Talk
Television Pedagogy, Economic Transformation and the Building of a Middle-Class Imagination in 1990s Czech Republic and Slovakia

This talk seeks to address how media participated in building one of the key expectations of the postsocialist economic transformations: the creation of a strong middle class. Although after 1989, talk of social class was deemed an anachronistic relic of the socialist era by many policy and opinion-makers in Eastern Europe, one particular social class did feature prominently in the ideological project of market and liberal democratic reform. The middle class functioned in period discourse not only as an economic and social category, but also as a cultural goal: a symbol of prosperity-to-come, a central aspiration and promise of a return to “normality”. This talk argues that television in the 1990s became a powerful cultural medium for the didactic project of explaining to viewers central concepts of the market economy. Based on archival materials from Czech and Slovak public television, it shows how educational programmes fostered a middle-class imagination through “normalizing” market mechanisms and privileging the figure of the entrepreneur as a role model of the new era. These programmes can thus be read as putting into practice the “liberal pedagogy” of the transformation project. But while much of the literature on middle-class imaginaries in the postsocialist region has focused on urban cosmopolitans, this presentation will analyse the role of media in cultivating a small-town and rural entrepreneurial class, which constituted an important, though nowadays overlooked, element of Czechoslovak transformational pedagogy.

Veronika Pehe is a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she leads the Research Group for Historical Transformation Studies. Her work concerns popular culture, memory and memory politics and the history of the economic transformations in the postsocialist region. She is the author of Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture (2020) and editor, together with Joanna Wawrzyniak, of Remembering the Neoliberal Turn: Economic Change and Collective Memory in Eastern Europe After 1989 (2023).

The talk is part of the HAIT Lecture Series Lost (in) Transformation: Answers from the Recent Past to Challenges of Today in the winter semester and the Dresden-Prague Talks. Andreas Kötzing will moderate the talk.

The Lecture Series takes place in TIL 110 and hybrid via Zoom.

If you would like to attend, please register by the Monday before the event at: hait@tu-dresden.de, stating your full name. The registration link will be sent to you separately a few days before the start of the event.

Diese Maßnahme ist mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushalts.