Thesis (doctoral)--University of Stockholm, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-225).

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. [466]-492.

This thesis is about the construction of a nationalised public Catholic culture in Slovakia from 1985 to 1993. At the core of this culture was the assumption that the Catholic Church had always been an integral part of the Slovak nation, her past, her present and her future. The thesis seeks to answer the question of who created this culture during the 1980s and 1990s and how and why they did so. To answer these questions this thesis adopts a cultural approach and explores how this culture was created utilising the concepts of collective memory, symbols and events as its main analytical tools. The data for this analysis include, but are not restricted to, materials produced in relation to various commemorative events and pilgrimages, especially those related to the leading national Catholic symbols: the National Patroness Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows and Saints Cyril and Methodius. The thesis argues that this culture was deliberately constructed from the point of view of many actors. Before 1989 these included the official Catholic hierarchy, underground Catholic Church communities, the pope and nationalist Communists. After 1989 these actors continued to construct this culture even as their positions of power changed. Most notably, underground Catholics became part of current ecclesiastical and political elite, and communist nationalists dissociated themselves from the Communist Party but retained their position within the cultural and political elite. The thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter looks at how the nationalised public Catholic culture started in the mid-1980s with underground Catholic communities that focused on culture and grassroots mobilisation. The second chapter looks at how the nationalist Communists and the official church hierarchy became involved in construction of parts of this culture and how their involvement resonated with the underground Catholic communities. Chapter Three examines how this culture continued to develop in the early 1990s in a new political context, and how it contributed to a broader cultural legitimisation of Slovak independence.

This diploma thesis is attentive to very low numbers of girls, studying at technically oriented secondary industrial schools. It examines the factors, which lead to the reasons why girls are not motivated to study at the schools of this kind, as well as factors which cause that they do enter these schools, such as their interest in studying technologies, their motivation in the form of their future professional application or the existence of patterns in the form of people who they imitate. In the theoretical part, which examines the causes of the absence of female students, the work criticises the claim that boys are more talented for studying technical disciplines, while girls excel in humanities. It points to ways of keeping gender stereotyped thinking, for example, a strongly rooted opinion, that little girls should be led to take care of children and other persons, housework, and professions which are an extension of their domestic roles into the public sphere. After this work identifies the risks and impacts of the absence of girls in technical fields, there are mentioned some procedures that should be introduced in the education of children in elementary schools, so that the children may not have to decide on their future field of study based on generally accepted gender stereotypes. Based...

The following thesis titled Zavedené nepořádky: Českoslovenští fotbaloví fanoušci v letech pozdního státního socialismu thematises Czechoslovak football hooliganism from a historical point of view with a special emphasis on the contextualisation of the whole phenomena into the field of the Czechoslovak contemporary history. It is specifically concerned with detailing various aspects of this specific community's everyday life but it also thematises broader questions about the community's members relation to the social order in which they themselves lived and were surrounded by. On one hand, the thesis accepts some basic aspects from the subcultural theory, but at the same time it offers interpretative alternatives inspired by the concepts of socialist everydayness. The whole thesis is thus not only a description of a very specific community of football hooligans in the era of late state socialism but also a contribution to a broader discussion on the character of late state socialism in the last years of its duration. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

To wield direct influence on the everyday lives of citizens, new political elites have often professed a profound interest in shaping the politics of dwelling. In the 1920s, Vienna’s Social Democrats built 400 communal housing blocks equipped with public gardens, theaters, libraries, kindergartens, and sports facilities, hoping that these facilities would serve as loci for “growing into socialism”. In the 1950s, housing construction in Berlin became a site of the Cold War. East Berlin’s social realist “workers palaces” on Stalinallee were meant to serve as an ideal flourishing ground for the “new socialist men and women”. In contrast, West Berlin's modernist Hansa-Viertel was designed to showcase an ideal dwelling culture and an urban environment that would cultivate individuality. This dissertation examines three historically situated and ideologically distinct responses to the housing question: social democracy in Red Vienna, state socialism in East Berlin, and liberal capitalism in West Berlin. It illuminates how political promises of a radical new beginning were translated into spatial arrangements—the private scale of the apartment and the urban scale of the city—as well as how citizens appropriated the social, political, and economic norms inherent to the new spaces they inhabited. More specifically, the following analyses demonstrate the fact that inherited social, technological, and economic practices have often subverted political visions of a radically different future. This was the case with pedagogy in Red Vienna’s municipal housing, instrumental reason in the form of Taylorism and Fordism in East and West Berlin’s mass housing, and gender relations in Red Vienna’s and East Berlin’s politics of dwelling. At the same time, this dissertation examines counter-spaces that emerged from the dialectics between political promises and actual socio-spatial realities, counter-spaces that both reflect critically on past hegemonic “politics of dwelling” and that foreshadow alternative political imaginations that are still relevant today. Of particular interest are counter-hegemonic practices of dwelling that embody possibilities of emancipation—of experiencing oneself as subject instead of object of social transformation, justice—of emphasizing considerations of equality and recognition, and radical democracy—of questioning power relations and of forming alliances among disadvantaged groups to transform everyday life.

To wield direct influence on the everyday lives of citizens, new political elites have often professed a profound interest in shaping the politics of dwelling. In the 1920s, Vienna’s Social Democrats built 400 communal housing blocks equipped with public gardens, theaters, libraries, kindergartens, and sports facilities, hoping that these facilities would serve as loci for “growing into socialism”. In the 1950s, housing construction in Berlin became a site of the Cold War. East Berlin’s social realist “workers palaces” on Stalinallee were meant to serve as an ideal flourishing ground for the “new socialist men and women”. In contrast, West Berlin's modernist Hansa-Viertel was designed to showcase an ideal dwelling culture and an urban environment that would cultivate individuality. This dissertation examines three historically situated and ideologically distinct responses to the housing question: social democracy in Red Vienna, state socialism in East Berlin, and liberal capitalism in West Berlin. It illuminates how political promises of a radical new beginning were translated into spatial arrangements—the private scale of the apartment and the urban scale of the city—as well as how citizens appropriated the social, political, and economic norms inherent to the new spaces they inhabited. More specifically, the following analyses demonstrate the fact that inherited social, technological, and economic practices have often subverted political visions of a radically different future. This was the case with pedagogy in Red Vienna’s municipal housing, instrumental reason in the form of Taylorism and Fordism in East and West Berlin’s mass housing, and gender relations in Red Vienna’s and East Berlin’s politics of dwelling. At the same time, this dissertation examines counter-spaces that emerged from the dialectics between political promises and actual socio-spatial realities, counter-spaces that both reflect critically on past hegemonic “politics of dwelling” and that foreshadow alternative political imaginations that are still relevant today. Of particular interest are counter-hegemonic practices of dwelling that embody possibilities of emancipation—of experiencing oneself as subject instead of object of social transformation, justice—of emphasizing considerations of equality and recognition, and radical democracy—of questioning power relations and of forming alliances among disadvantaged groups to transform everyday life.

This dissertation thesis deals with the notion of "vekslactvi" in socialist Czechoslovakia and with a social group called "vekslaci", which orchestrated illicit trade with foreign currencies, the so called tuzex vouchers, and smuggled consumer goods. The analysis lays emphasis on the daily operations of the "veksláci" and also on the commodities which they traded. From this perspective, "vekslaci" could be treated as a driving force within the Czechoslovak black market. In addition to the basic principles of "veksl", the chapter also presents a certain typology of traffickers and mutual hierarchical links within this specific community. The lifestyle of the "vekslák subculture" is also a subject of historical reconstruction as the thesis seeks to place "veksláci" in the context of the Czechoslovak society before 1989. The thesis also deals with the social and economic circumstances that enabled the birth of a peculiar social group of "vekslaci". Among others, it focuses on the role of the Tuzex hard currency shops, which was introduced in order to sell (mostly imported) consumer goods in exchange for foreign currencies or special vouchers. Attitude of the Czechoslovak state regarding the issue of "veksláctví" is also a subject of analysis. The research focuses on legislation, which gradually...

This dissertation has the ambition to contribute to the understanding of the economic system in Czechoslovakia during the post-war socialist transformation and the subsequent consolidation of the communist regime in the 1950s. The means of knowledge is the state economic plan, which has gradually become one of the key determinants of the Czechoslovak economy after the Second World War. The process of forming a system of state-controlled economy is monitored from the field of view of selected industry - brewing. The importance of the brewing industry consists in the deep-rooted specifics of beer consumption in Czech society. The research focuses on the penetration of post-war national, social and economic transformations through Czechoslovak production and beer consumption. It focuses on the limits of business freedom in brewing industry in the period of the Third Republic, transformation of private enterprise into collective forms of ownership, specifics and detail of the state plan and its formation in the context of crucial domestic political and international events. The results of the dissertation provide information about the mechanism of state economic planning, the development of traditional Czech industry and beer consumption in the period of state socialism, and at the same time provide...