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Panel, 6th Congress Polish Studies
Caring in Transformation: State Care, Self-Care & Cash-for-Care


16/03/2024 - 14:00
TU Dresden, Hörsaalzentrum Bergstraße, HSZ 103

Description of the event

The section explores upheavals and new beginnings of care provision in Poland and her neighboring societies since the 1980s. The various long postsocialist transformation processes brought about accelerated change of care values and/or practices of care. The state socialist welfare regimes transformed into activating welfare states in which care-giving (and receiving) increasingly followed market mechanisms and relied more and more on self-care. As the transformation process created blank spaces in terms of institutional infrastructures and responsibilities for those who needed care, new visions and practices of care had to be elicited and tested. The adaption of care regimes to postsocialist realities involved, for instance, creating new functions and structures of institutional care and adapting to them, re-defining ‘good care’, as well as coping with new notions and requirements of self-care.
The contributions assembled in this section examine how the various postsocialist societies coped (and continue to cope) with the challenges and opportunities in the field of care, by scrutinizing various experiences of state care, self-care and cash-for-care provision. Moreover, the section aims at an internationally comparative perspective on care which sheds light on distinct and/or shared experiences of care by engaging with care workers, service providers, people in need of care (children, older people or others), as well as decision-makers in the postsocialist care economies.

Chaired by PD Dr. habil. Friederike Kind-Kovács, Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies, TU Dresden

Contributions:

Dr. Aleksandra Oniszczuk, Warsaw:
New Approaches to Institutional Care in the Early 20th Century

Prof. Dr. Małgorzata Mazurek, New York:
Unplanned Society: Family Self-welfare and the Waning of Communist Poland (1976–1989)

Dr. Maren Hachmeister, Dresden:
In States of Upheaval: Care for Older People in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship and the North Bohemian Regions (1980s–1990s)

Prof. Dr. Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, Kraków:
Great Expectations. New Visions of Childhood and the Transformation of the Orphaned Child and Child-in-Need Care System in Poland in the 1980s–1990s

Dr. Till Hilmar, Vienna:
Health care workers’ memories of economic change in post-1989 East Germany and Czechia

Comment: Prof. Dr. Kornelia Kończal, University of Bielefeld


This project is co-financed by tax funds using the budget approved by the Landtag of the Free State of Saxony.

Photo: Filip Kwiatek, Starsza kobieta z dzieckiem przy łóżku (1971) [Ältere Frau mit Kind neben dem Bett]. Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (NAC), zespół Archiwum Grażyny Rutowskiej, sygnatura 3/40/0/17/50/15

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Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (NAC), Bild 3/40/0/17/50/15