For our third public talk in the Sociobord lecture series we welcome Professors Karolina Lendák-Kabók, Hanna Lindberg and John Paul Newman. Together, this multidisciplinary trio will discuss a forthcoming special issue of the European Review of History on which all three are collaborating. Co-edited by Profs Lendàk and Lindberg, the special issue explores past and present patterns of welfare provision in the European border regions of Finland and Yugoslavia, with a special focus on ethnic and social minorities. Contributing author Newman will join Lendák and Lindberg in discussing some of the central questions that organize this special issue, including: How have different systems of social welfare addressed issues of ethnic heterogeneity? In which ways have different providers of social welfare contributed to the social inclusion or exclusion of minorities? How has the recognition of minority rights affected the distribution and organization of social welfare? How has the development of welfare contributed to the emergence of new social minorities constructed around disability and medical status? The answers to these questions will help us to better understand the ways in which social welfare and minorities have both constituted and responded to one another, and to see how these interactions have shaped the borders defining minorities and welfare.
Karolina Lendák-Kabók is an Assistant Professor at the Study program of Social Work, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Serbia. She earned her PhD in Gender Studies in 2019. Her research interests include intersectionality, ethnic minorities, language rights and gender differences in academia. She has edited a book of essays with ethnic minority Hungarian women living in Serbia, titled Üvegplafon? Vajdasági magyar (értelmiségi) noi perspekívák [Glass Ceiling?, Hungarian (Intellectual)
Women’s Perspectives in Vojvodina], Novi Sad: Forum, 2020. She is currently working on a monograph on ethnicminorities in Serbian academia and the role of gender and language barriers, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2022.
Hanna Lindberg is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX), Tampere University. She is specialized in the history of welfare, minorities, disability, and gender in the Nordic countries during the 20th century. In her current project she studies the minority formation and activism among Finland-Swedish deaf people in the 20th century. She has previously published works on the construction of gender in academic social policy and the history of scientific writing in Finland, and currently acts as editor-in-chief of the journal Finsk Tidskrift.
John Paul Newman is Assistant Professor in Twentieth-century European History at Maynooth University. He completed his PhD at the University of Southampton and was an ERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the project ‘Paramilitary Violence after the Great War (2008-2011).’ His research focuses on the modern history of the Balkans and East-Central Europe (Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Czechoslovakia), war veterans, paramilitary violence, victorious societies and cultures of war victory in twentieth century Europe and the intersections of national and imperial identities in nineteenth-century Central Europe. Professor Newman is the author of the monograph Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War 1903-1945: Veterans and the Limits of State Building (2018), and co-editor of several collective volumes.