Scrapping, Repurposing, and Reappraising in East Central Europe's Industrial Centers

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel focuses on industrial centers and industrial practices in transition. It contrasts the material inertia of these spaces and the materials inhabiting them with the ways in which the values and narratives attached to these spaces and objects changed. Each of the papers insists upon the highly networked and internationalized character of these sites, in each instance outside of the capitals of socialist states and in their “peripheries.” Together, the papers shed light on economics, labor history, materiality, and transformation from below.

Sub Unit

• History: 1945-1990

Chair

• James Allen Nealy, U of Texas at San Antonio

Papers

• Agents of Internationalization: Industry, Trade, and Travel in Postwar Poland - Agata Zysiak, U of Vienna (Austria)

• A Farewell to Arms: Disassembling Czechoslovakia’s Weapons Industry, 1989-1994 - Rosamund Therese Johnston, U of Vienna (Austria)

• Scrapyard Politics: Dismantling the Ruins of Nazi War Infrastructure to Industrialize Poland, 1945-1948 - Karolina Partyga, Columbia U

Discussants

• James Allen Nealy, U of Texas at San Antonio

• Victor Petrov, U of Tennessee