COST Action 18119 Who Cares in Europe?
Who Cares? Narratives on Families in Postsocialist Europe
November 24, 2021
9.00 – 13.00h CET (Beograd, Budapest, Berlin, Warszawa)
9.00 – 9.20 Opening words
9.20 – 9.40 Short introduction by participants
9.40 – 11.00 Session 1
Tatyana Kotzeva, Ana Luleva and Gergana Nenova: Caring for the child, caring for the family – the clash over family policies in Bulgaria
Ionela Băluță and Claudiu Tufiș: The ‘referendum for family’: political narratives on the traditional family in contemporary Romania
Jelena Ćeriman and Tanja Vuckovic Juros: The (Dis)continuity of care for the family: Actors of narratives on families in contemporary Serbia and Croatia
11.00 – 11.10 Break
11.10-12.30 Session 2
Anikó Gregor and Ingrid Verebes: Serving the power? The role of scholars in promoting familism during a period of anti-gender politics in Hungary
Soňa G. Lutherová, Radka Šustrová, Ľubica Voľanská: Family of Return or Evolution? The Search for the Traditional Family in the Czech Republic and Slovakia
Małgorzata Sikorska and Joanna Wawrzyniak: The clash of family narratives in Poland: family benefits, restrictive abortion law and LGBTQ+ rights as political turning points in the years 2015-2020
Maren Hachmeister: Concepts of family and aging in post-1989 East Germany
12.30-13.00 General round of final comments
The international workshop “Who Cares? Narratives on Families in Postsocialist Europe” is organized within the framework of COST Action 18119 Who Cares In Europe?, by the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Centre for the Study of Equal Opportunity Policies (CPES & FSPUB), University of Bucharest, and the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw.
Conveners:
Adriana Zaharijević (University of Belgrade)
Anca Dohotariu (University of Bucharest)
Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw)
Participants:
Ionela Băluță (University of Bucharest)
Jelena Ćeriman (University of Belgrade)
Anikó Gregor (ELTE University)
Maren Hachmeister (TU Dresden)
Tatyana Kotzeva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Ana Luleva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Soňa G. Lutherová (Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Gergana Nenova (Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski)
Małgorzata Sikorska (University of Warsaw)
Radka Šustrová (University of Cambridge and Charles University in Prague)
Claudiu D. Tufiș (University of Bucharest)
Ingrid Verebes (ELTE University)
Ľubica Voľanská (Slovak Academy of Sciences)
Tanja Vuckovic Juros (University of Zagreb)
The main aim of the online workshop “Who Cares? Narratives on Families in Postsocialist Europe” has been to gather the participants who are going to actively participate in one of the two main activities of the Working Group on Families and Social Welfare in the months to come. Out of 16 participants, 9 are COST Action 18119 members, while other 7 joined through an open call, or were specifically invited to join due to their expertise in the field. The online workshop managed to gather all participants who presented their extended abstracts.
The presentations and the discussion helped in providing the editors/the conveners with a clear structure of the future collection. Each participant presented their extended abstracts, which helped in communicating ideas and understanding the intersections and/or differences between the seven country cases. The main aim of the workshop – to strengthen the overall coherence of the special issue section before the beginning of the writing process – is fully realized.
The workshop helped to define the next steps towards our main deliverable – special issue section in East European Politics and Societies, to be published hopefully within the timeframe of the COST Action. There is a provisional decision to meet – preferably on site, possibly in Belgrade – at the beginning of April to discuss the first article drafts. Upon receiving all articles, editors will finish the Introduction to the section and will submit the planned publication by the beginning of June 2022.
Regarding the COST objectives, the workshop fitted within COST 18119 Who Cares in Europe? specific objectives, as its main goal is to help define and develop a common terminology on family, focused on comparisons between different national cases. Its aim is to build synergies between current national and transnational research in the domain of family studies, gender studies, memory studies and political science. It was specifically oriented on expending the network between scholars working in and on Eastern and South Eastern Europe.