GENTRIFICATION IN THE CONTEXT OF REVITALIZATION OF INNER CITY OF BRATISLAVA Inner city of Bratislava is currently experiencing the revitalization processes which share similarities with the process of gentrification witnessed in many other advanced capitalist cities as well as postsocialist cities. Aim of this study is to analyse situation in Bratislava in a complex way and to respond on a question, if there is gentrification happening in the Capital of Slovakia, what is its extent, character and a general influence in the context of revitalization of the inner city. For these purposes, more types of research methods are used, in which social, physical and functional image of the selected area with the biggest potential for gentrification is observed, views and motivations of the local actors are explored and signs of possible conflicts are analysed. By that study also aims to extend and deepen the knowledge about the mechanisms of transformation of postsocialist cities. Key words: Gentrification, postsocialist city, Bratislava

Charles University in Prague Faculty of Science Department of Social Geography and Regional Development URBANIZATION AND SUBURBANIZATION IN URBAN REGIONS OF PRAGUE AND VIENNA Summary of the PhD Thesis Mgr. Darina Posová Praha 2010 Supervisor: doc. RNDr. Luděk Sýkora, Ph.D. Supervisor - consultant: Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Walter Matznetter, M.Sc. INTRODUCTION This PhD thesis is focused on study of urbanization and urbanization processes in urban regions of Prague and Vienna. The thesis has two major parts. In the first part, general approaches to urbanization and suburbanization research are introduced and results of an analysis of Prague and Vienna urban regions are summarized. The second part consists of six publisher or submitted papers analyzing spatial distribution of population, housing, new housing construction in Prague urban region as well as comparing urbanization in Prague and Vienna urban regions in 1980s and 1990s. In the introductory chapter, I focus of the thesis and development of my approach to research on suburbanization within the post-socialist urban development context. Chapter on general perspectives summarizes the state of art in the field and shows the application of such approaches on the case of Prague and Vienna. The last chapter focuses on comparison between Prague and Vienna,...

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The following thesis addresses the process of growing old in an urban environment. It concentrates on the factors, which infulence the quality of senior citizens' lives and how they do it. The main focus is put on the city disticts that are subject to dynamic changes caused by the processes of post-socialist transformations, revitalization and gentrification. The thesis explores the problems but also the benefits, which these changes can bring to elderly citizens' every day lives. Looking for the answers to these questions is based on the case study of a city district in Prague - Karlín. The qualitative research have been done by semistructured interviews with local senior citizens. It has shown possible perception of some aspects of environment of Karlin and changes of this environment.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among the individuals, groups, and institutions that comprise Moscow's contemporary restaurant industry, this dissertation explores the production and consumption of Moscow's postsocialist culinary culture and landscape. Approaching cuisine as both a social product and a cultural process, I examine the agents and avenues of the local globalization of culinary culture. In my analysis, these "agents" include restaurateurs, chefs, cooks, professional associations, and educators and educational institutions, among others. I attend to the various meanings, practices, and contexts of their work, as well as to the political, aesthetic, and performative dimensions of cooking, cuisine and restaurants. I also examine how Russian consumers engage with and make sense of Moscow's emerging culinary culture and restaurant scene. I see these producers of cuisine and restaurants as authors of the capital's postsocialist consumer landscape and intermediaries between the local and the global. Articulating global culinary culture into local contexts, these cultural producers redeploy contemporary and historical culinary practices, aesthetics, and forms as representations of culture on both local and global stages. I call these practices culinary strategies and argue that they are vehicles through which new social actors struggle over the meanings and values at stake in the marketization of Russian society. Cuisine and restaurants are thus contested sites for the construction of Moscow as a world-class city and the production, dissemination, and negotiation of community, nation, identity, and class. I suggest that cuisine and restaurants play important roles in processes of globalization, serving as sites for reproduction and contestation of global hegemonies of form. Drawing on and expanding work in the anthropologies of food, visual communication, postsocialism, and globalization, my project suggests how ethnography and micro-analysis of the visual, sensual, performative, and structural dimensions of cultural production can open critical understandings of the complex and shifting interactions between local, national, and global contexts. / Anthropology

This thesis examines the political pop art of contemporary Chinese artist Wang Guangyi in light contemporaneous shifts within the political, economic, and artistic space of China from 1978 until the present. Through an analysis of the work of art as an historically determined antagonistic aesthetic praxis, this thesis attempts to reveal the sedimented traces of the alternative modernity which the Chinese government is actively attempting to construct. With its evocative juxtaposition of contrasting ideological forms, the artwork of Wang Guangyi seeks to deconstruct the normative and teleological narratives encountered within the dialectic interplay between state sponsored transnational capitalism and Marxist-Leninist communism. An understanding of the discursive structure upon which these dual modernising narratives has been based, and of the fragmented artistic space they have engendered, should serve to enliven the debate concerning the role of cultural production in questioning and revealing narratives of the nation, of the Self, and of modernity.

This thesis examines the political pop art of contemporary Chinese artist Wang Guangyi in light contemporaneous shifts within the political, economic, and artistic space of China from 1978 until the present. Through an analysis of the work of art as an historically determined antagonistic aesthetic praxis, this thesis attempts to reveal the sedimented traces of the alternative modernity which the Chinese government is actively attempting to construct. With its evocative juxtaposition of contrasting ideological forms, the artwork of Wang Guangyi seeks to deconstruct the normative and teleological narratives encountered within the dialectic interplay between state sponsored transnational capitalism and Marxist-Leninist communism. An understanding of the discursive structure upon which these dual modernising narratives has been based, and of the fragmented artistic space they have engendered, should serve to enliven the debate concerning the role of cultural production in questioning and revealing narratives of the nation, of the Self, and of modernity.

This thesis is about the geopolitics of feminist knowledge and the role of the visual arts in conceiving and reconfiguring postsocialist feminist imaginaries. Its central concern is to contest the fantasy, prevalent within Western feminist theorizing, of a “lag” between Western and former Eastern Europe. The thesis explores these imaginaries on a micro scale, zooming in on the deeply personal and political artwork of a contemporary feminist and lesbian-identified Estonian artist, Anna-Stina Treumund. This partial and limited focus on Treumund’s photographic self-portraiture enables us to look into the intensities and specificities of individual experience in postsocialist space. Throughout, the thesis evokes a whirling subject as a feminist figuration. This is simultaneously a reference to the embodied and the relational structure of knowledge-systems and world-making. Drawing on postsocialist, postcolonial, queer and feminist visual culture studies, the author argues that Treumund’s art is always already embedded in the local context, as it builds on and problematizes the existing discussions of feminist generations, theorizing, activism and art practices. Combining close readings of Treumund’s artworks with contemporary theoretical debates in feminist studies, encounters with the artist and autobiographical narratives, this thesis asserts: there is no “lag”. More importantly, it is of utmost ethical and political importance to pay closer attention to geopolitical locatedness as an axis of difference that matters in contemporary feminist theorizing. / Den här doktorsavhandlingen handlar om geopolitik i feministisk kunskap och bildkonstens roll i förståelse och omskapande av postsocialistiska feministiska föreställningar. Dess huvudsakliga fokus handlar om att bestrida den i västerländsk feministisk teori ofta förekommande fantasin om att före detta Östeuropa på olika sätt ”släpar efter” i relation till väst. Doktorsavhandlingen utforskar dessa föreställningar på mikronivå då den zoomar in på det djupt personliga och politiska bildkonstarbete utfört av den samtida feministiska och självidentifierat lesbiska estniska konstnärinnan Anna-Stina Treumund. Avhandlingens partiella fokus på Treumunds fotografier i form av självporträtt möjliggör för oss att få inblick i de intensiteter och specifika förhållanden som utgör en individuell erfarenhet av att befinna sig i det postsocialistiska rummet. Genomgående i doktorsavhandlingen används det virvlande subjektet som feministisk figuration. Figurationen innebär simultant en referens till den förkroppsligade och den relationella aspekten av kunskapssystem och skapande av världen. Med utgångspunkt i postsocialistiska, postkoloniala, queera och feministiska studier av visuell kultur argumenterar författaren att Treumunds bildkonst alltid redan är inbäddad i en lokal kontext, detta sedan den växer fram ur och problematiserar de diskussioner som pågår mellan feministiska generationer, i teori, aktivism och bland konstutövare. Genom att kombinera närläsning av Treumunds konstnärliga arbete med samtida teoretisk debatt inom feministiska studier, med möten med konstnärinnan, och med självbiografiska berättelser, försäkrar denna avhandling: det finns ingen “eftersläpning”. Än mer väsentligt är att betona att det är av yttersta etisk och politisk vikt att ägna mer uppmärksamhet åt geopolitiska lokaliseringar som skillnadsskapande faktor i samtida feministisk teoribildning.

„Russland“ und „Feminismus“ scheinen eine fragliche Kombination zu sein. Russland ist eher für neopatriarchale Politik bekannt, die für Feminismus kaum Platz lässt. Doch in den letzten 15 Jahren ist in Russland eine feministische Basisbewegung entstanden. Was tut sie? Wie kann sie sich in einem ungünstigen Kontext durchsetzen? Wie massenhaft und inklusiv ist diese Bewegung und wie geht sie mit inneren Konflikten um? Kerndaten dieser Studie sind qualitative Interviews mit Feminist*innen aus vier Städten in Russland, ergänzt durch mehrjährige Beobachtung der feministischen Szenen. Aufgrund dieser Daten behaupte ich, dass die zeitgenössische feministische Bewegung in Russland eine dezentrale Basisbewegung ist, welche Macht auf mehreren Ebenen der sozialen Organisation herausfordert. Neben dem öffentlichen Protest übt sie diskursive Politik aus und wirkt durch die Einführung neuer Definitionen und Denkweisen direkt auf die Gesellschaft. Intersektional betrachtet wird die Bewegungsbeteiligung durch Mehrfachmarginalisierung aufgrund des Ressourcenmangels und Disempowerment beeinträchtigt. Kollektive Lösungen können Ressourcenumverteilung und Berücksichtigung von Differenz darstellen. Debatten um Differenz und Inklusion sind ein zentraler Bereich, in welchem die feministische Bewegung soziale Innovation herstellt. Schließlich verortet diese Studie die zeitgenössische feministische Bewegung in Russland in einem globalen postkolonialen Kontext. Ich behaupte, dass ein lineares Fortschrittsnarrativ, welches Feminismus als Kennzeichen der westlichen Moderne konstruiert, die Beziehung zwischen russländischen und westlichen Feminismen sowie die Machtdynamiken zwischen Feminist*innen in Metropolen, (post-)kolonialen und nichtkolonialen Peripherien Russlands prägt. An scheinbar für eine feministische Praxis ungeeigneten Orten widerstehen Feminist*innen kolonialen und imperialen Narrativen und betreiben eine auf lokalen Erfahrungen basierende feministische Politik. / The words “Russia” and “feminism” seem to be an unlikely combination. Russia is better known for neopatriarchal policies leaving little room for feminism. Yet a grassroots feminist movement has been growing in Russia since the last 15 years. What kind of movement is this? What does it do? How does it sustain itself and grow in a largely unfavorable context? How mass and inclusive is this movement and how does it deal with internal conflicts? The core data in this research are qualitative interviews with feminists in four cities across Russia complemented by direct and online observation of feminist scenes. Drawing upon this data, I argue that the contemporary feminist movement in Russia is a decentralized grassroots movement that challenges power on various levels of social organization. Besides public protest, it notably uses discursive politics that act directly upon society by introducing new definitions and ways of thinking. Feminist communities serve as platforms where these innovations are developed and tried out. From an intersectional perspective, I argue that due to lack of resources and disempowerment, multiple marginalization negatively affects participation in the movement. A collective way to address this can be resource redistribution and consideration of difference. Debates over difference and inclusion are, I argue, a crucial area in which the feminist movement produces social innovation. Finally, this research places the contemporary feminist movement in Russia in a global postcolonial context. I argue that a linear progress narrative that constructs feminism as a hallmark of Western modernity impacts both the relationship between Russian and Western feminisms and power dynamics between feminists in Russian metropolitan centers, (post)colonial and non-colonial peripheries. In places deemed unsuited for feminist practice, I argue, feminists resist colonial and imperial narratives and do feminist politics rooted in local experience.