Prof. Dr. Čarna Brković, Professor of Cultural Studies/European Ethnology and Managing Director of the Institute for Film, Theater, Media, and Cultural Studies, has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for her project entitled “Racial Socialism – Racialization and Value in Socialist Red Cross Societies” and can now expect to receive a total of around two million euros in funding over five years. The Consolidator Grant is one of the ERC’s most generous funding measures for individuals. It is intended to support outstanding researchers with seven to twelve years of experience since completing their doctorates in setting up or establishing their own teams.

The “Racial Socialism” project examines humanitarian practices in socialist countries in order to develop new perspectives on racialization. Racialization refers to the process by which certain groups are constructed as fundamentally different on the basis of supposedly essential biological differences. The significance of racialization for the historical development of capitalism is well documented, as the extraction of socioeconomic value was often legitimized by portraying populations as ontologically different. However, historical sources show that processes of racialization also took place in socialist societies. To date, however, there has been a lack of theoretical analysis of this apparent contradiction. Using the example of the national Red Cross societies in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, the project examines how racialization took effect in socialist societies.

A cultural anthropology of value is proposed as an analytical approach to systematically examine the contradictions of racialization in socialism. Socialist societies are understood as social orders with diverse forms of value that were structured by specific logics—or a network of competing logics—and took effect at different social levels.

The central objectives of “Racial Socialism” are:

– new empirical research on the question of whether and in what ways different groups within socialist Red Cross societies were racialized;
– the identification of different registers of value and negotiations of value – including political, economic, social, and cultural value – as well as their hierarchical interrelationships;
– the theoretical redefinition of racialization in socialism, which has thus far been understood primarily as a phenomenon of capitalist social formations. By combining detailed historical research on socialist humanitarian organizations with cultural anthropological theories on value and racialization, the project develops new perspectives on this fundamental contradiction.