New Event with the DSA International Committee →

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Join us on International Women’s Day for a fascinating discussion!

Speakers:

Prof. Agnieszka Kościańska, author of Gender, Pleasure, and Violence: The Construction of Expert Knowledge of Sexuality in Poland (Indiana University Press 2021). Visiting Professor at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw.

Prof. Kateřina Lišková, Masaryk University, Czechia, and author of Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Prof. Kristen Ghodsee, University of Pennsylvania, author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books, 2018).

Moderated by Dr. Polina Aronson (Germany/Russia), freelance Journalist is a sociologist and the debate editor of openDemocracy Russia. She was born in St Petersburg and lives in Berlin. She is working on a book about perceptions of love in Russia and in the West.

Sponsored by Democratic Socialists of America International Committee Europe Subcommittee, DSA SocFem Working Group, and Lux magazine.

Anatomy of a Zoom background

So now that I am teaching again and appearing on a lot of podcasts with video components, I have had a lot of questions about the room (my home office) that I sit in when I am in front of my computer’s camera. I will have to admit that I thought about buying one of those room dividers or a green screen, but in the end I decided to clean up the space and decorate my bookshelves with some of my favorite things. A few notable items in the background:

Two of my favorite typewriters on top of the bookshelves: my 1930s Urania QWETZ typewriter from Dresden on the right and my 1950s Model T Groma typewriter (from the former GDR) on the left. There is a bust of David on the floor (who will beat the Goliath of capitalism eventually), hiding some storage boxes hidden between the corners of the bookshelves. There is a framed and signed photo of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, given to me by the late Elena Lagadinova, as well as an unframed photo of Alexandra Kollontai. I still have my original Rubik’s Cube from the 1980s (designed by a Hungarian architect during the Cold War) and a variety of books on various utopian movements and ideologies. On my walls are a poster of the Acropolis in Athens and the Oxford Cartographers World History Timeline that I have often lectured and written about. The big plant behind me is a fake one that adds a little depth to the room.

It’s not the most exciting background, but I feel like it is at least visually more interesting than a paper screen.

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