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SAVA Research Week: Greening Socialism: Women Eco-Activisms I

28 November 2024, 4:00 pm–5:30 pm

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The SAVA (Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts) Research Week is back!

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Maja and Reuben Fowkes

Location

IAS Common Ground, G11
ground floor, South Wing, Wilkins Building
UCL, Gower St, London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom

This panel brings together reflections on women’s environmental activism in public space under socialism and post-socialism, with a presentation by art historian Doubravka Olšáková on the late 1980s informal group of Prague Mothers in Prague and a talk by artist, curator and activist Aigerim Kapar on the performative strategies of activist movements in Kazakhstan. 

Doubravka Olšáková (Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague) will present her research on the Prague Mothers, an informal group of mothers who, in the second half of the 1980s, decided to fight for a better environment for their children. They did it in the way that mothers do: dancing and singing with their children in the streets of Prague - and collecting signatures for a petition they sent to the Conference of European Environment Ministers, held in Prague in May 1989. Instead of making a political statement in their apartments like dissidents, these women chose street activism in Prague, demanding a safe and unpolluted world to live in with their children.
 

About the Speaker

Doubravka Olšáková

Senior Researcher at Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences

Doubravka Olšáková leads the Department of Global Conflicts and their Consequences at the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research is oriented towards the intersection of the history of science and environmental history. She is actively involved in academic life and acts as a member of various committees and editorial boards. She is a member of the DHST Committee on Science, Technology, and Diplomacy. In 2014, she published a book titled Science Goes to the People! (2014, in Czech) about the dissemination of science in communist Czechoslovakia and the indoctrination of the masses. In 2016 she worked as the principal editor of an edited volume In the Name of the Great Work. Stalin’s Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe (New York: Berghahn Books).