POLITICAL CORRECTNESS AND LANGUAGE OF THE MEDIA – BEFORE 1989 AND NOWADAYS

Elena Krejčová, Associate professor, Masaryk University in Brno (Czechia)

Wednesday, 12 February – 6 pm to 8 pm

Location: Alumni Hall, 121 St Joseph Street, Room 400

More information and registration at:  https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ceres/event/28549/

Main Sponsor: Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

 

Elena Krejčová is Associate Professor at the Department of Slavic studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno (Czechia). She studied Czech Studies, Bulgarian Studies, English and American Studies at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski (Bulgaria), and completed her doctoral studies at Masaryk university in Brno (1999). Her main areas of research include political linguistics, sociolinguistics, contrastive linguistics of Slavic languages, theory of translation. Elena Krejčová is the author of monographs Slavonic Babylon (2016), Quo Vadis, Philologia? (2017), The Power of Public Speech (2017) and author of dictionaries Czech- Bulgarian Law Dictionary (2015) and Czech-Bulgarian Specialized Dictionary of Legal, Economic and Socio-political Terminology (2016).

Political correctness as a way of forming the principles of communication and in particular the verbal behaviour is very strongly connected with the period of totalitarianism in the countries of the former socialist block (including Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, etc.). The idea of “right” and “wrong”, i.e. unacceptable speaking, thinking, behavior that is treated as a crime, the battle of ideas and ideologies is well presented in media as a tool of propaganda before 1989, this close relation between communication and political systems was a part of the state policy. What happened after 1989 – did we finally gain freedom of speech? Media after the “Velvet revolution” changed a lot – from the feeling of freedom with no restrictions that ended up to vulgarization of language to the new requirements in society to treat people without prejudice and discrimination.

 

 

EVERYDAY FUNCTIONING OF THE CENTRALLY PLANNED ECONOMY IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Libor Zidek, Masaryk University

 

Friday, March 27 – 10 am to 12 pm

Munk School, 1 Devonshire Place, room 108N

More information and registration at: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ceres/event/28274/

Main Sponsor: Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies

Libor Žídek, Associate Professor, has lectured at the Faculty of Economics and Administration at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, since 1997. He specializes in economic transformation with a particular focus on the Czech economy. He also has a keen interest in planned economy, particularly in Czechoslovakia and generally in economic history. His doctoral thesis focused on the impact of globalization on economic policy and his habilitation thesis on the transformation process in the Czech Republic. He teaches courses on World Economic History, Economic Transformation and Macroeconomics. He has lectured on the topics of central planning and transformation in a number of countries, including the USA, Canada, Japan, Germany, the UK, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, and Jamaica. He has presented at conferences and published several books and a number of chapters and journal papers.

The main goal of the talk is to give an idea about everyday economic reality in the socialist totalitarian system. It is partially based on results of our unique research – interviews with top-managers from the 1970s and 1980s. It generally breaks the common view that individual companies (at the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid) without hesitation followed the orders of the centre. The everyday reality was more complicated and foremost full of paradoxes, pretense and negotiations. The practice was far remote from textbook theory dealing with central planning.