Archives par mot-clé : southeast Europe

The Left in Southeast Europe: Identities and Discourses

Call for Papers for a conference to be held on 4th and 5th April 2024, University of Tirana

Deadline: 15/01/2024 (please see  here and below for contact details)

Right after the democratic transition, scholars have pointed at the great diversity of communist successor parties’ identities and discourses. Some of them, in fact, were able to successfully turn into social democratic parties, rejecting the wrongdoings of the previous regime. Others transmuted towards nationalism, revisiting recent history through a patriotic lens. Finally, some groupings resisted the change and kept their Communist banner, assessing the capitalist and democratic transition negatively.

The memory of the past was indeed not the only sphere of divergence between the fellow parties since they came to vary in economic and socio-cultural issues too. The present call wants to explore communist successor parties’ identities and discourses thirty years after the transition. It both welcomes papers enquiring on the causal roots of communist successors’ identity and on left-wing discursive practices.

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Reconstructing and Reimagining the Family: Health sciences and welfare on families in Southeastern Europe (1945-1989)

September 8, 2023

Athens, École Française d’Athènes

Organisers: École Française d’Athènes (EFA) //École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) // Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale, Société (CERMES3)// COST Action “Who Cares in Europe”// Modern Greek History Research Centre, Academy of Athens// The Greek Network for the History of Health

At the end of the Second World War families all over Europe faced harsh realities: missing, killed, and injured members, loss of home and recourses, dislocation and separation. At the same time, “the family” was recognized as “the natural and fundamental group unit of society […] entitled to protection by society and the State”. It was placed at the foreground of a series of discourses and practices aiming at reconstructing Europe, and at guarantying its economic, political and social stability and progress. In a nutshell, the rebuilding and development of post-war societies went through the rebuilding of families, which was often envisioned as reform or even as “modernization” of the family. Subsequently, over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, political, economic and cultural changes had varied and profound effects on families and the notion of “the family”. These developments can be fruitfully explored from the perspective of health sciences and welfare interventions.

The workshop aspires to enrich and nuance our understanding of post-war visions of and approaches to the family through an original geographical and analytical lens. On the one hand, it will chart new research on the countries of the post-war Southeastern Europe (Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania and Turkey), which are understudied in comparison to Western European countries, and which are rarely examined together, owing to their different political systems and social policies. On the other hand, through the concept of health, a notion that was broadened in the post-war period to encompass not only the physical and mental, but also the social, the workshop embarks on a combined exploration of medical and social sciences, along with welfare professions, in shaping discourses and undertaking action on families.
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