Redefining the Common Good After Communism

Redefining the Common Good After Communism
Abstracts

Schedule

Redefining the Common Good After Communism
A Conference on International Worker’s Day to mark the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
Friday May 1, 2009
Bowdoin College – Maine Lounge, Moulton Union

8:30 – Opening Remarks and Welcome by Cristle Collins Judd

8:45 – Program information and logistics by Kristen Ghodsee and Laura Henry

9:00 -10:30 – SESSION ONE:

The Return of the State: Protecting the “Common Good.”

  • Presenter:  Julie Hemment, Associate Professor of Anthropology – U Mass Amherst: “Common Good/Common Bad: Redefining Social Entitlements and the Deserving in Putin’s Russia
  • Presenter: James Richter, Professor of Politics – Bates College  : “The Ministry of Civil Society”
  • Presenter:  Linda J. Cook – Professor of Political Science – Brown University  : “Oil Wealth and Welfare in the Russian Federation”
  • Discussant: Laura Henry – Assistant Professor of Government – Bowdoin College  

Redefining the Common Good after Communism
 The ideal communist man and woman.  Relief on a community center in Madan, Bulgaria)
Photo by: Kristen Ghodsee

10:45 am – 12:15 pm SESSION TWO:

Popular Ideas of the Common Good in Putin’s Russia

  • Presenter: Valerie Sperling – Associate Professor of Government – Clark University: “"Protecting the Russian Common Good...in France: Russia and the European Court of Human Rights."
  • Presenter: Doug Rogers – Assistant Professor of Anthropology – Yale University: “Corporate Social Responsibility, Russian Style: Defining and Funding the ‘Common Good’ in the Urals”
  • Presenter: Nancy Ries – Professor of Anthropology – Colgate University : “The Moral in the Grotesque: Russian Social Imaginaries and the Postsocialist Order”
  • Discussant: Page Herrlinger – Associate Professor of History – Bowdoin College

12:15- 1:30 – Lunch

1:30 pm – 3:00 pm SESSION THREE

Class, the Market, and the Common Good

  • Presenter:  Elaine Weiner - Associate Professor of Sociology – McGill University : “The Inequality in Equality: (Anti-)Discrimination, Economics and the Law in the Czech Republic”
  • Presenter: Olga Shevchenko – Assistant Professor of Sociology – Williams College: “The State Owes Me Nothing, and I Owe Nothing to the State: The Lived Experience of Postsocialism and Neoliberal Rhetoric in Russia
  • Presenter: Pamela Ballinger - Associate Professor of Anthropology - Bowdoin College: “Reconstructed Hope: Tourism and the Limits of Hope in Post Yugoslav Croatia”
  • Discussant: Kristen Ghodsee – Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies – Bowdoin College

3:15 pm – 4:45 pm SESSION FOUR

Living the Common Good after Communism

  • Presenter:  Zsuzsa Gille – Assistant Professor of Sociology – University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, "The Hungarian Foie Gras Boycott: Struggles for Moral Sovereignty in Postsocialist Europe"
  • Presenter:  Laura Henry – Assistant Professor of Government – Bowdoin College: “Redefining Citizenship in Russia”
  • Presenter: Kristen Ghodsee – Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies – Bowdoin College   – “Minarets After Marx: Saudi Islam and Promise of  Social Justice in Bulgaria”
  • Discussant: Pam Ballinger – Associate Professor of Anthropology – Bowdoin College

5:30 pm – 7:00 pm – Dinner

7:30 pm Keynote speech

Ronald Suny, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Chicago , “Capitalism and the Common Good:  What’s Left of Marx?”


Redefining the Common Good after Communism
 Fighting for the bright communist future in Bulgaria.   Photo by: Kristen Ghodsee