Drawing on her new book, Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Sex, and Race in Eastern Europe, Kateřina Kolářová will argue that postsocialism is essential to understanding neoliberal cultural politics, economic structures, and state policies worldwide. She will show how disability, sexuality, and race—though often rendered invisible—have shaped the postsocialist consensus in the Czech Republic and more broadly.The talk will focus on how discourses of “inadaptability” have contributed to racialized abandonment. Kolářová will examine how particular understandings of disability helped establish an ideal of rehabilitated, white postsocialist citizenship. She will also consider the “neoliberalization of race” and the “racialization of neoliberalism” (Mahtani and Roberts) within the specific historical and political context of the Czech Republic and post socialist Eastern Europe. Specifically, Kolářová will explore how portrayals of Roma people as “inadaptable (non)citizens” have been used to determine who belongs in shared public spaces and whose exposure to violence is treated as morally defensible. The talk will conclude by examining forms of resistance that open up alternative possibilities, or “crip horizons.”
Kateřina Kolářová is associate professor of sociology at Charles University in Prague. Kolářová’s other recent work takes the feminist queer crip perspective to explore the bio-social dimensions of metabolism, “crip guts,” the relationship between human and non-human lives, and how we coexist with microorganisms, toxic chemicals, and other "unclean" elements/entities. She is currently working on a monograph exploring HIV and human-viral coexistence (forthcoming in 2027). She is a passionate forager, fermentation enthusiast, and an avid chaos gardener.
Her book Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Sex, and Race in Eastern Europe (University of Michigan Press, 2025) is available on "Open Access." It was the winner of the 2019 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities.
Open Access link to book: https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/xd07gw749
If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at [email protected]. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.
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Weiser Hall, 500 Church Street, Suite 500, Ann Arbor, MI, United States, Michigan 48109
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