Post-socialist transformations

In the past decade, urban regeneration policy makers and practitioners have faced a number of difficult challenges, such as sustainability, budgetary constraints, demands for community involvement and rapid urbanization in the Global South. Urban regeneration remains a high profile and important field of government-led intervention, and policy and practice continue to adapt to the fresh challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century, as well as confronting long-standing intractable urban problems and dilemmas. This Companion provides cutting-edge critical review and synthesis of recent conceptual, policy and practical developments within the field. With contributions from 72 international experts within the field, it explores the meaning of ‘urban regeneration’ in differing national contexts, asking questions and providing informed discussion and analyses to illuminate how an apparently disparate field of research, policy and practice can be rendered coherent, drawing out common themes and significant differences. The Companion is divided into six parts, exploring: globalization and neo-liberal perspectives on urban regeneration; emerging econceptualizations of regeneration; public infrastructure and public space;
housing and cosmopolitan communities; community centred regeneration; and culture-led regeneration. The concluding chapter considers the future of urban regeneration and proposes a nine-point research agenda. This Companion assembles a diversity of approaches and insights in one comprehensive volume to provide a state-of-the-art review of the field. It is a valuable resource for both advanced undergraduate
and postgraduate students in Urban Planning, Built Environment, Urban Studies and Urban Regeneration, as well as academics, practitioners and politicians.

During the important, early years of transition for the post-socialist countries in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Mongolia, the Open Society Institute/Soros Foundation was arguably the largest and most influential network in the region. How NGOs React follows the Soros Foundation's educational reform programs there and raises larger questions about the role of NGOs in a centralist government, relationships NGOs have with international donors and development banks, and how projects are adopted and interpreted in different contexts.

Case studies (authored by former or current educational experts of the Soros Network based in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) look at the impact of capacity-building programs, the professional development of teachers, school administrators, government officials, textbook authors, publishers, teacher educators, and university lecturers, among others. Soros's particular focus on capacity-building and how this strategy was adopted across a wide area reveals much that will instruct NGOs working in international education policy. The unique combination of perspectives from Western as well as Eastern scholars based in the region makes this collection an essential retrospective on key processes involved in the transformation of closed societies into open and free ones.

Private tutoring has become increasingly visible in Eastern Europe and Central Asia since the collapse of the socialist bloc in the early 1990s. Yet, this unprecedented growth of private tutoring, in its varied forms and arrangements, has remained largely unnoticed by policymakers in the region. Based on the data from the cross-national studies of private tutoring in 12 countries, this explorative study examines factors driving the demand for private tutoring and discusses government responses to private tutoring in Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine (research conducted in 2004–2005) and Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan (research conducted in 2005–2006). The article analyzes various policy contexts and examines challenges that confront education stakeholders and policymakers as they formulate their responses to the rapidly-spreading and constantly-changing phenomenon of private tutoring. Finally, the article discusses whether, and to what extent, the existence of regulatory mechanisms influences the scope, nature, and implications of private tutoring across the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Для советских людей обвал советской системы стал одновременно абсолютной неожиданностью и чем-то вполне закономерным. Это драматическое событие обнажило необычный парадокс: несмотря на то, что большинство людей воспринимало советскую систему как вечную и неизменную, они в принципе были всегда готовы к ее распаду. В книге профессора Калифорнийского университета в Беркли Алексея Юрчака система «позднего социализма» (середина 1950-х – середина 1980-х) анализируется в перспективе этого парадокса. Образ позднего социализма, возникающий в книге, в корне отличается от привычных стереотипов, согласно которым советскую реальность якобы можно свести к описанию, основанному на простых противопоставлениях -- таких как: официальная/неофициальная культура, тоталитарный язык/свободный язык, политическое подавление/гражданское сопротивление, публичная ложь/скрытая правда и т.д.

The 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union is a time to reflect on the educational transformations in the post-socialist nations of Southeast/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union and in educational systems around the world. This volume provides a comparative account of the meanings and processes of post-socialist transformations in education by exploring theories, concepts, and debates on post-socialism and globalization in national, regional, and international contexts. By contesting a common expectation that post-socialist societies would inevitably converge towards Western norms, this book sees post-socialism as open, plural, and inevitably uncertain. Speaking from particular contexts of their countries—both from within the post-socialist region of Southeast/Central Europe (Albania, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine) and outside (Cuba, Africa, the Caribbean, China, and Nicaragua)—the authors engage in a theoretical and conceptual complexification of post-socialism by raising a series of important questions. What are the elements of continuities and discontinuities in various post-socialist settings and how do they interact in reshaping education policies and practices? What rationalities underpin the logic and define the purpose of education transformations in different post-socialist contexts? How do post-socialist policies function as political technologies to simultaneously promote and challenge global norms? How are global norms actually understood, experienced, and interpreted in post-socialist contexts? And, more broadly, what insights do post-socialist analyses offer for our ongoing attempts to (re)read the global in comparative education?

These questions have important implications for comparative education. In addition to providing important comparative accounts of issues specific to post-socialist societies, they open opportunities for us to engage in theorizing about globalization and its effects on education in refreshingly new ways. By re-engaging post-socialism as a conceptual category (with all of its contradictions and complexities), the essays in this book suggest a (re)reading of the global through the lens of pluralities, discontinuities, and uncertainties. They propose a (re)reading of the global that is free of its predetermined finality. Post-socialism thus becomes an intellectual space and a challenge for comparative education to embrace new theoretical and methodological possibilities.

Post-socialist transformation processes have been accompanied by gendered nationalism, deeming women unqualified to participate in the new nation-building projects. In this context, women have been relegated to private and home spaces, where their main roles have been associated with reproducing their families and nations. Yet, as the authors argue in this chapter, this private space – linking women to home and nature, while associating men with the public sphere and culture – is not always exclusionary but is also full of disruptions of modern gender dynamics. By focusing on analysis of early literacy textbooks in Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Latvia – through the lens of feminist critical discourse analysis – this chapter aims to show how textbooks produced in the post-socialist periods simultaneously reinforce and challenge gendered norms and how they (re)shape domestic, private spaces allotted to women to construct identities outside of gendered rhetoric. By directly linking the analysis of gender, nation and nature, as well as the intersections among the three, this chapter reveals how early literacy textbooks produce an ambivalent and ambiguous narrative of post-socialist nation and gender, reflecting multi-layered and sometimes contradictory histories of these nations.

The integration of the countries of eastern and southeastern Europe into global flows of migration has become a major issue not only in migration policy debates , but also in analysing longer term social change in the region. Changes in the magnitudes of migrant remittances can be of crucial social and political importance. In this study, I link a conceptual contribution with a three-step empirical inquiry. First, I conceptualize migrant remittances as a form of external economic dependency. Next, I describe recent changes in the strength of the empirical relationship between migrant remittances as percentages of the GDP and per capita GDP for all societies of the world utilizing data from two online data sets. Employing what Charles Tilly (1984) called " variation-finding comparison, " I examine, next, the – as it turns out, quite sizeable – residual variation in the relative magnitude of remittances that remains after controlling for per capita GDP, and interpret it as a marker for patterns of remittance dependency. Finally, I trace the recent trajectories of the societies that had, until one generation ago, constituted the Soviet " bloc " against the backdrop of the global distribution in remittance dependency. The data have been adopted from two sources: Estimates for migrant remittances as percentages of the GDP of their home country come from the online World Develop

This book presents the results of a study that examines how education has been affected by private tutoring in nine former socialist countries: Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Lithuania, Mongolia, Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine. The comparative study is the first document of its kind in the former socialist countries that looks into the main factors behind the phenomena; its scale, cost, geographic spread and subjects involved; the educational, social, and economic impact of private tutoring on the education system; the policy options and alternative approaches.

The publication consists of an in-depth international comparative overview; country reports prepared by nine Education Policy Centers and their partners as well as a set of recommendations for policymakers. It can be useful for national legislative bodies, education ministries, school administrators, local authorities, policymakers, and other education stakeholders to help raise awareness of the problems and benefits of private tutoring. It can also serve as an advocacy tool in the effort to make national education policies more equitable for all students.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the theoretical genealogy and main uses of heritage in actually existing communist countries. This is performed by carrying out a critical review of Èleazar Aleksandrovič Baller’s Communism and Cultural Heritage, (1984, Progress, Moscow). The analysis of Baller’s work reveals that the logics of heritage in communist countries differed in various ways from capitalist countries, mainly because of the almost total state control over the heritage apparatus and the subordination of heritage policies to Marxist–Leninist ideology. Heritage was fundamental in dealing with the problem of change and continuity with the traditions, narratives and identities of previous society, and in the process of transforming citizens into ‘new men’ through the cultural revolution and the inculcation of ideology through museums and monuments.

Myanmar is undergoing a transformation process similar in many ways to that of Poland. This is true in political, social and economic spheres. Myanmar chose, as Poland did, to follow a good pattern of political deals brokered by the elites behind closed doors: the Round Table negotiations in the case of Poland and Suu Kyi-army deal in the case of Myanmar. Politically, these local equivalents of “cabinet diplomacy” offer political stability, enable reforms and fit into patterns of the Polish and the Burmese political cultures.
In both cases it has been a win-win model for the elites. The democratic opposition gained the nominal power and moral satisfaction. Society gained the feeling of change and of historic justice. The social energy was reinvigorated, while at the same time the basic interests of the previous regime were not affected; the previous regime’s authorities
were not prosecuted and were even acclaimed abroad. They have continued to control the economic sphere from behind-the-scenes and to influence the political sphere. The success of this scenario required both sides of the political spectrum – the military establishment and the democratic opposition – to restrain their demands, compromise and keep the deal. The prize is well-worth it: political stability. Both Poland and Myanmar were able to achieve this, at least so far.

The fate of the monuments to Soviet political leaders offers an ironic portrayal of educational research examining post-socialist transformations. In this chapter, we connect the movements and metamorphoses of supposedly immortal political leaders across different former socialist contexts with the perspectives on educational research. Our aim is to trouble – and make strange – dominating knowledge, while opening spaces for knowing otherwise. This chapter offers a decolonial reading of academic interpretations that positioned change as the removal of socialist ideology in the early 1990s and attempted to de-ideologize education as an inevitable convergence to Western systems through neoliberal education reforms. Such reforms
(and research) have positioned the former socialist education systems on a linear path to Western modernity, while overlooking the diverse trajectories of post-socialist transformations. By carefully re-examining the historical and colonial legacies of post-socialist education, we offer comparative and international education researchers an alternative framework from which different education imaginaries become visible.

Despite the diversity of socio-political and economic contexts, educational transformations in post-socialist states have some common trends: orientation towards the ‘West’ and denial of the socialist past; marketisation of higher education through the introduction and extension of paid services, as well as promotion of competition for public funding; economisation of higher education via adjustment to the amount of economic resources and labour market demand. In this article, I analyze how those trends have been reflected in political practices and public discourses in the case of Ukrainian higher education reforms since the ‘Euromaidan’ events in 2013–2014. The research shows that, in the Ukrainian case, concepts of orientation towards the ‘West’, marketization and economization of higher education are the key elements of local opinion-makers’ political rhetoric that play a crucial role in the process of legitimization​ of neoliberal reforms in higher education.

The establishment of the journal Word, which is to be seen as the core of the dynamics of Serbian fiction during the 1990's, was initiated by the ideological polarization at the Serbian cultural and literary scene of the time. The analysis of fiction texts, within the particular context (1994-1999), indicates that the official ideology, especially nationalism, marked one significant strand of Serbian literature in the last decade of the 20th century, which, from the present point of view, does not seem to be the most dynamic and vital one. Although mainstream in the 1990's, postmodern fiction exists predominantly in texts that parody postmodern poetics, thus giving a new life to the exhausted narrative paradigm. In analogy with this process, some young and female authors produce different fiction which could be named new mimetic fiction: texts are written in the confessional and realistic mode, in the form of diaries or notes, introducing various topics connected to the process of post-socialist changes. Keywords: ,,Rec" (1994-1999), Serbian fiction, postmodernism, ,,new mimetic fiction", post-socialist transformation .

Alexander Leistner geht in seiner Studie der Frage nach, wie soziale Bewegungen als eine fragile Form sozialer Ordnung entstehen und sich stabilisieren. Eine hier vorgeschlagene biographietheoretische Bewegungsforschung liefert analytische Bausteine, um diese Form der Ordnungsbildung zu fassen. Dabei kommen gesellschaftliche und biographische Konfliktkonstellationen in den Blick, in denen Engagement entsteht. Es werden die sozialen Kontexte herausgearbeitet, in denen es sich (pfadabhängig) stabilisiert. Schließlich wird gezeigt, dass Schlüsselfiguren sozialen Bewegungen als informelle Rollenordnung eine (relativ) stabile Gestalt geben.

Alexander Leistner entwickelt damit ein analytisches Instrumentarium zur Historisierung sozialer Bewegungen und wendet dieses exemplarisch und damit auch als Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte auf die unabhängige Friedensbewegung in der DDR (und deren Entwicklung nach 1989) an. Zur Untersuchung wurden biographische Interviews mit langjährigen Aktivisten und Aktivistinnen geführt und um weitere Zeitzeugnisse ergänzt.

Die Studie wurde mit dem Max Weber Preis für Nachwuchsforschung ausgezeichnet.

Ukraine’s reform process is delayed by both, domestic enemies and hindrances, as well as various effects of Moscow’s “hybrid war” against Kyiv on the Ukrainian economy, state and society. In view of the enormous dimensions, complications and challenges of the transition agenda, the results that have been achieved until mid-2016 are not trivial. However, they are still far from achieving a sustainable transformation and have partly happened only on paper so far. A successful “Europeanization” of Ukraine could have positive repercussions and further liberal-democratic values throughout the entire post-Soviet region. To make Ukraine’s reforms successful, close cooperation of Ukrainian reform-oriented politicians, civic activists and civil servants with international donor organizations (EU, IMF, EBRD, World Bank etc.) is necessary.

Master thesis concluding the „Democratic Politics and Communication“ degree program, University of Trier, supervision: Prof.Dr. Winfired Thaa, June 2017.

Abstract
The post-socialist space is anything but a steady region. Numerous conflicts, political crises, lingering corruption and oligarchic power claims, and economic instabilities are feeding into growing discontent within the region’s populaces. This contradicts sharply the prognoses of the so called „transition paradigm“ in social sciences and economics – the assumption that, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the former socialist societies would fall in line with a somewhat unilinear, determined macro-stream of societal modernization.
Using the reconstruction-deconstruction political theory technique, in this thesis I assess academic texts from the field of transformation studies to show the following: (1) The confrontation between supporters of the catch-up modernization paradigm and authors cautioning „problems of simultaneity“ are grounded in the same theoretical presuppositions, stating the universality and desirability of neoevolutionally determined societal modernization. (2) These mainstream presuppositions pose a highly problematic grounding for investigating societal transformations: The neoevolutional modernization theory normativistically objectifies its own premises, it is a teleological, functionalist theory. Deviations from its predictions can only be described negatively, it rather evaluates outcomes than that it describes processes. Policies formed following such a theory are mechanistic, human agency is left aside.
This theoretical one-sidedness left some gaps in the academic understanding of post-socialist transformations. The field remained undercomplex in terms of democracy theory, underestimated the power aspirations of old elites and was left blind towards the heterogeneity and contingency of lived reality and civil societies in the post-socialist region.

Throughout history, large scale political and economic change have often correlated with change in the observance of holidays and the ritual cycle, reflecting and enabling the appearance of new ideologies and practices related to work. This is especially true for the modern period, both from the initial appearance of capitalism and industrialism, and in the twentieth-century efforts of states to engineer and better control economic development. The Soviet Union and other socialist states, for example, transformed the cycle of annual holidays celebrated by their populations with the intent of spreading political ideology and increasing economic productivity and efficiency. While there is a small but rich literature about the surprising effects of these policies, there has been no sustained study of post-Soviet or post-socialist transformations in ritual cycles and their connection to changing economic practices and ideologies. This paper represents a preliminary attempt to analyze the impacts of capitalism, nationalism, and religious revival as influences on transformations in the ritual cycle of post-socialist Moldova.

The text examines artist Tanja Ostojic's interdisciplinary research project entitled Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić, in the light of feminist materialist theories, participatory art, and socio-political analysis of the former Yugoslav region. Tanja Ostojić decided to frame her project around the lives of women who share her first and last name. Ostojić's name-sisters became her collaborators as the work turned into a large-scale, long-term project involving 33 women and their personal histories. The women all share a mutual connection to the Yugoslav region that has directly or indirectly shaped their lives through its turbulent recent history. Artist's intent was to use the stories encountered by collaborating with her name-sisters as a foil to uncover and highlight the connecting personal narratives following Yugoslav wars of succession in the 1990s and in doing so point to the detrimental legacies of war and transition on women's lives. In this article, author's main argument borrows from Karen Barad's discursive-material ontology to point out that Lexicon activates a form of material feminism which functions intra-actively, in other words, in both its form and content the work recognizes that women's lives are continuously constituted and reconstituted through multiple linguistic and material formations, or through complex relationships between humans, non-humans, and various discursive and material contexts. In using materialist feminist analysis, the author argues that Lexicon gives primacy to women's agency and proposes a sustained, growing forms of resistance to the forms of post-socialist exploitation.

- Yancheva, Yana. 2013: Rock subculture in a small town – forms and strategies of identification. In: Euxeinos – Governance and Culture in the Black Sea Region, № 11/2013 – Popular Culture in Bulgaria and Romania since the 1960s, edited by Carmen Scheide, University of St.Gallen , pp. 17-27, ISSN 2296-0708.

Als das mutmaßlich folgenreichste Ereignis in der jungen Kunstwelt der Dritten Polnischen Republik ist das Gerichtsverfahren gegen Dorota Nieznalska und ihre Arbeit „Pasja“ (Passion), 2001, anzusehen. Einen nationalistischen Katholizismus begünstigende und instrumentalisierende Regionalpolitiker nahmen die auf einem Kreuz abgebildete Fotografie männlicher Genitalien, die (nur) einen Teil des Werkes darstellte, zum Anlass, um eine Beleidigung religiöser Gefühle nach § 196 des polnischen Strafgesetzbuches (StGB PL) anzuzeigen. Nieznalskas Fall wurde zum Lackmustest einer über die Kunstfreiheit hinausgehenden demokratischen Ordnung.

This paper analyses Andrzej Stasiuk’s concept of ‘Middle Europe’ in his texts from the 1990s (Dziennik okrętowy, Dukla, Opowieści galicyjskie) as they were part of a public discourse which has defined Poland`s transition after 1989. Drawing on the theoretical concept of geopoetics, this analysis demonstrates how Stasiuk’s work oscillates between East and West and creates his own ‘Middle Europe’ by displaying and utilizing ideas from the mythological concepts of Austrian Galicia (Habsburg Empire), Kresy and Sarmatia. Stasiuk’s ‘Middle Europe’ represents an attempt to overcome the East/West opposition and he relies on the cultural, collective heritage of Galicia, Kresy and Sarmatia. Stasiuk achieves this by connecting these ideas in his private geography, which features imaginary flashbacks to personal memories. Stasiuk’s ‘Middle Europe’ is an empty space which becomes a microcosm for his own imaginations and re-construction.

This article analyzes religious justifications used by contemporary Russian citizens in filing complaints addressed to the president of the Russian Federation. The concept of critical capacity postulated by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot is applied as a frame of analysis. This research permits identification of a connection between the transformation of political (presidential) discourse, which took place in 2000s, and attempts of citizens to justify their claims for justice based on Orthodox foundations. Developing a complaint mechanism promotes the reproduction of a particular way of coping with in- justice and also special grammar of argumentation based on practices of appeal of the “weaker citizen” to the “stronger state,” rather than on a dispute between equal actors. In such an approach, all regulatory normative systems involved in aligning justifications are reduced to rhetorical devices, the legitimacy of which is determined by situational political discourse. At the same time, religious rhetoric in complaints contributes to the reproduction of the absolutist model of presidential power and the merging of religiosity with political legitimacy and civic loyalty.

This article examines the political, cultural and social changes in two Latvian language textbook editions, one published in 1980 during the Soviet era, and the other in 1994 in the newly independent Republic of Latvia. The following findings stemming from the quantitative and qualitative analysis are presented: political information; cultural information; geographical information; role models and heroes; and spatial scene. The study suggests that the process of the de-Sovietisation of Latvian textbooks does not imply depolitization, since one form of political reproduction,
teaching Soviet citizenship, appears to have been entirely replaced by another form of political reproduction, Latvian citizenship.

This article argues that, in addition to other more easily recognizable meanings, U.S. brands and goods (e.g U.S. flag-patterned clothing, Nike, Hilfiger, etc) in post-Soviet Cuba are particularly valued as markers of a privileged position in a remittance economy oriented towards Miami.  The meanings of fashions, of course, change over time and have histories, which are here analyzed in relation to the Cuban vernacular term "La Yuma."

The original aim of the paper was a review of the three books, which show wider tendency of academic reflection on research and higher education in Poland. Three issues should be underlined: metareflection on academic scholarship, institutional and educational dimension of the university, social functioning of science and higher education. In Polish context all those things are related with the question of functioning of the public sector, as well as the private one, in the age of socio-political transformation after the collapse of the communism. This essay is in some way a review. However, it goes beyond descriptive level, and it asks: about legitimacy of such a profiled discerns of the academic reality? about ideological background of such a descriptions? and finally, about consequences of those projects (which – it should be emphasized – is not noticed by the authors of the books under discussion)? The following books will be taken into consideration: Anna Drapińskia, Zarządzanie relacjami na rynku usług edukacyjnych szkół wyższych, Tadeusz Wawak ed., Wyzwania zarządzania jakością w szkołach wyższych and Andrzej Rozmus and Stanisław Waltoś, eds., Kariera naukowa w Polsce. Warunki prawne, społeczne i ekonomiczne. In this essay I underlined traps of neoliberal logic of the market, which mentioned academics accept without any serious doubts, without noticing dangers to the institution of the public good, such as university. What is more, there is another side and source of those dangers for contemporary university, and they are totally unrecognized, that is bureaucratic and technocratic logic, which capture increasingly parts of academy. Hence, all those issues are situated in the core-(semi)peripheral scheme, that is based on the world(-)system theories approach. As a consequence we can observe that Polish universities are not on the straight way to the core/center, but rather in opposite direction – to the peripheries.

Purpose: Poland’s political and economic transformation after 1989 brought the logic of the neoliberal market into the educational system. These changes, however, were far from the real liberal free market and instead relied on bureaucratic and technocratic local-level apparatus as well as supranational supports (the EU). Moreover, instead of enhancing post-socialist education to bring them up to the level of the core territories, this process pushed education out to the (semi?)periphery. The purpose of the text is to present selected examples of alternative non-mainstream models of education.

Design/methodology/purpose: Elements analysed include: non/academic discourses, with particular emphasis on academic texts, media material and public debates concerning the topic in question.

Findings: Two related fields and levels ought to be distinguished: the descriptive level, focused on presenting non-mainstream educational institutions and initiatives, within the socioeconomic context of Poland’s post-socialist transformation; the normative level, with recommendations for policymakers, NGOs and educational activists.

Practical implications: Appreciation of systems parallel and alternative to the neoliberal and technocratic mainstream education system in Poland, with a view to encouraging both policymakers to recognise and develop such initiatives, and members of Polish civil society to create and participate in such forms of education.

Originality/value: Most scholars focus on mainstream education, with a number of exceptions, largely those engaged in the parallel models. This neoliberal model of education is accepted or critically examined, but its technocratic base is not recognised. This text is therefore ground-breaking in that it describes the real mechanisms of the Polish educational system in transition and provides a normative account and recommendations.

Keywords: Polish education, science and higher education, parallel models of education, non-mainstream educational institutions, post-socialist transition/transformation, neoliberalism.

Article Classification: research paper

The Forgotten Pioneer Movement Guidebook is a companion volume to the interdisciplinary performance and exhibition project of the same name that reconsiders perspectives on the (post-)socialist experience. 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Forgotten Pioneer Movement engages with the last generation to grow up in the final phase of the cold war, during perestroika and in the ‘pOst-Western’ Europe of the 1990s. As a fictional movement, TFPM probes forms of cultural memory and examines the social perspectives of this generation. The Guidebook to the project explores strategies and discourses from visual as well as performative arts, history and cultural theory in order to approach the “future behind us” described by art historian Edit András as a pan-European experience independent of geopolitical classifications. On 120 pages, theoretical and artistic contributions create new connections between that remote future and the present.

During the first decade of post-socialist transformation in Eastern Europe, the majority of educa- tion reform projects focused on in-service teacher education. Governments, international agencies and non-governmental organizations prioritized various in-service teacher education programs to help teachers deal with rapid changes in schools. This has consequently created a gap between school teachers, who had multiple in-service development opportunities, and pre-service teacher educators, who were largely left out of the reform processes. Using Latvia as a case study, this article examines one of the first efforts to create professional development opportunities for a group of pre-service teacher educators and explains how this short-term project had contributed to re-conceptualizing professional development for the participants involved in the initiative. Based on document analysis and in-depth interviews with 18 teacher educators, this article: examines the motives behind ongoing, voluntary professional development experiences among pre-service teacher educators; discusses the nature and characteristics of this unique initiative; and contextualizes the theory and practice of professional development of pre-service teacher educators in a post-socialist context.

In Central Asia, the post-Soviet transformation period has been accompanied by significant economic and social costs, including the widening of the gender gaps in politics, economy and the social sphere. Tajikistan, which receives the largest amount of international aid and has the worst record of gender inequity in Central Asia, has quickly responded to the worsening situation by introducing quotas favoring female representation in politics, labor market and education. This article examines the context within which international gender equity norms were introduced in the 1990s as well as the factors that account for the variation in implementation of these policies. By using the case study of Tajikistan, this article suggests that the introduction of policies favoring female participation in political, economic and social life has largely depended on the transfer of international discourses on gender equality, while their implementation has been halted by historical legacies, economic realities and local political factors.