54th ASEEES Annual Convention 2022

Kateřina Lišková, Natalia Jarska, Annina Gagyiova, and José L.A. López Barajas presented at the conference 54th ASEEES Annual Convention which took place from 10th to 13th November 2022 in Chicago.

Mothers and children in state-socialist East-Central Europe: An expert view.

Mothers and children reproduce society in both physical and symbolic sense. Yet, it is often women as (future) mothers and (their) children who find themselves in precarious situations. Our panel analyzed state-socialist medical, pedagogical and psychological expertise, which studied women as bearers of healthy pregnancy and tried to identify and eliminate risk factors endangering gestation; researched newborns with the aim to increase the chances of survival for pre-term babies and thus decreasing infant mortality rates; zoomed in on the future healthy development of children as experts sought to identify and foster the “normal” child while classifying and trying to rectify “the “defective” one.

Panel was rigorously comparative: all four papers brought analyses from four East-Central European countries – East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia – over the four decades of state socialism. We analyzed scholarly journals and other expert documents, including transnational sources, e.g. the World Health Organization. The aim of this panel was to explain similarities and differences between the countries while addressing the role of gender, class and ethnicity in the shaping of expert discourses. Doing so, we analyzed expertise as central to the modernization project of state socialism.

Kateřina Lišková chaired the panel and presented the broader context for ExpertTurn research and outlined its aims and objectives. She focused on the gendered aspects of the comparative research and how it will enrich what we know about the lives of women and children under state socialism.

Natalia Jarska presented a comparative paper on the four countries, on the issue of school maturity: its assessment, the construction of “immature” and “uneducable” children between the 1950s and 1980s, as well as different ways in which these children were treated by educational systems. In the paper, I showed that although the approach towards measuring school maturity was similar, the solutions for “immature” children differed to a great extent.

José L.A. López Barajas presented a comparative paper on medical expertise and the search for the causes of prematurity in East-Central Europe. Though there were differences, for the 1950s-1970s. The paper identified a “socio-medicalization” of the pregnancy, which foregrounded the social factors as a cause of pre-term birth. In the 1980s, though, the “bio-medicalization” of pregnancy became predominant and social factors faded away.