Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on New Trends in Social Sciences
Year: 2023
DOI:
[PDF]
Images of Everyday Life in The Period of Late Socialism
Klara Kohoutová, Lucia Heldáková
ABSTRACT:
Everydayism is one of the accepted perspectives on history that provides new and often neglected interpretations of historical events. As an object of research, the everyday is very difficult to delimit and its meaning is still not uniformly defined. Although research on everyday life in the socialist period is at first sight an interesting topic, it is not yet sufficiently theoretically grounded in the Czech or Slovak environment. In recent decades, especially the younger generation of scholars has pointed out that the period of socialism should not be studied exclusively from a black-and-white perspective (oppressed society versus repressive regime), because of the different experiences in different countries or regions, which may give rise to ambivalent interpretations. We see the contribution of research on everyday life during the period of (late) socialism in Czechoslovakia as being particularly in the interaction between official ideology, its lineage, personal experiences and how people adopted these lineages. At the same time, as a new way of understanding the historical realities of the communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia. The aim of the poster is to present the project Current Images of socialism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia – family memory. Project is a basic and, to a large extent, a rescue, qualitative research aimed at mapping the phenomenon of remembering in contemporary society. The importance of this qualitative research lies not in the factual plausibility of the information obtained, but in how the past is portrayed in the present. This poster is the first output of the project and at the same time has the character of a theoretical and methodological anchoring of the chosen topic.
keywords: Czechoslovakia, everyday life, family memory, oral history, socialism