Disability in the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia

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This project takes up on the growing interest in disability as a research program with both historical relevance and a strong current weight. By establishing a close and focused collaboration between Czech and German scholars, the project aims at historical depth, spatial expansion and a systematic approach. The sub-projects develop several aspects of construction and representation of disability in Czechoslovak/Czech society before and after 1989. The German sub-projects (presented in detail further in the description) will focus on a) an analysis of the representation of disability in popular magazines and b) a history of the Federation of Czechoslovak Invalids. In addition, we plan workshops with a comparative research agenda. Of late, disability has developed into an ambitious research program that helps not only to write a history of people with disabilities, but rather designs disability as a crucial historical category. Disability as a concept has been effectively employed in order to understand social and cultural patterns. While such research has been very successful in the UK, North America and increasingly in Germany, East Central and Eastern Europe as well as Russia have hardly been included in this field so far. Very few studies have been published, most of them focusing on a small range of specific topics such as the history of war veterans or the tradition of eugenics. The field of the modern welfare state is of special concern here. In these studies, disability is usually conceived of merely as impairment rather than as a problematic and historically variable category. In particular the socialist era has been largely neglected by researchers so far. This project envisions a close collaboration with the Czech cultural critic Katerina Kolárová, who has proven to be one of the very few Central European scholars in this field with a strong theoretical and empirical background. We envisage to establish the necessary framework for systematic research on disability in East Central /Eastern Europe. This includes both a strong focus on the Czechoslovakia/Czech case and comparative perspectives on the German case and other socialist/postsocialist societies. Ultimately, the project encompasses crucial questions and problems of contemporary history, such as the mechanisms and discoursive patterns of socialist and postsocialist societies; path dependency of socialist and postsocialist mentalities and social politic; questions of social and political agency; the problem of top-down versus bottom-up approaches to history; socialist and postsocialist social models as varieties of modernity.