Name: Anti-Kitsch, or How to make Socialist Doily [přednáška Nicolette Makovicky]
Start: 2026-03-10T19:30:00+01:00
Location: Kavárna Na Boršově

$Anti-Kitsch, or How to make Socialist Doily [p\u0159edn\u00e1\u0161ka Nicolette Makovicky]$

Long before Pinterest and Etsy, there was Dorka and Praktická žena. In late-socialist Czechoslovakia, women’s magazines taught teaching readers to embroider doilies with folk motifs, resist ‚bourgeois clutter‘, and express their ‚authentic socialist selves‘ through textile handicrafts.
In this talk, I show how the humble doily can be a surprisingly rich window into life under late communism – and why it shouldn’t be understood as kitsch, but quite the opposite: anti-kitsch!
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Dr Nicolette Makovicky is an Associate Professor in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oxford’s School of Global and Area Studies. She has been part of the faculty since 2010, following a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, and brings a rich interdisciplinary background from her training in European Ethnology (BA) and Anthropology (PhD).