Public Keynote by Luminiţa Gatejel: Car Culture in State Socialist and Post-Socialist Countries
The public keynote speech "Looking Back at More Than Two Decades of (Post)Socialist Car Culture and Why We Can’t Let It Go!" by Luminiţa Gatejel will take place on Nov. 8, 2024, at 11:00 a.m. in the room M-225. This talk is a part of the academic workshop “History and Present of the Socialist Car Culture” at Tallinn University, November 8-10, 2024.
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iCal calendarThis talk will give a short overview of the literature dealing with automobiles and car culture in state socialist and post-socialist countries. It will emphasize the wide-range interdisciplinary approaches coming from consumer, mobility and STS studies that blended in most studies. It will reflect on the merits of focusing on a specific cultural space when dealing with broad phenomena that many societies share. Further, it will examine official policies as well as social interactions and personal experiences concerning car ownership, driving and repair practices or (informal) economic exchanges with and around automobiles.
Luminiţa Gatejel is a senior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. She received her PhD from the University of Tübingen and was a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She has published extensively on the history of automobility, everyday life, and consumption in the Eastern Bloc. Her latest book is Engineering the Lower Danube: Technology and International Cooperation in an Imperial Borderland, published in 2022 with Central European University Press.