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In this tribute, we take a different approach and explore the influence of Southern Africa on Burawoy's sociology. The influence of Southern Africa on Burawoy began early in his career when he himself was just learning what it meant to be a sociologist and continued to influence him in different ways throughout his life. In an interview with Eddie Webster in Johannesburg, 21 October 2023, Burawoy observed: 'My experiences in Southern Africa decisively shaped my sociology at a theoretical level, at a methodological level and at a substantive level. Throughout my career Southern Africa was one reference point for understanding other societies'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decree passed by the socialist Romanian state at the beginning of the 1970s stipulated the need to defend state secrets as a condition for the country's economic and social progress in the context of its growing participation in world commerce. While the law operated with a wide notion of state secrecy, referring to any piece of information which, if disclosed, could jeopardize the Romanian state's interests, it included harsh regulations with regard to personal contacts with foreign citizens and served primarily for establishing a heightened operative control over the local economic life. Following the Romanian State Security Council's encouragement of campaigns for popular education, which should help prevent any trespassing of this decree, the early 1970s saw the commissioning of several instruction films made by the newly founded Film Service of the Ministry of the Interior as a form of 'counterintelligence training of the working class'. The present paper contextualizes and closely analyzes some of these films staging fictional cases of industrial espionage and their subsequent investigation by State Security as a form of useful cinema, arguing that, aside from their main educational mission of raising awareness about the legal responsibilities ensuing from the decrees concerning state secrecy, these films also acted as an instrument of national, geopolitical and institutional self-representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, socialist states developed a new schooling system aimed at building an egalitarian society. While there is a solid body of research discussing the relationship between the intent and effect of the egalitarian design of socialist school systems, the importance of school maturity assessments for the socialist project has received only minor attention. This article discusses how the introduction of school maturity assessments developed by experts in medicine, psychology, and pedagogy in 1960s Hungary and East Germany contributed to the visibility of children who were deemed immature. It shows that both socialist states developed institutional solutions beyond the standard school system for tackling the problem of school immaturity in children; these solutions, in turn, evoked different reactions from parents. As the article discusses, parents used various avenues to oppose the official expert assessments with which they disagreed. In both countries, parents increasingly voiced their opinions in complaint letters addressed to the state in a quest to overcome what they perceived as a severe threat to their children's 'normal' development. By tracing parental bottom-up initiatives, the article investigates how parental agency ultimately shaped state policies and expertise despite the asymmetrical power relations that were present in these authoritarian societies. To show the interplay of parental agency, experts, and the state, we employ a combination of two methodological approaches, the sociology of expertise and the concept of Eigensinn, for understanding the spaces of negotiation and the role expertise plays in it. This article thereby sheds light on parental agency and its impact on expertise and state policies concerning school maturity in two socialist states that offered very different institutional answers to the problem; bureaucratic approaches towards complaint letters also varied significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After World War II, infant mortality rates started dropping steeply. We show how this was accomplished in socialist countries in East-Central Europe. Focusing on the two postwar decades, we explore comparatively how medical experts in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany saved fragile newborns. Based on an analysis of medical journals, we argue that the Soviet Union and its medical practices had only a marginal influence; the four countries followed the recommendations of the World Health Organization instead, despite not being members. Importantly, we analyze the expert clashes over definitions of livebirth, which impact infant mortality statistics. We analyze the divergent practices and negotiations between countries: since the infant mortality rate came to represent the level of socioeconomic advancement, its political significance was paramount. Analyzing the struggle to reduce infant mortality thus helps us understand how socialist countries positioned themselves within the transnational framework while being members of the "socialist bloc." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the 1989–1992 collapse of the Soviet bloc, Eastern European countries underwent rapid socioeconomic changes from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. Yet, research from these countries has been only scarcely used to study the neoliberalization of sexuality. To fill this gap, this article examines heterosexual masculinity in Poland at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. Using Foucauldian approaches to discourse, I analyze how sexual problems were discussed in Pan, the first Polish lifestyle magazine for men (1987–1993). I demonstrate that, in contrast to the neoliberal models of heterosexuality, the state-socialist masculinity of Pan did not advocate discipline, control, and sexual mastery, but it repudiated egalitarianism and reciprocity of pleasure. Heterosexual dynamics in Pan prioritized men's interests at the expense of women, whom various sexual experts silenced, admonished, and blamed for sexual difficulties. As a result, Pan constructed a deeply patriarchal masculinity of unaccountability and entitlement to women's submissiveness. These findings add novel insights that help understand the ideologies of sexuality under state socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What eating and drinking habits can be observed in Hungarian cinema before 1989? What are the occasions and circumstances under which the characters in the films sit down to eat? Do meals serve merely as the background to dialogues in scenes? When and how do food and drink become the “main course” on Hungarian screen? The social commentary of Hungarian cinema is greatly shaped by the dining scenes in films. The article explores the topic through a selection of classic films made between the two world wars, as well as by looking at the gastronomic depictions in post-war cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

East-Central Europe is often perceived in the literature discussing housing as an area unified by its common state-socialist legacy. Based on data covering developments in housing tenure and housing policy in the past 140 years in seven East-Central European countries, we trace the long history of a division between a northern (Germany, Poland and Czechia) and southern (Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and partially Slovakia) group of countries in terms of their support for and share of housing in collective (cooperative and nonprofit rental) versus private ownership. We find that the initially less urbanized and industrialized southern group started out with a weak cooperative tradition, focused state support on home ownership under state socialism and privatized more radically post-1990. The paper argues that differences between the two groups, persisting despite the number of transformative changes affecting the region, are rooted in different housing policy choices made by (predecessor) states before and following World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relevance of the decolonial approach for analyses of postsocialist disablement, taking as its test case the analytical tool of the 'postsocialist disability matrix'. The question we pose is how much decolonial critique can the analyses of postsocialist disablement embrace without becoming reactionary amidst growing illiberalism and social abandonment in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? We provide an overview of postsocialist illiberalism, assess critically some central arguments in decolonial disability studies and outline the production of 'southern bodies/minds' as a key feature of social abandonment in CEE. We conclude that decolonising disability in the postsocialist region needs to go beyond the North versus South binary to account for the specific experiences of disabled people inhabiting the 'poor North'. Given these considerations, the double-edged critique implied in the original formulation of the 'postsocialist disability matrix' as scepticism towards both the state and the market could also help embrace the decolonising imperative while remaining sceptical towards both Northern and Southern theory production in disability studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the impact of Katherine Verdery's work on gender under socialism as exemplified by her article "From parent-state to family patriarchs: Gender and nation in contemporary Eastern Europe." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of the article is to expose how the Czechoslovak state socialism shaped scholarly habitus through various mechanisms, institutions and policies, especially through the intrusion of the secret police into the scholarly world. The article is informed by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and presents a case study focusing on the ethnographer Vladimír Karbusický. In the 1960s, Karbusický was under surveillance by the State Security, the secret police of the socialist Czechoslovakia. His surviving dossier from the State Security archives allows us to see precisely how exactly the actions of the State Security diminished the autonomy of the scholarly world, influenced career paths and contributed to the formation of academic habitus. At the same time, the dossier, which emerged as part of the effort of the state to maximize its control over society, can be also used as evidence of the persistence of (surviving) academic autonomy and the concomitant scholarly ethos. This suggests that the socialist state of Czechoslovakia under the hegemony of its Communist Party may have not been entirely successful in its policies to control society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State socialist Hungary undertook historically unparalleled action to satisfy the health needs of its population. To support its efforts, it recognized in its constitution the protection of health as an essential state task and, later, a right to health. Although formulated as a right of citizens, the right to health was not available to enfranchise the individual. Instead, it expressed common social needs, as well as the responsibility and the institutional obligation of the socialist state to take care of those needs. This emphasis on needs over individual rights had a crucial impact on the implementation of the right to health. Contemporary and retrospective policy and sociological analyses reveal that the healthcare system in state socialist Hungary left the individual exposed to institutional and professional interests within the health system, and their vulnerability as a patient was regularly exploited.

After his release from prison in 1963, Ferenc Mérei (1909–1986), a Hungarian psychologist and pedagogue, started working at the National Institute of Neurology and Mental Health (OIE), where he and his colleagues established the foundations of Hungarian clinical psychology. The OIE was a closed institution dealing with mentally ill patients living on the margins of society, but prisonization also affected the healthy staff. Mérei did not see this liminal situation as a twist of fate but as an opportunity: it was not synonymous with social exclusion but a kind of inverted status in which it was possible to develop a framework for truth-telling and authentic living. According to Victor Turner's approach, people in a liminal state form communities and learn the implicit language that guarantees the conditions for truth-telling and protects truth-tellers from possible retaliation. Connotation is the key concept in this hermetic use of language, which, as Mérei writes, is "only a part of a hidden whole, known and understood only by the 'accomplices,' the 'initiated' [...]." By examining the expressions, "informal rank," "hiding kuruc ," "hiding college," and "hiding school," which often appear in Mérei's works, we can observe that these were not only the key concepts of his life story but also the outlines of the social organization of the socialist era in Hungary. They are concepts of a non-democratic age in which "real life" in the moral sense and "real achievement" in the scientific sense were politically persecuted. In this approach, what is seen, read, heard, consumed, and publicly available is all just a false front; the true spirit is forced into opposition or moved underground. This framework refers to the Rákosi and Kádár eras, but at the same time, it opens up to us the meta-history of centuries of persecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than three decades after the collapse of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, local urban processes are still very often associated with that historic period or post-socialist transformation. This article aims to undermine the concept of the post-socialist city itself as reductionist, given the crucial importance of factors that differ from the influence of the pre-1989/91 times. The article confronts the discussion on the applicability of the post-socialist framework with field research conducted in selected Polish and Ukrainian cities, in particular the examples of the Kvity Ukrainy (Flowers of Ukraine) protest movement in Kyiv, Ukraine, and the 2003 spatial planning reform’s results in Krakow, Poland. The analysis is based on interviews with representatives of different actors involved in the policymaking process, such as local government representatives, policy advisors, urban planners, journalists, business circles, and members of grassroots initiatives.