Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ATFM (Articulating the free market: A cultural history of the economic transformation in Central Europe, 1989-1999)
Période du rapport: 2018-02-01 au 2020-01-31
The study brought together approaches from a variety of social science disciplines in order to question how cultural production represented these changes arising from the new economic conditions and acted as a significant contributor to public discourse. The project analysed film and television series produced in the 1990s to uncover a wider regional dynamic, with case studies from the Polish, Czech, and Slovak contexts. This decade has often been remembered as a time of new-found freedom, but also excess. A number of producers of films and television series attempted to capture these new realities. Filmmakers, and television directors such as Władysław Pasikowski, Krzysztof Krause, Vít Olmer, Juraj Jakubisko, Věra Chytilová, Wojciech Wójcik and Jaroslav Hanuš tackled new social phenomena brought about by the sudden deregulation of the market and decline of the authoritarian structures of the state, including economic crime, prostitution, drug use, the development of mafia structures, etc, in their work. The enquiry analysed the different strategies of portraying these topics in visual production and how these works interacted with economic ideas that circulated in the public sphere, in the broader context of the transformations of institutional structures in culture industries. It will thus trace how economic ideas and language informed the creative force of cultural producers’ conversations about the changing economic and political landscape during the systemic transformations.
The final project sought a reappraisal and new approach to the systemic transformations of the 1990s; an assessment of the role that cultural production played in rendering economic change intelligible through its representation; and an investigation of how the circulation of economic ideas and language gave the transformations social coherence and validity. Research conducted revealed two key topics that will merit from further investigation by historians and scholars of related disciplines: the crucial role of entrepreneurship as a central category structuring the artistic imagination and new social stratification of the 1990s; and the "gendered economic imaginaries" of the transforation that popular culture of the period produced.
During the course of the project, the researcher undertook various forms of training, including teaching. Between October and December 201 the researcher designed and taught a course on "History, Memory and Culture: 20th Century Central Europe" at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague. She thus gained experience in creating her own syllabus and conducting a whole course unit from the preparation stage, through teaching, to grading and student feedback, gaining valuable experience of working within the Czech higher education environment. Further skills were acquired through presentations at conferences and internal seminars at the host institution and the organization of an international workshop. Closer integration into the host institution was gained by the researcher through becoming a member of the editorial team of the Czech Journal of Contemporary History.
As the period of the 1990s, on which the project primarily focused, has recently been much discussed in Czech, Slovak and Polish public discourse, the project also offered ample opportunities for popularization. Articles were thus published in the Czech, Slovak and Polish press and in English in the Cultures of History Forum, a popularizing outlet for historical research. A series of three articles dedicated to the cinema of Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia in the 1990s respectively, was published on PoliticalCritique.org.
In the fall of 2019, the researcher was invited by the National Film Archive in Prague to co-curate with colleague Vítězslav Sommer a series of film screenings dedicted to Czechoslovak cinema of the late 1980s and early 1990s. As part of the series, the researcher gave an introduction to a public screening of the film Corpus delicti (dir. Irena Pavlasková, Czechoslovakia, 1991). The project's main findings were summarized in a public lecture as part of the regular seminar at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in June 2022.
Further planned outputs include a special issue of VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture on (post)socialist television satire, which the researcher is co-editing with Dana Mustata and Sonja de Leeuw, and to which she will contribute an article (late 2022), and, together with Joanna Wawrzyniak, a collective monograph addressing the way the economic transformations of the 1990s have been remembered across Eastern Europe (2023).