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Sociology of State Socialism

Class at Faculty of Social Sciences |
JSM483

Syllabus

The course will be taught again in the academic year 2011/2012!!!

Course Calendar. see http://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=943 for updated schedule

Week 1: Introductory class - What Was Socialism? (Hájek)

Week 2: Historical Sketch of Socialist Era in Czechoslovakia (Gjuričová)

Week 3: Communist Overturn in the Post-war Era (Kabele)

Week 4: Gender Order of Socialist Society (Havelková)

Week 5: Cadre politics as a part of socialist project of the "new" society and sociability. Ideas and practice (Černá)

Week 6: The Countryside in the Socialist Era (Kandert)

Week 7: Hierarchies of Czech Socialist Society (Hájek)

Week 8: The propaganda in the state socialist television (Reifová)

Week 9: Opposition Movements (Gjuričová)

Week 10: Semiotics of State Socialism (Hájek)

Week 11: A Stability of Czech Socialism (Kabele)

Week 12: Rector's Day - no class

Week 13: Film projection

Text, Readings, Materials.

On the Moodle site: http://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=943

Annotation

The course will be taught again in the academic year 2011/2012!!!

Course Description. see http://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=943

Although the real socialism was the dominant social structure in Central and Eastern Europe for almost half a century, in the university curricula it has received only a marginal attention and almost exclusively of historiographical or political nature. In addition, if a sociological perspective is applied to the state socialism then is directed mainly to areas of everyday life, rather than on social organization as such.

In a large part, the course is based on our own sociological and anthropological studies of state socialism, which where carried out in 2000-2005 and the results have been widely published (including the recent publication Kabele J. and M.

Hájek: Jak vládli. 2008). The course links researchers from several disciplines (sociology, anthropology, history / political science) and, if possible, achieves a multi-layered perspective on the phenomenon.

The target group are mainly foreign students studying at Charles University with the aim to provide them with knowledge of relatively broad issues of social organization of state socialism in our country. The course should be attractive to that part of social-oriented students who are interested in understanding both the specific forms of political organization and the historical context of Czech society a culture.