1989 and the Great Transformation

Drawing on her chapter "Sexuality and Science" in the Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation, Kateřina Lišková will discuss with other authors how expertise in medicine and the human sciences was not merely reshaped by the changes the volume describes, but actively drove them. The conversation explores how scientific and medical expert knowledge produced transformations of its own, reshaping bodies, institutions, and everyday life, and asks what such changes meant for ordinary people — moving beyond simple narratives of winners and losers. Participants reflect on where 1989 fits into this longer arc stretching from the 1970s to the Covid pandemic, and why East Central Europe is central rather than peripheral for understanding the contemporary world. The discussion also examines the stakes of replacing the older language of "transition" — with its implied promise of straightforward progress toward a Western model — with the more open-ended, and more honest, vocabulary of transformation.