February 23, 2023: Visegrad Scholarship at OSA Presentations

We are happy to announce the next presentations of the Visegrad Scholarship at OSA. Join the event online following the link below!

The presentation will be held at 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 23, 2023, online. The Zoom link of the meeting is: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/98686410018?pwd=UDJSM0d1amtkYTFmU0tmbUZuZ0Z4QT09

This project explores the history and legacy of Cold War (Neo)Liberalism through the Records of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (RFE/RL RI). Historians have argued that (Neo)Liberalism inoculated capital from politics by establishing supranational regulatory institutions. And yet, media institutions have been left out of recent histories even though these organizations had a central role in defining and disseminating (Neo)Liberalism. As one of the leading Cold War media institutions, RFE/RL has attracted ample scholarly attention, but its role in shaping Cold War (Neo)Liberalism is curiously absent.

By looking at the RFE/RL RI’s Audience Research and Evaluation Department, and the Free Europe Committee President’s Office files, this project presents various imbrications between (neo)liberal thought and RFE/RL’s operations. Perhaps most relevantly, the presentation shows how RFE/RL and (neo)liberal thinkers simultaneously based their work on fighting their ideological enemies as well as on redefining politics in the West. As such, this research shows how media organizations contributed to the (Neo)Liberal project decades before its ascendency in the 1980s and 1990s.

The development of criminology has been highly influenced by the evolution of the country’s political and social system in the Socialist era. This presentation aims to address how police training evolved in the Socialist Bloc through audiovisual training methods; how educational videos were produced in order to standardize investigative skills; and what analog investigation tools were used to pursue crime and criminals. The research is based on the Records of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (RFE/RL RI) and on the educational videos made by the Hungarian Ministry of Interior.

These archives are suitable to analyze how the police perceived the strata of the society and how the Socialist world looked like through the eyes of a police department. The research also addresses the media representation of crimes with particular reference to a unique Hungarian innovation, the crime magazine of the Socialist era. Based on an interactive documentary project and in particular on my research at the Blinken OSA Archivum, I will focus on how law enforcement was implemented during the Socialist period from a citizen’s perspective.