Uschi Klein, senior lecturer in the School of Art and Media at University of Brighton, will present her paper "Resistance through culture: using photography and foreign radio stations as forms of opposition and survival to Romania’s communist regime".

Klein's research focuses on photography during Romania's communist period, with an approach that uses photographs and oral history conversations to explore marginalised voices and hidden stories from the past.

As one of the most repressive dictatorships of Eastern Europe, Romania’s communist past was characterised by the (neo-)Stalinist ideological system of fear, coercion and austerity, most often remembered for the last decade of Ceauşescu’s regime, when empty shelves, blackouts, petrol shortages and cold apartments dominated people’s everyday lives. The all-powerful secret police, the Securitate, silenced people’s voices from speaking out and protesting against the grim conditions and therefore, the regime did not experience many large-scale resistance movements until the Revolution in December 1989.
By exploring the notion of ‘resistance through culture’ in this context, this paper argues that cultural forms like photography and foreign radio stations (namely Radio Free Europe, BBC and Voice of America) were used as tools to ‘speak out’ and contest the regime in subtle ways. The camera and radio are therefore not considered as neutral recording or broadcast devices. Rather, they are framed as media entangled in webs of power, dialogue, resistance and agency, and further involving several choices, meanings and social actors. Since owning a camera or radio was not prohibited, both forms of mass media created ‘free spaces’ in which people expressed their everyday lives and personal stories, thereby challenging the propaganda about the ‘Ceauşescu reality’.