Global Security Series Welcomes Julia Mead to Discuss Mining, Masculinity, and Energy Security in Czechoslovakia
Written by Jack Whitten, Pardee School of Global Studies, Dean’s Ambassador (MAIA ‘26)
For the November 5th installment of the Global Security Initiative Speaker Series, the Pardee School of Global Studies hosted Julia Mead, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. To a full audience, she shared stories from her research on coal mining, masculinity, and energy rights in socialist Czechoslovakia.
Mead presented her research in an engaging, narrative style through four stories that showed different aspects of Czechoslovakian energy history, especially around the prestigious and highly masculine profession of coal mining. She opens with the mystery of a missing miner, suspected of desertion. Those who deserted like him were called bulači, and viewed almost as harshly as if they’d deserted the military. She then told the story of a student protest, sparked by unreliable heating in their dormitories, which gave rise to the concept of a “right to energy,” which would permeate Czechoslovak society for the rest of the socialist period. She detailed a case of marriage counseling for a miner and his wife, discussing how the state handled domestic violence and social issues around such a masculinized profession. Finally, she covered the case of a man who, two years after receiving the highest possible honor for decades of work in the mines, was working as a simple janitor because the social security benefits and pension he’d worked for had been devalued by inflation.
To conclude, she discussed how the miners and those around them remember this time period now that the socialist period is over. Many of these people have a certain nostalgia for the socialist past, and fondly remember their time in the mines as the good times, where they did the work of “real men,” despite hardships. Though this socialist nostalgia might surprise certain outsiders, in Mead’s words, “Nostalgia is a referendum on the present. The past gets rosier as the present gets tougher.”
The talk concluded with an array of questions from a very engaged audience, touching on topics including the nature of protest in authoritarian countries, how the right to energy or the hyper-masculine view of mining compare in other countries, how women interact with such masculine professions, and how socialist countries made coal into mining such a prestigious job despite its dangers.
The Pardee School’s Global Security Initiative invites experts to share their insight on a wide range of topics. The school extends our thanks to Julia Mead for taking the time to speak with our community! You can learn more about the Global Security Initiative and see additional upcoming events here.