CBEES Advanced Seminar with Miglena S. Todorova, Associate Professor in Social Justice Education, University of Toronto, Canada

Speaker: Miglena S. Todorova, Associate Professor in Social Justice Education, University of Toronto, Canada

Discussant: Susan Lindholm, Researcher at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University

Chair: Yulia Gradskova, Associate Professor in History, Senior Researcher at the Department of Gender Studies, Södertörn University, and Research Leader at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies CBEES

Abstract: Feminists, national governments, and international organizations, such as the United Nations and the World Bank, share the belief that integrating women, especially minority women, in the economy is a way to stop domestic and sexual violence against women in countries worldwide. Educating girls and women, experts suggest, allows women to take better paid jobs, thus making them economically independent and able to leave violent domestic and social situations. The present study evaluates this anti-violence paradigm from the perspective of women’s experiences in former socialist economies and states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Focusing on the case of Bulgaria, it suggests that former socialist states which forced and absorbed women in their public economies fully and en- masse not only exacerbated domestic and sexual violence against women but also exposed certain groups of women to state and ideological violence marking these women for social and cultural death. The histories and realities of women in former socialist states, this study argues, present a potent and critical conceptual lens for evaluating further the links between gender and violence in mixed economies, such as those in Nordic states, as well as capitalist and neoliberal economies where women constitute the core of labor and production.

Miglena S. Todorova is Associate Professor in Social Justice Education, University of Toronto, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research, teaching and publications cross and relate transnational feminisms, critical race and gender studies, and educational research in Canada, the United States and former socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Dr. Todorova is the Director of the Centre for Media, Culture and Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto where her research further supports media and cultural literacy education locally and globally. Todorova’s work has been published in leading academic journals, such as Meridians: Race and Transnational Feminisms, TOPIA: Cultural Studies, Canadian Woman Studies, and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. She is the author of Unequal under Socialism: Race, Women and Transnationalism in Bulgaria published in 2021 by the University of Toronto Press. Dr. Todorova is the co-editor of the book collection Decolonizing the Spirit in Education and Beyond (2019) by Palgrave Macmillan Press. Her new book project entitled Postsocialist Studies of Education: Global, Gender and Emotional Aspects constructs “postsocialist studies” as productive methodological and conceptual paradigms that expand the horizons of both humanistic and social scientific inquiries, including research and theorizing generated in Western academies. Prof. Todorova is a distinguished educator and the recipient of awards for excellence in research and teaching.