Ongoing projects
Czech Society and Soviet Army 1968–1991 (2017–2019, Czech Science Foundation)
The project will focus on the presence of the Soviet Army in Czechoslovakia between 1968 and 1991 and its impacts on the Czech society, particularly in places where Soviet Army units were stationed. It will examine various forms of contacts between the Czech population and Soviet soldiers at the municipal, institutional and personal levels, problems accompanying their mutual coexistence, and the practical implementation of the state policy of friendship a part of which was also an official transformation of the image of the Soviet Army from an occupying force into a friend. It will concentrate on the general politicization of the mutual coexistence and the roles of various socio-political organizations, security elements and also local and nationwide media in it. First and foremost, the project aims to capture social and political aspects in the broadest sense of the word (rather than military and strategic ones) of the presence of the Soviet Army in Czechoslovakia and to set the topic in the context of the social history of the Czech normalization.
The Student Generation of 1989 in Longitudinal Perspective: Biographical Interviews after Twenty Years (2017–2019, Czech Science Foundation)
The project constitutes a continuation and broadening of the project Students at the time of the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia – biographical interviews (1999). For the first time in the history of similar longitudinal oral history projects, we are able to build on previously recorded interviews. Tracking changes in testimonies of student leaders of November 1989 will enable to capture changes in the subjective perception of historical events and wider shifts in public discourse about the past. The interviews will offer a window on broader shifts in social norms and memory politics. Thus the project will bring an essential knowledge on the issues of changes in memory processes in a particular group of narrators. The project’s outputs are designed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of 1989. They will thus constitute a major contribution to understandings of the memory of this pivotal date in contemporary Czech history and bring the first large-scale analysis of subjective perceptions of the post-socialist era.
Science and Research in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1939–1945. Conception and Impact of the Nazi Science Policy (2017–2019, Czech Science Foundation)
The project aims to analyze the Nazi science policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939–1945. It focuses primarily on conceptual measures and impact in personal and (infra)structural areas. Firstly, it will analyze the Nazi personal policy and various types of repression/persecution against the local scientific community. This analysis will be based on a quantitative/prosopographical evaluation of the changes in the personal structure (incl. emigration/exile). Secondly, it will cover the conceptual and administrative framework, which was necessary for the interventions of long-term impact, e.g. conversion towards the applied (mostly military) research and close connection with industry. The effectiveness of implemented organizational changes and principal conceptualized efforts reacting to German interventions, both domestic (resistance) and foreign (exile), will be discussed as well.
Sphaera mundi. Reception of the medieval treatise on sphere by Iohannes de Sacrobosco in the Czech lands (2017–2019, Czech Science Foundation)
In the framework of the project important Latin texts, which influenced European astronomy and learning during the whole Middle Ages, will be studied. One of examples is the treatise De sphaera by Iohannes de Sacrobosco (1220), which was the basic textbook on spherical astronomy in European education up to the 17th century. The project will be focused mainly on the reception of this work and commentaries, which originated in the Czech lands especially in the 15th century (Martinus de Lancicia, 1430, Wenceslas Faber of Budweis, 1495). Commented editions and translations of these texts will be prepared during the grant project.
The Concept and Enforcement of Communist Education in Czechoslovakia 1948–1989 (2016–2018, Czech Science Foundation)
The project will examine various forms of the enforcement of Marxism-Leninism as Czechoslovakia’s state ideology between 1948 and 1989. Its purpose is to describe and analyze the creation, implementation, and enforcement of structures and contents of the education of society in line with the above ideology. The research will focus both on general principles of the across-the-society “education” toward Marxism-Leninism and on specific implementations of the ideology in everyday life through the indoctrination performed by the school system, attempts to suppress religion, or doctrinal interventions into science. Based on segmental outputs, the collective of researchers will prepare a first-ever Czech monograph summarizing key aspects of the topic which has hitherto not been approached in a comprehensive manner. More…
The Inclusion of the Jewish Population in Postwar Czechoslovakia and Poland (2016–2018, Czech Science Foundation)
The project aims to analyze the inclusion process of the Jewish population in Czechoslovakia and Poland from the end of the Second World War to 1968. The emphasis is on the legal position of the Jews, their institutional framework, transnationalist and nationalist perspectives, Shoah commemoration and gender. It makes innovative contributions because (1) it compares for the first time the post-war situation of the Jews in two neighbouring countries; (2) it analyzes (dis)continuities with the pre-war period; (3) it re-integrates Czechoslovak and Polish Jewish history into both the post-1945 history of east central Europe and Jewish world history; (4) the team is composed of scholars from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany, with expertise in history, sociology, Hebrew and German studies. More…
Virtual assistent for access to historical audiovisual data (2016–2019, Ministry of Culture)
The proposed VIADAT project aims to create methods and associated software tools for documentation and presentation of nation’s cultural memory as it is (and will be) recorded in audiovisual documents. The project thus belongs primarily to the area of Oral History. The open software tools created will however serve much broader spectrum of uses of spoken and audiovisual material – from research to education. State-of-the-art technology of preservation, local and remote access will be used for depositing, indexing, annotating and accessing the recordings, and additional tools will be created to support end-users’ research needs. The core of the technologies used will come from the language technology domain, both for automatic speech recognition and the follow-up text analysis and indexing, since the value of the recordings of various witnesses of historic events is primarily in their language content – in what has been said. The user tools will allow for both quantitative and qualitative processing of the extracted material, for producing tables, extracts, segments of video and audiomaterial etc. to support presentation of scientific findings, including their visualization. These outputs will not only serve research and its dissemination, but will be used in educational materials for all types of schools.
These goals will be materialized by creating an integrated software platform, a “Virtual assistant” for processing, annotation, enrichment and access to audio and videorecordings. Most of the software components will be language-independent, allowing also international use. The Virtual assistant will have four parts: a repository for long-term preservation of the enriched recordings and associated metadata and documents, access system, deposition software and software for annotation and exploitation of the recordings. More…
Czechoslovak dissent as a spiritual, cultural and political phenomenon at the times of normalization, revolution and transformation 1969–2000 (2015–2017, Czech Science Foundation)
The project is dedicated to Czechoslovak dissent and its resonances within and reception by the society between 1969 and 2000. A fundamental question arises in connection with the dissent, namely what it was during the Communist dictatorship and at the time when the latter fell. Hidden behind these questions are heuristic and interpretation challenges. The pre-November dissent can be understood only if seen in the context of more broadly perceived social relations: with the state power, with the official cultural community, with the majority Czech and Slovak society, with the Western and Eastern policies and the public opinion. In November 1989, the dissident movement was accepted as the moral victor over the dictatorship, but its influence on real politics was limited. The second fundamental objective of the project is to find out what place the dissent took during the first decade of the post-socialist policy, how it affected the democratic discourse and what place it has taken in the historical memory. More…
The Road to Technocratic Socialism: Concepts of Governance in Czechoslovakia 1953–1975 (2015–2017, Czech Science Foundation)
The project will explore the genesis of technocratic government in Czechoslovakia from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Research will be focused on the theme of the creation of expert knowledge, its political application and its influence on the legitimacy of state socialism in Czechoslovakia. The project is intended to reconceptualise, deepen and revise the traditional categories of power, repression and everyday life. At the same time it will make it possible to identify the continuities linking the periods before and after the major milestone year 1968. The aim is to investigate the formation of the phenomenon of technocratic government as the result of interactions between power, knowledge and society. The subject of research will be 1) concepts of the management of society formulated by scientists and experts, 2) the political application of expert knowledge and 3) interaction between technocratic governance and society in specific concrete social contexts. More…
Expert Roots of Post-Socialism: the Case of Czechia 1980–2000 (2015–2017, Czech Science Foundation)
The project is devoted to the analysis of post-socialist forms of governance, their legitimizations after 1989, and their expert roots in the previous period. It seeks to historicize current social scientific as well as political debates about the “neoliberal hegemony” that supposedly replaced the state-socialist regimes after their collapse. It is based on the assumption that what is called the „neoliberal governance“ was not only a result of an expedient import of Western political and cultural patterns, but also of a number of intellectual, mental and socio-cultural continuities from the time of late socialism. These assumptions and hypothetical continuity of the „long systemic change“ period (c. 1980–2000) is the main subject of study of the proposed project. The analysis will proceed on two levels: the first one is that of intellectual history analyzing some of the key expert discourses about the state and its governance, the second – in the form of case studies – will analyse selected expert milieu and enterprise management respectively. More…
“Micro-histories“ and “Macro-history” of Czech/Czechoslovak Travelling and Tourism 1945–1989 (2015–2017, Czech Science Foundation)
The project reflects the growing demand for exploring social and cultural aspects of life in the era of former communist regimes. More specifically, it explores the topic of Czech/Czechoslovak travelling and tourism in the period 1945–1989. Although individual studies on travelling and tourism have been done, there is no synthesis that would provide a bigger political, economic, and social-cultural picture of travelling and tourism in communist Czechoslovakia. The project brings together two research perspectives: 1) macro – through archive research; 2) micro – through oral history interview. After collecting data we will make a synthesis and prepare the main project’s outcome – a collective monograph. Other project outputs are: international conference and individual studies on the topic. Our attempt to synthesize the topic will significantly contribute to understanding not only the nature of post-war (WWII) Czech and Czechoslovak society, but also the system of power relationships on one hand and the individual experience on the other. More…
Children, Youth and Socialism in Czech Lands 1948–1970 (2015–2017, Czech Science Foundation)
The subject matter of this research deals with children at the age of compulsory school attendance (6 to 15 years) and teenagers (under 18) in the Czech lands. The time range of 1948–1970 represents a time of fundamental changes in the structure of children’s organisations in Czechoslovakia and changes in educational policy. Unlike for university students, Czech historiography completely lacks any comprehensive research of the younger generation; this project seeks to examine children and youth mainly in the following framework: the young generation between the family and the State, extracurricular education and leisure time, media environment, social care and protection of children and youth, and use of the motif of youth and childhood by the regime. The research is anchored in the concept of cultural and social history; archive and printed sources, historical audio-visual sources and methods of oral history will be used. The main result will be a monograph, drafted by a collective of authors according to individual specialisations. More…
The Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature in Czechoslovakia 1948–1964 (2015–2017, Czech Science Foundation)
The Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature was announced in the USSR on October 20, 1948 and was soon implemented in Central Europe. The Czechoslovak Committee for the Transformation of Nature was established in January 1953 at the Czechoslovak Academy of Agricultural Sciences (ČSAZV) at the insistence of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. This project will analyse the implementation of this plan in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s (differences and its after effects) and will focus on key figures, i.e. scientists from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and ČSAZV. The plan failed as it tried to apply pseudoscientific theories and involved the mechanic transfer of Soviet knowledge without accounting for regional differences. The plan’s failure strengthened nature conservation. More…
Between state plan and research freedom. Ethnography and folklore studies in Czechia in the context of development of culture and society in 1945–1989 (2015–2017, Czech Science Foundation)
Project aims at the research of institutional and personal development, theoretical-methodological and epistemological changes and other aspects (e.g. relation to political power and ideology) of ethnography and folklore studies and related disciplines in Czechia in 1945–1989. The research hypothesis rests upon the results of previous research in the history of humanities, according to which the dynamics of the development of scientific disciplines was determined not only by the official line of research, but also by the “niches” of the Czech science (the places of scientific freedom). Thus, analysis would reach to development and works of central institutions, but also to the research realized in museums, in the regions, to applied research, but also unofficial research (dissent, researchers in exile). Special attention will be rendered to the international influences on the development of disciplines. Methodologically the project draws upon the combination of approaches to the history of science (hermeneutical analysis of texts and archival funds) with the methods of oral history. More…
Industrial Work Force in the Czech Lands, 1938–1948 (2013–2017, Czech Science Foundation)
The major goal of the project is to elaborate an essentials monograph on history of the work force in the years 1938–1948, along with a subsequent edition of key sources. The term work force as such has been perceived in two senses of the word: on one hand, as a professional category with a specific life style and culture, on the other as a social class, better to say an important part of lower and, partially, also middle strata that actively endeavour to push through their social, economic and political demands. Within the frames of this project, both of these approaches should be preserved. That implies, however, parallel application of historical and sociological methods. Therefore, the research team consists of historians as well as of sociologists. An important part of the project should be an interdisciplinary colloquy of sociologists and historians. The solution of these issues has to be mainly based on application of a broad scale of archive sources, including those that had not been elaborated so far (namely empiric researches of those times). More…