 |
Privacy
in Post-Communist Europe
Volume 69 No. 1 (Spring 2002) Arien Mack, Editor |
Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
This issue of Social Research is the ninth in our conference series,
the mission of which is to foster discussion of matters of
grave public interest in light of their often neglected and generally
illuminating historical and cultural contexts. Thus, for example,
past conferences have dealt with the AIDS crisis (“In Time of Plague”),
Homelessness (“Home: A Place in the World”), and
Hunger (“Food: Nature and Culture”).
The current issue contains edited versions of presentations given at the Social Research conference on Privacy in Post-communist Europe, which was held at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, on March 23-34, 2001. The conference followed an earlier conference on privacy, held at New School University in October 2000, at which the paper by Lawrence Lessig, included in this volume, was presented. Because the concept of privacy is socially constructed and therefore contingent on particular cultures, a full understanding of what privacy means demands cross-cultural exploration. Such understanding is critical at a time when new technologies, which recognize no national boundaries, pose threats to privacy everywhere. These threats are not contained within the borders of any one country, but are worldwide.
For this reason, the privacy project was incomplete without similar
exploration of privacy issues as they are developing in countries with
deeply different histories and, therefore, different conceptions of
privacy
and threats to privacy. The conference in Budapest, convened under the
direction of Professor András Sajó, head of legal studies
at Central European University, was
designed to cover conceptions of privacy that prevailed in the Central
and East European Communist world and those that
have emerged during the transition period. A final conference on
privacy
in Islamic societies, to be held at New School University in December
2002,
will conclude our exploration of this subject. Papers from that
conference
will appear in a subsequent issue.
We are grateful to David Caughlin for his invaluable help in
coordinating
the conference in Budapest, and to the Open Society
Institute and Rockefeller Foundation for their generous support of
the conference.
Arien Mack
Editor
Table of Contents
Part I: Public/Private: The Distinction
Notes on
Contributors
(at time of publication)
Joe Bailey is Professor of Sociology at Kingston University. His publications include Social Europe (ed., 1998), Pesimism (1988), and "Some Meanings of 'The Private' in Sociological Thought" (Sociology 14:3, 2000).
Péter György is Professor of Aesthetics and a member of the ELTE Media Centre at Eötvös Loránd University.
András Kovács is Professor of Nationalism Studies and Jewish Studies at Central European University, and Professor of Sociology at Eötvös Loránd University. His publications in English include "Jews and Politics in Hungary" in Values, Interests and Identity: Jews and Politics in the Changing World (1995).
Lawrence Lessig is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. His publications include The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) as well as other articles on cyberspace regulation.
László Majtényi is Parlaimentary Commissioner on Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Hungary.
Dominique Memmi is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Her book on contemporary law regarding decisions concerning life, death, and the body, Dire, Faire Dire, is forthcoming in 2003.
Nils Muiznieks is Director of the Latvian Center for Human Rights and Ethnic Studies. He is the author of numerous publications and also a regular contributor to the annual UNDP publication "Latvia. Human Development Report."
Mark Neocleous is Lecturer in Politics at Brunel University and coeditor of Radical Philosophy. His publications include The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (2000) and Imagining the State (forthcoming 2002).
Renata Salecl is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Criminology of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana. She is the author of (Per)Versions of Love and Hate (2000) and The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (1994).
András Sajó is Professor of Legal Studies at Central European University. His publications include Limiting Government: An Introduction to Constitutionalism (1999) and Political Corruption in Transition: A Sceptic's Handbook (coeditor, 2002).
Judit Sándor is Professor of Law and Political Science at Central European University. Her publications in English include "Genetic Testing, Genetic Screening and Privacy" in The Ethics of Genetic Screening (1999).
Júlia Szalai is Professor os Sociology at the Institute os Sociology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a founding member of the Center for European Studies in Budapest.
István Szikinger is with the law firm of Schiffer and Társai in Budapest. He teaches as Visiting Faculty in the Legal Studies Department at Central European University.
G. M. Tamás is a Visiting Professor at Central European University. His most recent publication is Törzsi fogalmak ("Tribal Concepts": Collected Philosophical Papers) (in Hungarian, 1999). His book On Global Fascism is in progress.
Viktor Voronkov is Director of the Center for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg.
Anna Wessely is Senior Fellow at the Central European University Humanities Center and Associate Professor, Institute of Sociology, ELTE University. Her publications in English include Intellectuals and the Politics of the Humanities (ed., 2002).
Oksana Zabuzhko’s recent works in Ukranian include Shevchenko’s Myth of Ukraine: Toward a Philosophical Verification (1997), the collection of essays Chronicles of Fortinbras (1999), and the best-selling novel Field Work in Ukranian Sex (1996).
Elena Zdravomyslova is a researcher at the Center for Independent Social Research and co-coordinator of the M.A. Gender Program at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology, European University at St. Petersburg.
