Professor Libora Oates-Indruchova

Visiting Research Fellow

Professor Libora Oates-Indruchová

Mellon Foundation Fellow, January - March 2004; Visiting Research Fellow, January - February 2024; Nominated Fellow, January 2025

Home institution: University of Graz

Libora Oates-Indruchová is Professor of Sociology of Gender at the University of Graz (Austria). Her research interests include cultural representations of gender, gender and social change, censorship, everyday creativity and narrative research, with a focus on state-socialist and post state-socialist Czech Republic. Her publications include Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89: Snakes and Ladders (Bloomsbury 2020); “Blind Spots in Post-1989 Czech Historiography of State Socialism: Gender as a Category of Analysis” (East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 2022) and “Self-Censorship and Aesopian Language of Scholarly Texts of Late State Socialism” (The Slavonic and East European Review 96 [2018], 4: 614-641). She also co-edited The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: an Expropriated Voice (with Hana Havelková; Routledge 2014, paperback 2015; expanded Czech edition 2015) that won the 2016 BASEES Women’s Forum Book Prize.

Project title: Reception of the Greenham Common protests in the Czech press

The amount of research on the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp since it was first set up in 1981 positions this activist mobilization as a defining phenomenon of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. In the scholarship on East Central Europe there has been growing interest in the global involvement of the Eastern Bloc countries in women’s activism, but a link to the Greenham Common protests has been only little explored. My research project at the IASH aims at a comparative perspective on the media reception of women’s peace activism East and West within the tenets of Cold War politics. It further aims to contribute to the visibility of the “Second World” in gender research and theory, a perspective that is still only marginally present in the various discourses of decolonization of feminist research and the history of women’s movements. The silences and accentuations in the coverage of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the Eastern Bloc are of particular interest, as well as the contexts of the international peace movement, Cold War politics and the gender culture of late state socialism. With what agenda did the communist media report on women’s peace activism? How did the representation in the communist press differ from the presentation in the British press in that respect? I take the Czech press as an example and look at the coverage of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the main Czech dailies of the 1980s: Rudé právo (the main daily of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia) and Mladá fronta (the daily of the Union of Socialist Youth). For context, I draw on existing research on the media reporting on the Camp in the British press and on the global involvements of Communist women’s organizations in the peace movement.