

Dr. Věra Sokolová, Department of History, Charles University, Czech Republic, Incoming Senior Fellow

Elisabeth Pedersen, BA MA, Junior Research Fellow

Aleksandra Fila, MA, Junior Research Fellow

Public Lecture Series (Info)

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Gender and Creativity Research (June 2nd-3rd, 2022) (PDF)

 

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GenderedCoronaTime

March 2020 – onwards

An international research team explores the impact of the lockdown during the COVID-19 crisis on how couples in families with schoolchildren or in pre-school daycare spent their time. The measures taken by European governments to prevent the spread of the Corona virus during the first wave of the pandemic brought dramatic changes to the daily routines of all of us. Families with schoolchildren or children who normally spend their days in daycare had to cope with the closure of schools and daycare centers, while the parents had to either continue to go to work or adjust to working from home offices. The project explores how the regulations imposed during the first COVID-19 lockdown influenced time-use between couples in seven European countries.

Contact

Sociology of Gender

Univ.-Prof. Dr.habil. PhD

Libora Oates-Indruchová

Institut für Soziologie

Phone:+43 316 380 - 7086

Contact

Office

BA.

Eva Krasser

Phone:+43 316 380 - 3540

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