Microhistories of Socialism
Since 2015, every year at the end of summer, in Pula we organise a workshop for PhD students in history and related fields. Even last year we succeeded in doing so, although through a distance learning platform, so we are sure that the workshop will be also held in 2021, in circumstances which are still uncertain due to the pandemic. Depending on travel possibilities, we will work entirely in person in Pula, or entirely online, or in a hybrid way. We will be flexible and make every endeavour to find the most suitable solution for every participant.
So far, the Workshop has focused on various topics in contemporary history, history of socialist Yugoslavia and the wider European context: The History of Everyday Life in Socialist Yugoslavia; Yugoslav Socialism: Similarities and Exceptionalities; A New Man for the Socialist Society; Yugoslavia and the Global 1968: Contexts, Perspectives, Echoes; Industrial Societies of Late Socialism: European Comparisons; Cooperation, Exchange and Solidarity in Europe 1945-1990. The themes were often connected to the research projects at CKPIS or with the cooperation network around the Chair for South-East European History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Over the past years, the Workshop has received an excellent response, with PhD students and lecturers coming from various universities and other institutions (Belgrade, Berlin, Birmingham, Budapest, Durham, Florence, Ghent, Giessen, Glasgow, Graz, Hamburg, Iaşi, Konstanz, Koper, Ljubljana, Montreal, Munich, Nottingham, Paris, Potsdam, Prague, Regensburg, San Diego, Sarajevo, Skopje, Sofia, Split, Vienna, Warsaw, Warwick, Zagreb and Pula). Information on past workshops is available on our website.
This year, the theme is connected to the research project Microstructures of Yugoslav Socialism: Croatia 1970-1990 (Microsocialism), which is financed by Croatian Science Foundation, and focuses on social, cultural, political and economic processes on the microlevel, in selected municipalities as case studies. Some of the workshop lecturers will talk about their research within this project. However, the theme of the Doctoral Workshop is broader: we are not exclusively interested in Yugoslav space, but are also enquiring into microhistories of state socialist societies in the European and global context, from the end of the World War II to the 1990s. We welcome presentations which bring views from below in working and living environment, views into the space of a city, a village, a factory, some other collective or an organization. By discussing events and structures, and analysing historical episodes and longer processes, we will build meeting points, contextualize and compare them, and connect microhistories and case studies into a larger whole.