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Transformative PodcastAuthor: recet
Welcome to the Transformative Podcast, which takes the year 1989 as a starting point to think about social, economic, and cultural transformations on a European and global scale. This podcast is produced by the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) and its managing director Irena Remestwenski. Our patron is Philipp Ther, and we could not do it without Leonid Motz, Jannis Panagiotidis, Rosamund Johnston, Sheng Peng, and Jelena Dureinovic. Language: en Genres: Science, Social Sciences Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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Austerity Welfare Work in Interwar Bucharest (Alexandra Ghiț)
Episode 77
Wednesday, 11 March, 2026
Why have the histories of work and the histories of welfare been told separately, and what happens when we bring them together? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Alexandra Ghiț (GWZO Leipzig) focuses on domestic servants, social workers, and users of welfare in interwar Bucharest to argue that “histories of welfare provision are histories of work, and histories of work are histories of welfare provision.” She tells Rosamund Johnston (RECET) how welfare provision has historically been gendered, how this has changed over time, and how a locally-specific but transnationally-connected form of “austerity welfare work” was developed by unpaid and paid, formal and informal workers alike in Depression-era Bucharest. Alexandra Ghiț is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig. She is the author of Welfare Work Without Welfare: Women and Austerity in Interwar Bucharest (De Gruyter Brill, 2025). Ghiț is an editor of the 2024 volume, Through the Prism of Gender and Work: Women’s Labour Struggles in Central and Eastern Europe and Beyond, 19th and 20th Centuries (Brill, 2024), and the author of numerous articles in Aspasia, The European Review of History, and International Labor and Working Class History.
