Networking The Bloc

The story of the experimental zeitgeist in Eastern European art, seen through personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Throughout the 1970s, a network of artists emerged to bridge the East-West divide, and the no less rigid divides between the countries of the Eastern bloc. Originating with a series of creative initiatives by artists, art historians, and critics and centered in places like Budapest, Poznań, and Prague, this experimental dialogue involved Western participation but is today largely forgotten in the West. In Networking the Bloc, Klara Kemp-Welch vividly recaptures this lost chapter of art history, documenting an elaborate web of artistic connectivity that came about through a series of personal encounters, pioneering dialogues, collaborative projects, and cultural exchanges. Countering the conventional Cold War narrative of Eastern bloc isolation, Kemp-Welch shows how artistic ideas were relayed among like-minded artists across ideological boundaries and national frontiers. Much of the work created was collaborative, and personal encounters were at its heart. Drawing on archival documents and interviews with participants, Kemp-Welch focuses on the exchanges and projects themselves rather than the personalities involved. Each of the projects she examines relied for its realization on a network of contributors. She looks first at the mobilization of the network, from 1964 to 1972, exploring five pioneering cases: a friendship between a Slovak artist and a French critic, an artistic credo, an exhibition, a conceptual proposition, and a book. She then charts a series of way stations for experimental art from the Soviet bloc between 1972 and 1976—points of distribution between studios, private homes, galleries, and certain cities. Finally, she investigates convergences—a succession of shared exhibitions and events in the second half of the 1970s in locations ranging from Prague to Milan to Moscow. Networking the Bloc, Kemp-Welch invites us to rethink the art of the late Cold War period from Eastern European perspectives.

Imaging and Mapping Eastern Europe puts images centre stage and argues for the agency of the visual in the construction of Europe’s east as a socio-political and cultural entity. This book probes into the discontinuous processes of mapping the eastern European space and imaging the eastern European body. Beginning from the Renaissance maps of Sarmatia Europea, it moves onto the images of women in ethnic dress on the pages of travellers’ reports from the Balkans, to cartoons of children bullied by dictators in the satirical press, to Cold War cartography, and it ends with photos of protesting crowds on contemporary dust jackets. Studying the eastern European ‘iconosphere’ leads to the engagement with issues central for image studies and visual culture: word and image relationship, overlaps between the codes of othering and self-fashioning, as well as interaction between the diverse modes of production specific to cartography, travel illustrations, caricature, and book cover design. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, and central Asian, Russian and Eastern European studies.

'Epic... Wilson writes captivatingly with humour...anyone with an interest in eastern European sport will be consulting this book for years to come' FINANCIAL TIMES 'This fascinating and perceptive travelogue includes a fine collection of anecdotes too colourful for fiction' SUNDAY TIMES 'A blissful book, lovingly and stylishly written' DAILY TELEGRAPH From the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo, where turning up for training involved dodging snipers' bullets, to the crumbling splendour of Budapest's Bozsik Stadium, where the likes of Puskás and Kocsis masterminded the fall of England, the landscape of Eastern Europe has changed immeasurably since the fall of communism. Jonathan Wilson has travelled extensively behind the old Iron Curtain, viewing life beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall through the lens of football. Where once the state-controlled teams of the Eastern bloc passed their way with crisp efficiency - a sort of communist version of total football - to considerable success on the European and international stages, today the beautiful game in the East has been opened up to the free market, and throughout the region a sense of chaos pervades. The threat of totalitarian interference no longer remains; but in its place mafia control is generally accompanied with a crippling lack of funds. In BEHIND THE CURTAIN Jonathan Wilson goes in search of the spirit of Hungary's 'Golden Squad' of the early fifties, charts the disintegration of the footballing superpower that was the former Yugoslavia, follows a sorry tale of corruption, mismanagement and Armenian cognac through the Caucasuses, reopens the case of Russia's greatest footballer, Eduard Streltsov, and talks to Jan Tomaszewski about an autumn night at Wembley in 1973...

This inter-disciplinary and wide-ranging study unravels the social processes of decision-making at the interface of central banks and financial market participants, and thereby raises important questions about responsible central bank governance and its obligations to stakeholders in society. The book challenges commonly held assumptions on how central banking works and critically assesses unconventional monetary policy and its underlying theoretical tenets. Drawing from rich, multi-sited fieldwork and data collection, this research monograph offers an in-depth look into the financial market practices around the quantitative easing programmes of the European Central Bank and focuses on the uneasy role of modern central banks as active market participants. The author introduces concepts from social network theory and develops a novel method to study organisational networks in the context of financial markets. An analysis of the European Central Bank’s social, organisational and financial networks is sketched over the course of multiple chapters. The concluding chapters dive into documentary analysis and the extensive material from qualitative interviews with senior investment professionals about the strategies and adaptive processes around the lived experience of quantitative easing. The winner of the British Sociological Association’s prestigious Philip Abrams Memorial Prize, this book is a vital resource for social scientists researching organisations in financial markets, providing theory, concepts, empirical data and practical implications. It will be of interest to academics and graduate students in economics, sociology and management/organisation studies, as well as practitioners at central banks and in asset management.

Since the publication of Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology in 1875, the use of social structure as a defining concept has produced a large body of creative speculations, insights, and intuitions about social life. However, writers in this tradition do not always provide the sorts of formal definitons and propositions that are the building blocks of modern social research. In its broad-ranging examination of the kind of data that form the basis for the systematic study of social structure, Research Methods in Social Network Analysis marks a significant methodological advance in network studies. As used in this volume, social structure refers to a bundle of intuitive natural language ideas and concepts about patterning in social relationships among people. In contrast, social networks is used to refer to a collection of precise analytic and methodological concepts and procedures that facilitate the collection of data and the systematic study of such patterning. Accordingly, the book's five sections are arranged to address analytical problems in a series of logically ordered stages or processes. The major contributors define the fundamental modes by which social structural phenomena are to be represented; how boundaries to a social structure are set; how the relations of a network are measured in terms of structure and content; the ways in which the relational structure of a network affects system actors; and how actors within a social network are clustered into cliques or groups. The chapters in the last section build on solutions to problems proposed in the previous sections. This highly unified approach to research design combined with a representative diversity of viewpoints makes Research Methods in Social Network Analysis a state-of-the-art volume.

This is an ethnographic account of how the anti-corporate globalization movement uses new technologies to organise itself, written by a participant im many of the biggest demonstrations of recent years. In addition to this, Juris provides a history of the movement and traces its roots.

While contributing to social inequality and environmental degradation, recent global transformations have also strengthened civil society groups opposing these trends. Yet, as they need to transform the existing social order from within, groups struggling for social justice face various strategic dilemmas. The articles in this volume examine these dilemmas and discuss possible solutions. Issues addressed include North-South disparities in what has been called "global civil society", and the precarious division of labor between local grassroots organizers and transnational coalition-builders.

Desperate to escape South Texas, Stephanie Elizondo Griest dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent. So she headed to Russia looking for some excitement—commencing what would become a four-year, twelve-nation Communist bloc tour that shattered her preconceived notions of the “Evil Empire.” In Around the Bloc, Griest relates her experiences as a volunteer at a children’s shelter in Moscow, a propaganda polisher at the office of the Chinese Communist Party’s English-language mouthpiece in Beijing, and a belly dancer among the rumba queens of Havana. She falls in love with an ex-soldier who narrowly avoided radiation cleanup duties at Chernobyl, hangs out with Cuban hip-hop artists, and comes to difficult realizations about the meaning of democracy. is the absorbing story of a young journalist driven by a desire to witness the effects of Communism. Along the way, she learns the Russian mathematical equation for buying dinner-party vodka (one bottle per guest, plus an extra), stumbles upon Beijing’s underground gay scene, marches with 100,000 mothers demanding Elián González’s return to Cuba, and gains a new appreciation for the Mexican culture she left behind.