The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Noted Scholars Series (co-sponsored by the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies, the Queer and Trans Anti-Fascisms Research Cluster & the Department of English Language and Literatures) presents:
Inadaptable (Non)Citizens, Racialized Capital and Lessons from Postsocialist Neoliberalisation
Kateřina Kolářová
WHEN & WHERE
Wednesday March 4, 2026
12-1pm
Room BuTo 323
Please RSVP below in advance
A light lunch will be served at 1:00pm
Abstract:
Kateřina Kolářová’s Rehabilitative Postsocialism offers a timely interdisciplinary and intersectional analysis of how disability, race, class, and gender operate as ideological tools within the postsocialist Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia). Kolářová presents postsocialism as an analytic that can and should be brought to bear to understand cultural politics, economic formations, and state politics through the present day.
Rehabilitative Postsocialism names disability, sexuality, and race as central yet invisible to negotiations of the postsocialist consensus. Drawing from a rich and varied archive, Rehabilitative Postsocialism maps the formation of new structures of inequalities and social imaginaries of wellness, merit, and justice in order to understand current articulations of global disenchantment with democracy, social justice, and solidarity. The book also makes clear that disability, race, and ethnicity continue to circulate in depictions of Eastern Europe as suspended in a chronic developmental “delay.” Rehabilitative Postsocialism both situates this positioning within its political and historical formation and offers the analytical tools to challenge its continued deployment.
About Kateřina Kolářová
Kateřina Kolářová is an Associate Professor at the Gender Studies Programme, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. Her new monograph Rehabilitative Postsocialism: Disability, Sex, and Race (Michigan University Press, 2025) presents intersectional postsocialism as an analytic that can and should be brought to bear to understand cultural politics, economic formations, and state politics through the present day.
Her work focuses on intersections of disability, sexuality and race, (feminist queer crip) transnationalisms, and postsocialism. Recently, she has been exploring the bio-social dimensions of metabolism, relationship between human and non human lives, ecological dimensions of digestion and how we coexist with microorganisms, toxic chemicals, and other “unclean” elements/entities.
Also, she is currently wrapping up a long-term research project into HIV/AIDS and politics of collective immunity/susceptibility to viral threats in Czech Republic. She regularly collaborates with artists, galeries and engages in other community-based projects.
She is the editor (with Martina Winkler, Uni Kiel) of Re/imaginations of Disability in State Socialism: Visions, Promises, Frustrations (Campus Verlag/Chicago University Press, 2021) and of Otherness-Disability-Criticism: Social Constructions of Disability and Disability (Postižení-Jinakost-Kritika, 2012).
