Teaching about postcommunism

This chapter discusses postcommunism as a global and yet-unexhausted resource of value for teaching critical political sociology in Western higher education. Based on a dozen conversations with educators in British universities, the author's own reflections on her teaching experience, and a review of recent debates over the value, parameters and preoccupations of the field, it considers some more technical and institutional challenges, as well as some more general and political barriers to incorporating knowledge and histories from the former East into broader (political) sociology curricula. A relative lack of student friendly reading material and a decreasing pool of area expertise for example, coupled with a recently renewed interest in Russia and Eastern Europe through the lens of conflict and security, poses significant challenges for critical education aimed at overcoming Cold War-era fallacies. At the same time, the intensive research accumulated by anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and politics scholars over the past three decades of easier access to the region of the former East and local as well as emigre scholarship, makes today for an invaluable collection of (growing) critical insight which has, particularly in the past decade, been unearthing previously erased histories and knowledges of significant critical value today. Much of this work draws on a more or less explicit post- and de-colonial analysis to de-centre and rethink previously dominant monolithic frames and entrenched binarisms - an exercise, this chapter argues, of immense value for todays' Western lecture hall and seminar room.