Trans/Socio: Transnational Sociology and Concepts of Social Expertise in Eastern Europe, 1970s–2000s is an intellectual history and digital humanities interdisciplinary project that sets out to recover the history of Eastern European socialist sociologists’ contribution at the conceptual toolkit of social expertise
beyond their respective national contexts beginning in the 1970s. Rather than a study of technocratic socialism in any one country or a comparison between state socialist contexts, it focuses on the involvement of socialist sociologists: 1) within a regional cooperation project between academies of science in Eastern Europe; 2) at the
transregional, East–West research institute known as the Vienna Center; and 3) within UNESCO’s International Sociological Association (ISA) and Social Science Department.
The project’s main hypothesis is that through their involvement in transnational
epistemic networks, socialist sociologists contributed substantially at defining the global social challenges of their time and a European vision of social justice and solidarity for the future. TransSocio asks what came of this vision
in Eastern Europe after 1989.
This is a history worth recovering as a counterpart to the current crisis of (social)
expertise; as an illustration of the challenges of professional and conceptual integration at the European and international levels; and as a resource for strengthening the role of social expertise, the public trust in science, and
transnational social solidarity at a moment of renewed crisis due to pandemic, war, and economic austerity.
The research focuses on archival sources in Amsterdam, Paris, and several countries in Eastern Europe, as well as oral history interviews with sociologists involved in transnational projects before 1989. It aims to map Eastern European sociologists’ involvement in transnational epistemic networks and elucidate their contribution at conceptualizing the main global social issues of their time (e.g., social inequality; education of youth; role of technology) before and after 1989.
Trans/Socio will create an open repository of sources for interdisciplinary research: a database of Eastern European sociologists active beyond their national settings in the state socialist period; a corpus of machine-readable publications resulting from their transnational involvement; and a collection of oral history interviews with sociologists from Eastern Europe involved in the production of transnational social expertise.
Trans/Socio is funded by the EU through HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01 (project id 101106513), and is led by dr. Adela Hîncu, under the supervision of dr. Darja Fišer, at the Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana.