Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe最新文献

{"title":"Marriage and the reproductive regime of a digitally connected Roma diaspora","authors":"Juan F. Gamella, Vasile M. Muntean","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2277078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2023.2277078","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the marriage, family, and reproductive regimes prevalent in a Roma group that, in the post-socialist period, has moved from Romania to over 16 countries in Western Europe and North America. It is based on a long-term collaborative ethnography that allowed the detailed reconstitution of 807 unions held from 1938 to 2021. Family networks in this diaspora have today a transnational character and maintain an intense social interaction by digital means. The paper will show how a partly autonomous social order is constituted and reproduced by a marriage and kinship system that involves gender formations and autonomous domestic development cycles. At its core is an implicit and successful reproductive regime that is often assumed to be biologically determined, and of no value to cultural analysis. Marriages tend to be universal, adolescent, pronatalist, and endogamous (often consanguineous) within this “community of understanding.” They are also negotiated and arranged by paterfamilias following a literal patriarchy or father rule. However, young people often act on their preferences influencing their parents or eloping. Marriages as household exchanges are launched by three major economic transactions. These transactions open the horizontal “circulation” of women and wealth between households following viri-patrilocal residence norms that generate patrigroups and fraternal coalitions.","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"69 1","pages":"533 - 559"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139343181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Part-time work: the co-production of a contested employment model for women in Austria and internationally, 1950s to 1980s.","authors":"Veronika Helfert","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227519","DOIUrl":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227519","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 2022, every second employed woman in Austria worked part-time, while only 12.6 percent of men did so. In more affluent countries, part-time work has evolved from a special form of employment to a gendered norm in the past six decades, whereas in state-socialist and post-state-socialist Europe, this model of women's employment played a much less pronounced role historically. Albeit contested, part-time work has been a concern of women trade unionists since the 1950s. This article examines the emergence and evolution of an important trend in the history of women's work from a multi-level perspective. It explores how women activists in the ICFTU, the ILO and in Austria dealt with part-time work as a method of harmonizing women's unpaid and paid work. Collaboration with the ILO played an important role in Austrian developments, and Austrian activists aimed to impact on international decision-making. Furthermore, the article shows the rather hidden role women civil servants played in generating knowledge on the topic. This analysis of the evolution of the gendered norm of part-time work and its contestation contributes to recent research on shifts in reproductive arrangements and gender relations in the second half of the twentieth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"363-383"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10478390/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43176630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Polish women labour inspectors between the world wars: scrutinizing the workplace and mobilizing public opinion.","authors":"Zhanna Popova","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227516","DOIUrl":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227516","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores the history of women's activism within the state apparatus, focusing on women labour inspectors in interwar Poland. Part of the State Labour Inspectorate since its creation in 1919, women inspectors often combined their professional duties with a distinctly activist stance. Like their male colleagues, they ensured compliance with labour legislation by performing factory visits and collecting information on the conditions of workers' lives and labour. But they also led campaigns in the press, published books and brochures intended to mobilize public opinion around issues related to the labour of women and minors, and sought to build activist networks aimed at the improvement of women workers' conditions. They exposed particularly exploitative labour arrangements, such as the labour of underage apprentices, and conceptualized them as urgent social problems. These multiple engagements meant that women labour inspectors moved between different scales of action including direct intervention on the shop floor, research and publications aimed at a national audience, and transnational contacts with the International Labour Organization, which had been committed to improving women workers' conditions since its inception.</p>","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"301-319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10478397/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43478902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"The rulers are the causes of the war […] They are the reason there is no bread in our town:\" women's food riots in the Hungarian countryside, 1917-1918.","authors":"Eszter Varsa","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227515","DOIUrl":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227515","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The essay discusses women's food riots in the Hungarian territories of the Habsburg Empire during World War I between spring 1917 and summer 1918. While the existing literature has primarily focused on urban contexts in a variety of European countries, this essay analyses the Hungarian countryside with a focus on small towns and villages where and around which inhabitants were mostly agrarian workers. The agrarian population was especially hard hit by the increasingly coercive wartime economic measures, and especially by the high cost of living and the break-down in food supply. Using archival sources and news reports, the article approaches food riots as a form of labour activism signalling (agrarian) women's efforts to improve their desperate living and working conditions and, thus, as a local political response to the international and national political and economic crisis that unfolded in the Dual Monarchy shortly before its disintegration during the second phase of the Great War. It pays particular attention to participants' social/ethnic background, agendas, and repertoires of action, including the antisemitic character of some of the riots and authorities' reaction to these uprisings. The essay, thus, also examines the interactions between members of local-level (un)organized activism and regional and national governance.</p>","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"279-299"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10478391/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46749036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The treacherous trade unionist: Paraschiva B. Ion and labour activism in the Romanian tobacco sector, 1920s to 1940s","authors":"Alexandra Ghiț","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227514","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2023.2227514","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What did it mean to be a woman labour activist in a state-owned industry in Romania before 1945? In this article, I construct a political biography of Paraschiva B. Ion, a worker and trade unionist in the “Belvedere” tobacco factory in Bucharest during the interwar period. P. B. Ion led factory- and national-level social democratic trade unions and served as an elected delegate to factory-level and municipal-level workers’ representative bodies. At the same time, she participated in labour control practices, including during the Second World War. I argue that P. B. Ion’s career illustrates how, in the interwar period, women labour activists in social democratic trade unions in Romania could become more prominent participants in labour governance on the shop floor, municipal, and national levels while not being involved in labour governance at the international scale. Like other trade unionists in Europe, at times, P.B. Ion supported certain claims made by women workers (including through expert knowledge production) and at other times restrained them. I position P. B. Ion’s activism in a domestic context marked by competing labour agitation and organizing in the tobacco sector, activities shaped by a legal framework that hindered labour organizing.","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"261 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48068430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Dracunculus against the dragon”: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s public vaccination as simultaneous enactment of public health and foreign policy","authors":"P. Marton, Tamás Matura, Csendike Somogyvári","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2221923","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2023.2221923","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines performativity in Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s February 2021 public vaccination against COVID-19 with the Sinopharm BBIBP-CorV vaccine. Following a discussion of the concept of performativity as it pertains to the subject of our study, we contextualize the process of the procurement of the Sinopharm BBIBP-CorV vaccine by Hungary to situate the significance of this transaction, along with that of the performance under review, in the post-2010 evolution of broader Sino-Hungarian government ties. We then submit footage of PM Orbán’s vaccination to multimodal critical discourse analysis, identifying several noteworthy features of this performance. We also examine similar performances by other heads of state and government, offering evidence that – having gone beyond the purposes of public health messaging to constitute a simultaneous enactment of foreign policy (and more) – PM Orbán deviated considerably from the consensus norms of public vaccination that have emerged in the reference group. This further indicates that his public vaccination with BBIBP-CorV was both a peculiar instance of vaccine diplomacy and a “demand-driven” manifestation of Chinese influence in Hungary.","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"409 - 428"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47043533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Environmental stress, majoritarianism, and social unrest in Europe","authors":"Nadia Eldemerdash, Christian B. Jensen, Steven T. Landis","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2023.2227520","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As climate change continues to affect countries worldwide, scholars have begun considering the impact of environmental stress for political instability in industrialized countries. This paper analyzes the risk of social unrest in various European political systems in relation to the interaction of environmental stress and electoral institutions. We use a spatially and temporally disaggregated dataset to examine the possible relationships between environmental stress and social unrest in all European Union member countries from 2000 to 2020. We find that there are stark differences between the observed interaction of majoritarian electoral features and environmentally induced unrest in those European states with a history of Communist rule or climate vulnerability versus the rest of Europe. Overall, these results suggest that electoral systems play an important but heterogenous role in the understanding of climate change and political unrest.","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"385 - 408"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41518014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Women and the gendered politics of work in Central and Eastern Europe, and internationally, in the twentieth century: activism, governance, and scale","authors":"Alexandra Ghiț, Veronika Helfert, Ivelina Masheva, Z. Popova, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, Susan E. Zimmermann","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2023.2227512","url":null,"abstract":"This issue of the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe brings together a set of articles that discuss the history of women’s labour activism in Central and Eastern Europe and transnationally. The seven contributions are the result of recent and ongoing primary research within the research project Women’s Labour Activism in Eastern Europe and Transnationally, From the Age of Empires to the Late 20th Century (ZARAH). In our research we aim to advance approaches to the history of women’s labour struggles that are long-term, transregional, integrative, and critical. Our overarching goals are: to contribute to establishing the chronology and cartography of women’ labour activism in Central and Eastern Europe and adjacent territories; to explore this activism’s crossborder, cross-regional and transnational dimensions; to conceive of its variety in terms of worldview, repertoires, and agendas within a common conceptual framework which contextualizes and examines from a critical perspective all varieties of activism; and to “think into” the global history of labour activism the labour struggles of women from Central and Eastern Europe (Çağatay et al., forthcoming). We define women’s labour activism broadly as action and organizing to improve the labour conditions and life circumstances of lower and working-class women and their communities. The cluster of articles presents selected elements of our research that revolve around two large, interrelated issues. These, we argue, must be centrally addressed when pursuing the overarching goals defined above. The first issue concerns the relationship between women’s labour struggles, on the one hand, and governance, on the other. Governance includes the regulatory frameworks that shape institutions and the practices characterizing the “behaviour” of institutions, ranging from social movement institutions (including, e.g. trade unions, cooperatives, and women’s and workers’ associations), through institutions of the layered state, to international networks and organizations that involved state and/or social movement actors (Bereni and Revillard 2018; Caglar, Prügl, and Zwingel 2013; Shin 2016; Storrs 2000; Wilhoit 2017). We pursue, in other words, an integrative approach to the history of women’s labour activism, arguing that to capture the full range of such activism, we need to consider three (repeatedly overlapping and entangled) varieties: women’s action within or via various “classical” social movements; their “unorganized” or “spontaneous” activism, a focus well established in feminist labour history; and women’s involvement – within and beyond the confines of social movement activism – with the various dimensions of how women’s work was governed. Such","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"227 - 240"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48753615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Millions of working housewives”: the International Co-operative Women’s Guild and household labour in the interwar period","authors":"Jelena Tešija","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2023.2227517","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article focuses on household labour as one of the key agendas of the International Co-operative Women’s Guild (ICWG) and on the contributions Central and Eastern European countries made to this agenda in the interwar period. I argue that ICWG women made household labour a policy issue in its own right and provided space for debates between women of diverse ideological positions coming from different political and economic systems and national contexts. Zooming in on key publications and paying attention to the organizational dynamics and complex relationship between communists and social democrats in the ICWG, I first explore how the ICWG discussed household labour and the solutions it offered to reduce the burden of such work. In the second part of the analysis, I argue that because it was crucial to their work, ICWG women inserted aspects of household labour into international discussions on women’s and/or labour-related issues. By doing so, they tried to 1) establish themselves as experts on household labour-based issues and 2) advance how topics such as popular nutrition and maternal deaths were approached in international settings.","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"321 - 338"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45010561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“An eight-hour day for women workers”: negotiating working time in the Bulgarian textile industry between international labour politics and the shop floor, 1890s to 1930s","authors":"Ivelina Masheva","doi":"10.1080/25739638.2023.2227513","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25739638.2023.2227513","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article investigates the issue of the eight-hour workday and its application from the early 1890s – when it first appeared on the Bulgarian organized labour movement’s agenda following the decisions of the Second International – to its adoption in national legislation as well as by the International Labour Organization in 1919, and finally, the enforcement of the eight-hour day in the Bulgarian textile industry between the two world wars. This article explores continuities and changes in the struggle to adopt and enforce the eight-hour day, conceptualizing them as parts of a single negotiated social process. The article employs a gendered and multi-scale approach to explore how working time limits were negotiated on and between the shop floor, the national political stage, and in international labour organizations by diverse social groups such as (un)organized (women) workers, trade unions and labour activists with various political affiliations, the state through its labour inspectorate, as well the International Labour Organization. The article goes beyond the gender-neutral language of legal documents, instead arguing that the eight-hour day was conceptualized differently – with some variations depending on women’s life-course stage and social circumstances – and held particular importance for women workers.","PeriodicalId":37199,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe","volume":"31 1","pages":"241 - 260"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44020626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}