Colloquium at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS)

We presented the findings from our project, focusing on how experts communicated with one another, the state, and ordinary citizens. We compared the developments across countries and disciplines, emphasizing transnational knowledge circulation. Our findings highlighted strong and relatively uninterrupted socialist expert connections to the West and a marginal Soviet influence, especially on medicine; a shared post-Stalinist rise and subsequent strong influence of psychology in all our countries; lively debates and even disputes between experts within our region; divergences in the developments in social sciences shaped by specific national political contexts; and strong emancipatory accents on women’s work and equal marriage in socialist medical expertise. Making this “expert turn” brought a novel understanding of governance in modern, yet authoritarian societies.