Disability in the Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia

作为一项既具有历史意义又具有强大现实份量的研究项目，该项目对残疾问题的兴趣与日俱增。通过在捷克和德国学者之间建立密切和有重点的合作，该项目旨在实现历史深度、空间扩展和系统方法。这些次级项目发展了1989年前后捷克/捷克社会中残疾问题的几个方面的建设和代表性。德国的次级项目(将在说明中进一步详细介绍)将侧重于a)分析流行杂志上的残疾情况，以及b)捷克斯洛伐克残疾人联合会的历史。此外，我们还计划举办带有比较研究议程的研讨会。最近，残疾已经发展成为一个雄心勃勃的研究计划，不仅有助于书写残疾人的历史，而且将残疾设计为一个关键的历史类别。为了理解社会和文化模式，有效地使用了残疾这一概念。虽然这类研究在英国、北美以及越来越多的德国取得了成功，但到目前为止，东欧、中欧和东欧以及俄罗斯还很少包括在这一领域。发表的研究很少，大多数集中在一小部分特定的主题上，如退伍军人的历史或优生学的传统。现代福利国家领域在这里特别值得关注。在这些研究中，残疾通常被认为只是一种损害，而不是一个有问题的和历史上可变的类别。特别是，到目前为止，社会主义时代在很大程度上被研究人员忽视了。该项目设想与捷克文化批评家卡特琳娜·科拉罗瓦密切合作，卡特琳娜·科拉罗瓦已被证明是这一领域极少数具有强大理论和经验背景的中欧学者之一。我们设想建立必要的框架，以便系统地研究东欧、中欧和东欧的残疾问题。这既包括对捷克斯洛伐克/捷克案件的强烈关注，也包括对德国案件和其他社会主义/后社会主义社会的比较观点。归根结底，该项目涵盖了当代历史的关键问题和问题，如社会主义和后社会主义社会的机制和话语模式；社会主义和后社会主义思想和社会政治的路径依赖；社会和政治中介问题；自上而下和自下而上对待历史的问题；作为现代性变体的社会主义和后社会主义社会模式。

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.