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Ingress: Förintelsens minnesdag 27 januari överskuggas av ett nytt kulturkrig. Radu Harald Dinu, universitetslektor i historia vid JU, skriver om den infekterade minnespolitiska debatt som blåst upp under kriget mellan Israel och Hamas., Temarubrik: Förintelsens minnesdag.

This article explores the complex relationship between fact and fiction in Holocaust narratives, focusing on the often-overlooked realm of microhistory. By applying Gérard Genette's approach to narrative discourse, it scrutinizes Christopher R. Browning's Remembering Survival and Omer Bartov's Anatomy of a Genocide, thereby underscoring the distinction between microhistorical accounts and grand narratives. The core argument posits that microhistories, which emphasize first-person testimonies and bottom-up perspectives, introduce an additional layer of complexity to the line between fiction and nonfiction. Unlike macrohistories that center on broad social, economic, or political processes, microhistorical approaches delve into the lives of ordinary people and incorporate fictional elements to a greater extent. Consequently, the article emphasizes the significance of narrative theory in Holocaust historiography and explores the challenges of narrating the Holocaust through a microhistorical lens, which intensifies the use of fictional elements.

Within the confines of this text, I will explore the history of the deaf community in Romania during state socialism (1947-1989). The primary reason for focusing on Romania is the scarcity of historical research that delves into the experiences of non-Western deaf communities and the prevalent perceptions of deaf people among the hearing majority in Eastern Europe. The objective of this blog post is thus to discuss previously unexplored sources that provide insights into an understudied minority group. Still, one might ask why a case study on yet another Eastern European country is necessary? An incorporation of lesser-studied cases such as Romania has the potential to challenge the longstanding Cold War narrative of Eastern Europe as a monolithic block and underscores the need for differentiated perspectives. Certainly, in the post-war era, several domains, including disability research, special education, or the state-controlled associations of the deaf and the blind in socialist countries, were initially shaped by Soviet blueprints, fostering commonalities across the socialist world. However, upon closer examination, distinctions emerge that were influenced by local traditions. Romanian psychologists and special educators acknowledged their indebtedness to domestic traditions from the interwar era and combined them with Soviet models (Dinu 2022b). In other socialist countries, such as Czechoslovakia, approaches to disability also merged autochthonous traditions with Soviet influences (Henschel and Shmidt 2019)., Article published January 22, 2024, on the blog website All of Us, published by the Disability History Association.

This volume puts disability and labour at the centre of historical enquiry. It offers fresh perspectives on the history of disability and labour in the twentieth century and highlights the need to address the topic beyond regional boundaries. Bringing together historians and disability scholars from a variety of disciplines and regions, the chapters investigate various historical settings, ranging from work cooperatives to disability associations and informal workplaces, and analyse multiple meanings of labour in different political and economic systems through the lens of disability. The book’s contributors demonstrate that the nexus between labour and disability in modern, industrialised societies resists easy generalisations, as marginalisation and integration were often two sides of the same coin: While the experience of many disabled people has been marked by exclusion from mainstream production, labour also became a vehicle for integration and emancipation. Addressing one of the research gaps of the disability history field, which has long been dominated by British and North American perspectives, the book sheds light on less-studied examples from Scandinavian countries and Eastern Europe including Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and Romania. Cutting across national, cultural and class divides the volume provides a springboard for reflections on common experiences of disability and labour during the twentieth century. It will be of interest to all scholars and students working in the field of disability studies, sociology and labour history.

Ingress: Vladimir Putin har den senaste tiden jämförts med flera 1900-talsdespoter, däribland Josef Stalin. Radu Harald Dinu, universitetslektor i historia på HLK i Jönköping, resonerar om huruvida jämförelsen håller.

Ingress: Nyttiggörande av forskning står högt i kurs idag. Men en drygt 80 år gammal text påminner oss om att kunskap är som mest värdefull när forskare inte bryr sig om dess nytta, skriver Radu Harald Dinu., Publicerad 4 september 2023.

This volume is the first of its kind to take a comprehensive and comparative historical perspective on labour and disability during the twentieth century. The project started in 2020 when the editors received a Research Initiation Grant from the Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond foundation to organise an international symposium. Recognising that historical research on disability varied across regions, with the symposium, we aimed to gather scholars from Eastern and Western Europe as well as North America and to facilitate an academic exchange on this topic. The symposium, which was hosted by Jönköping University and the Swedish Institute for Disability Research, brought together emerging and established scholars from ten countries and explored the nexus between disability and labour from a historical and comparative perspective. We decided early on to publish the conference papers, which eventually gave rise to the present volume.

This chapter explores the ways in which blind people in Romania were to be integrated into state socialism through their participation in labour. Being subject to rigorous state control, the blind community accommodated itself to socialist labour regimes and official expectations to become productive citizens. Within this framework, cooperatives became the main catalyst to incorporate disabled people into socialist production. Yet, many of the regime's high aims to maximise productivity went astray. Not only were cooperatives and other types of sheltered workshops constantly plagued by supply shortages, but a majority of blind people, especially those living in rural areas, remained outside the state-sanctioned wage-labour system. While the integration of blind people into working life may have steadily improved their living conditions during the post-war period, socialist production regimes in Romania ultimately fell short of their own expectations.

Hur har arbetets alltmer centrala roll under 1900-talet kommit att påverka personer med funktionsnedsättning? Och vilka skillnader fanns det mellan statssocialistiska samhällen i Öst och liberal-demokratiska samhällen i Väst? Dessa frågor står i centrum för föreliggande bidrag. Vi tar avstamp i en nyutkommen antologi där vi tillsammans med forskare från Nordamerika, Väst- och Östeuropa har undersökt vilka inklusions- och exklusionsmekanismer förvärvsarbete har skapat för människor med funktionsnedsättningar (Disability and Labour in the Twetieth Century. Comparative and Historical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2023). Trots att arbete har löpt som en röd tråd genom funktionshinderforskningen har sambandet mellan arbete och funktionshinder inte beforskats mycket ur ett historiskt perspektiv. Funktionshinder har även förblivit i utkanten av den etablerade arbetarhistoriska forskningen. Med vårt bidrag vill vi fylla denna forskningslucka och kasta nytt ljus på förvärvsarbete under 1900-talets andra hälft. Staffan Bengtsson diskuterar Kommitténs för partiellt arbetsföra betänkande från 1946 och efterkrigstidens socialpolitiska ansträngningar att få ”partiellt arbetsföra människor” i arbete. Radu Harald Dinu belyser hur synskadade skulle integreras i arbetslivet under efterkrigstiden. Som exempel tjänar de Blindas Förbund i Rumänien under statssocialismen.

Dinu situates his analysis of national constructions of dis/ability within the communist regimes of Eastern Europe. His purpose is to interrogate the construction and management of the dis/abled in a non-liberal-democratic government. Dinu examines “defectology”—the medical model and psychology of dis/ability that held sway in communist Eastern Europe during the 20th century and especially after 1945. As the name implies, defectology characterized dis/abilities of all types as deficits requiring medical intervention. Dinu asserts that this model arose as a byproduct of the communist ideal of the virile, healthy, and muscular “New Man,” a cultural icon popularized throughout the Soviet bloc. When measured against the New Man, the disabled fell short. Accordingly, they were subjected to physical rehabilitation to achieve social rehabilitation as productive members of the communist workforce.

This paper seeks to outline recent trends in historical research on disability during state socialism in Eastern Europe. In doing so, it explores how an emerging generation of historians have investigated various aspects of disability in Eastern Europe before 1989 and raises the question of whether there was a distinct experience of disability under state socialism. Drawing on studies published in English and German, the paper traces both Soviet discourses and practices after 1917 and Central and Eastern European trajectories after 1945. It argues that disability policies and expert discourses were informed by a productivist logic as a governing strategy to increase work capacity and to integrate the disabled into socialist society. The paper concludes by discussing the need for a transnational, comparative approach for conceptualising how disability was construed during communism in Eastern Europe.

I föreliggande artikel undersöks munskydd, ansiktsmasker och skyddskläder ur ett kultur- och idéhistoriskt perspektiv. Artikeln för fram idén att munskyddet inte kan reduceras till sin materialitet eller till en medicinsk produkt som enbart syftar till att bilda en fysisk barriär mot smittsamma ämnen. Som artefakter har munskydd och skyddskläder varit sammanflätade med sin tid och speglar därmed hur sociala normer och idéer om samhällsordningen har förhandlats genom århundradena. Studien visar att munskyddet utgjorde en måttstock för den moderna statens auktoritet och en symbolisk referens till människors förhoppning att kunna kontrollera smittsamma sjukdomar. De exemplen som studeras är pestvågorna i Europa under 1600-talet, lungpesten i Manchuriet år 1910, spanska sjukan i Nordamerika och Japan, samt polio- och HIV-epidemierna under 1900-talet. Undersökningen baseras på en litteraturstudie av tryckta, historiska källor och nyare publikationer inom epidemiologi, medicinsk vetenskap, kultur- och idéhistoria., Temanummer: Pandemins konsekvenser.

Konferensen genomfördes digitalt.

Ingress: Krönika av Radu Harald Dinu, universitetslektor i historia vid Jönköping University, om pandemin i ett historiskt perspektiv., Publicerad 2021-01-13.

Book review of: Intellectuals and Fascism in Interwar Romania: The Criterion Association. By Cristina A. Bejan. Basingstoke, Eng.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. xv, 323 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Maps. €72.79, hard bound.

Ingress: Under 2020 ifrågasattes och revs statyer. Vem får ge namn åt offentliga platser och vad gör vi med monument över personer som representerar historiska orättvisor? Historikern Radu Harald Dinu vid Jönköpings University har fördjupat sig i en känsloladdad debatt.

Publicerad 10 januari 2020 på bloggen Vertikals.se.

Krönika av Radu Harald Dinu, universitetslektor i historia vid Jönköping University, om konspirationsteorierna som följer i coronapandemins spår., Publicerad 2020-06-15.

Publicerad 23 april 2019 på bloggen Vertikals.se.

Publicerad 6 maj 2019 på bloggen Vertikals.se.

During the last decades, historical research on disability has been primarily conducted in Western Europe and North America. Consequently, disability history still focuses on Western attitudes towards disability. Perspectives on disabilities outside the West have recently broadened our understanding but remain scarce. Using the examples of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and the GDR, this paper seeks to provide an overview of disability policies under communism. It addresses the question whether the communist ideology provides a common denominator for studying disability in Eastern Europe. Communist states in Eastern Europe were never a homogenous entity. Additionally, certain trajectories in disability policies reflect global trends that go beyond socialism. Nevertheless, there was a specific theme that lay at the core of the communist world view, namely the glorification of physical labour and working class heroes. Labour played a crucial role for disability policies since communist regimes strove for moulding productive workers and “useful” citizens. At the same time these policies resulted in a discrepancy between official proclamations and social reality of disabled persons. This paper argues that the function and appearance of disabled persons’ bodies, challenged the very core of the communist work ethic.

Recension av: Qaisar Mahmood (2019). Den besvärliga mångfalden. Stockholm: Fri tanke. ISBN: 9789188589293.

Recension av: Eli Göndör, ”Religionskollision: majoritet, minoritet och toleransens gränser", Timbro förlag, 2017, ISBN: 9789177030638.