The year 1989 witnessed momentous changes in global politics: the end of the Cold War, the acceleration of global neoliberal capitalism, and the start of a long decade of internationalism and interventionism -- G.H.W Bush's famous "New World Order."
How have German cities changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall? Why is Germany rebuilding its palaces? Join us for a discussion of these questions and more!
1989 doesn’t usually resonate in the chronology of significant anti-apartheid activism. Yet, that year saw the rise to power of FW de Klerk in South Africa and progress (albeit halting) towards the release of Nelson Mandela and other activists of the liberation struggle from prison, the unbanning of political organizations, and the negotiated dismantling of the apartheid state.
Since the mid-20th century, science fiction has shaped our view of the nuclear. The possibilities and horrors of the nuclear has had a comparable impact on utopian and dystopian science fiction. American science fiction fans are well versed in the tropes. What was the relationship between the atom and Soviet/Post-Soviet science fiction? In this live interview, Anindita Banerjee will discuss the imagination of the nuclear in Soviet and post-Soviet science fiction.
There is a long tradition of empirical studies of Indian politics that repose, somewhat surprisingly, on remarkably little publicly available data. Since the 1960s, most political scientists have not been able to rely on strong public data and have had to build their own datasets and instruments. As a result, there is a great deal of fundamental questions on India's electoral democracy that we have no answer to, such as why people vote, what are the determinants of electoral behavior, or how has the composition of India's political class evolved through time.
As part of our Year of Memory and Politics and 1989 Series, the ESC, in cooperation with REEES, is pleased to welcome Maria Todorova as a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence speaker. Based on her forthcoming book on the perceived “golden age” of the socialist idea, Dr. Todorova will present the results of her research into a rich prosopographical database of circa 3500 biographies of people born in the 19th century.
Professor Condry will explore contemporary Japanese music, with a comparison of diverse examples, such as female Japanese rappers, underground techno festivals, the virtual idol Hatsune Miku, and the pop idol group AKB48. How can music help us understand the curvature of social space-time? What does this mean for our understanding of society and culture?
From 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in Kazakhstan. Despite decades of nuclear fallout, Kazakh rural communities inhabit the area around the site. How has living around a nuclear test site shaped those communities and their post-Soviet experience? This live interview with Magdalena Stawkowski will discuss her ethnographic work and the ways the Semipalatinsk test site still shapes economy, environment and subjectivities.
