Strategizing Success: Organizational Innovation and Literary Prominence in the Soviet Union (A Case of Iunost’) - conference paper
Daria Franklin
This paper examines the organizational dynamics underlying the success of the Soviet journal Yunost within the restrictive confines of the Soviet literary field. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset comprising contents from Yunost and other Soviet literary journals spanning the period from the 1950s to 1990, the study employs a two-mode network analysis to unravel the intricacies of Yunost's strategic success. Rather than viewing Yunost solely through the lenses of literature or journalism, this study redefines Yunost as an organizational entity characterized by unique administrative strategies. It posits that Yunost's ascendancy cannot be solely ascribed to its content or targeted audience appeal but rather emanates from innovative management approaches that diverged significantly from the prevailing norms in other journals. Through emphasizing the critical significance of strategic organizational maneuvering in determining journal success within the ideological and heteronomous literary environment, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the multifaceted dynamics that shaped the Soviet literary field.
Scientific vs Personal: the Subjective Experience of Cold War Academic Exchanges - in progress
Daria Franklin and Aleksandr Fokin (Tyumen State University, Department of History)
Relying on a set of ego-documents produced by Soviet and American participants in a scholarly exchange program and an investigation of the participants’ professional futures we combine comparative-historical methods and microhistory to explore what it meant to be an alien resident scholar on the other side of the Cold War divide in the late 1950s and 1970s. By conceiving US-USSR academic exchanges as a field where political agendas of the nation-states coexisted with individual projects, we aim to look beyond the ways the two conflicting states understood and measured the value of scholarly exchanges. Personal experiences and histories of participating scholars are insignificant traces of various minor events. Yet they allow us to see the course of large-scale political and social events through a different lens. In providing new - sometimes unexpected - knowledge of the experience of crossing the Cold War boundary, these investigations of the personal contribute not only to historical discussions of a major political and ideological conflict, but also to our understanding of state cultures in contested political environments.
American Women of Science: Shaping Meritorious Selves - in progress
Daria Franklin
By examining a large set of interviews with female scientists representing different cohorts, this paper traces the changes in the ways women fashioned their professional identities in relation to the dominant ideologies within science. I find that since the mid-1950s, as the legitimacy of institutional discrimination began to erode, the logic of merit-based model became the only legitimate mechanism of allocation of rewards and authority in science. Realized as quantifiable measures of scientific output, merit-based model shaped the dispositions of female scientists, but masked the opportunities to challenge the existing gendered power distribution in science.
Freedom Gained and Freedom Lost in American Science - in Smoother Pebbles, Columbia University Press, 2024
Jonathan R. Cole and Daria Franklin (co-authored)
Relying on oral histories recorded in the early 1980s, this essay explores the ways American female scientists experienced freedom and unfreedom at academic institutions in the years leading up to the Second World War. We argue that the histories and careers of women in science during that period were not simply histories of discrimination and exclusion. Practicing female scientists were more likely to experience the paradox of institutional particularism and individual universalism, carve out islands of freedom on the margins of institutional structures, and shape their scientific identities in relation to other scientists, but not institutions.