What obstacles did first generation students face in socialist Poland? And how might their biographies help us design affirmative action drives today? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Dr. Agata Zysiak tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how political reform of higher education is never enough by itself to overhaul membership of a country’s intellectual elite. Instead, these reforms rely on interpretation and implementation at multiple levels—both within and beyond the university’s walls. Ultimately, Zysiak explains that there came to exist a “clash of privileges” in socialist Poland, between state-support for working class and peasant students on the one hand, and the intelligentsia protecting their privileged claim to the university on the other, with the effect that both limited each other.
Dr. Agata Zysiak is a historical sociologist at RECET, University of Vienna, and the University of Łódź. She is the author of the award-winning book, Punkty za pochodzenie (Points for Social Origin); coauthor of the main publication about Łódź available in English, From Cotton and Smoke; and the author of Wielki przemysł, wielka cisza (Great Industry, Great Silence), which maps Łódź industry and its collapse. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Wayne State University (Detroit), Free University (Berlin), and Central European University (Budapest), and she was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton between 2017 and 2018.
Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia (Rosamund Johnston)
Intra-Yugoslav Albanian Migration during Socialism (Rory Archer)
SPECIAL ISSUE: Knowledgeable Youth (Carine Chen, Irena Remestwenski)
Sea, Sex and Tourism in Socialist Yugoslavia (Anita Buhin)
Will Ukrainian Refugees Return? (Olena Yermakova)
Closed Borders and the Open Society (Frank Wolff)
Actors of Yugoslav Socialist Internationalism (Peter Wright)
Remembering the Neoliberal Turn (Veronika Pehe)
Barcelona ’92: The New Europe at the Olympic Games (Leslie Waters)
Economic Memories of Transformation (Till Hilmar)
Beyond Political History: Social and Cultural Dynamics of Socialist Poland (Małgorzata Fidelis)
Minority Languages in Russia (Jeremy Bradley)
Transformative Power Of Utopias (Kristen Ghodsee)
Why Studying Migration Matters (Jannis Panagiotidis)
Banal Nationalism in Soviet Ukraine (Fabian Baumann)
Past and Present: Migration, Crisis and Public History in Poland (Dariusz Stola)
Sexologists in Socialist Czechoslovakia (Kateřina Lišková)
Churches in Ukraine (Yuliya Yurchuk)
Dialectics of (Im)Mobility: Historical Transformations Through the Lens of Movement (Steffi Marung)
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