Name: Does Eastern Europe generate ideas? (Małgorzata Mazurek)
Start: 2024-11-07T19:00:00+01:00
Location: Café Restaurant Merkur

$Does Eastern Europe generate ideas? (Ma\u0142gorzata Mazurek)$

The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna and the Research Platform "Transformations and Eastern Europe" invite to their regular Transformative Salon on 7 November 2024 at 7 PM, this time with Małgorzata Mazurek (Columbia University/IWM Józef Tischner Visiting Fellow), commented on by Eva-Maria Muschik (University of Vienna). The salon is moderated by Cathrin Kahlweit, correspondent of the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Vienna.
Venue: Café Merkur, Florianigasse 18, 1080 Vienna.
In the twentieth-century era of the national state, many national modernizers in Eastern Europe, Soviet Union, Middle East, Latin America, or Asia experimented with scholarly canons and scientific novelties. Empirical science about societies and economies — was their pivotal resource. The common language were surveys, questionnaires, models, and aggregate numbers that diverse nations and communities creatively adapted to recover, develop, and modernize. The perceived achievements of the Soviet Union and the Great Depression, which questioned the world capitalist order, were another milestone. National modernizers began to recognize their difference, while downplaying their perceived deficiency vis-à-vis the West.
Against this backdrop, Mazurek traces one intellectual power couple – Warsaw-based Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau, who transformed economics into knowledge about economic expansion (from rural development to full-employment economy). Their innovations prefigured much of what we know today as “international development.” This talk recovers the unique intellectual ferment of the Great Depression era in Poland to show how histories of “elsewhere”–peripheral, rural, and poor nation-states–moved to the center of global affairs and social science.
Małgorzata Mazurek is an associate Professor in Polish Studies in the History Department at Columbia University. Her interests include the history of social sciences, international development, the social history of labor and consumption in twentieth-century Poland, and Polish-Jewish studies. She published Society in Waiting Lines: On Experiences of Shortages in Postwar Poland (Warsaw, 2010), which deals with the history of social inequalities under state socialism. Her current book project, Economics of Hereness, revises the history of developmental thinking from the perspective of interwar Poland and its problem of multi-ethnicity. She has recently written about the idea of full employment in interwar Poland for the American Historical Review, history of social sciences for a survey handbook, The Interwar World, and the university as the Second-Third World Space in the Cold War for the volume Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular edited by Kristin Roth-Ey.
Eva-Maria Muschik is a historian and Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna. She is the author of Building States: The United Nations, Development, and Decolonization, 1945–1965 (Columbia University Press, 2022), which examines the role of UN personnel in the transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states.
Cathrin Kahlweit studied Russian and politics in Eugene (USA), Tübingen, Göttingen and Moscow, then at the Hamburg School of Journalism. She has been an editor at the Süddeutsche Zeitung since 1989. She worked for various years in the foreign affairs department, as a correspondent for Hesse, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, and in the domestic affairs department, specializing in family and social policy in Munich. After moving to Berlin, she was chief editor of the ARD talk show “Anne Will”. After returning to SZ, she was correspondent for Central Europe based in Vienna from 2012 to 2017 and correspondent for the United Kingdom based in London from 2017 to 2020. Since September 2020, she has been back in Vienna as correspondent for Central and Eastern Europe.
FREE ENTRY. No registration is needed to participate. The event language is English.
The organisers plan to record the event and publish it on the RECET YouTube channel 2-3 days later.
More Information: https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/does-eastern-europe-generate-ideas