Seminář: Television Pedagogy, Economic Transformation and the Building of a Middle-Class Imagination in 1990s Czech Republic and Slovakia
Srdečně zveme na přednášku Veroniky Pehe na téma Television Pedagogy, Economic Transformation and the Building of a Middle-Class Imagination in 1990s Czech Republic and Slovakia, která se uskuteční 16. ledna 2025 od 11:10 v Drážďanech (TIL R.110) a bude rovněž streamovaná přes Zoom.
V případě online účasti se zaregistrujte do pondělí 13. ledna 2025 na adrese: hait@tu-dresden.de a uveďte své celé jméno. Odkaz na Zoom vám bude zaslán samostatně několik dní před začátkem akce.
Přednáška proběhne v anglickém jazyce a je třetí ze série Topographies of Transformation: Dresden–Prague Talks, kterou pořádáme ve spolupráci s Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung.
Anotace
This talk seeks to address how media participated in building one of the key expectations of the postsocialist economic transformations: the creation of a strong middle class. Although after 1989, talk of social class was deemed an anachronistic relic of the socialist era by many policy and opinion-makers in Eastern Europe, one particular social class did feature prominently in the ideological project of market and liberal democratic reform. The middle class functioned in period discourse not only as an economic and social category, but also as a cultural goal: a symbol of prosperity-to-come, a central aspiration and promise of a return to “normality”. This talk argues that television in the 1990s became a powerful cultural medium for the didactic project of explaining to viewers central concepts of the market economy. Based on archival materials from Czech and Slovak public television, it shows how educational programmes fostered a middle-class imagination through “normalizing” market mechanisms and privileging the figure of the entrepreneur as a role model of the new era. These programmes can thus be read as putting into practice the “liberal pedagogy” of the transformation project. But while much of the literature on middle-class imaginaries in the postsocialist region has focused on urban cosmopolitans, this presentation will analyse the role of media in cultivating a small-town and rural entrepreneurial class, which constituted an important, though nowadays overlooked, element of Czechoslovak transformational pedagogy.
The talk is part of the HAIT Lecture Series Lost (in) Transformation: Answers from the Recent Past to Challenges of Today in the winter semester and the Dresden-Prague Talks. Andreas Kötzing will moderate the talk.