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The articles presented in this special issue stem from an international workshop entitled Methodologies of Working in Cold War Archives: Facts, Values and Archival Ecologies that was held in Budapest at the Blinken OSA Archivum (at CEU) in October 2021. The two editors of the special issue, Ioana Macrea-Toma (Researcher at Blinken OSA Archivum, Budapest), and Anca Șincan, (Researcher at Ioan Petru Culianu Institute for Religious Studies, Târgu-Mureș), consider it is of vital importance to take the Cold War, with its battle over information, as a good starting point for systematizing individual reflections on working with ideologically charged sources in a time when individuals and academic communities are increasingly divided over matters of common concern.

The conversation over the role of historians in contested times started at the Archivum around the sources of Radio Free Europe, a broadcaster that produced a vast documentation in its informational struggle against Communist regimes. Some of the contributors to the special issue are former grantees of the Visegrad Scholarship program at OSA. The six authors (James Kapaló, Szabolcs László, Alison Lewis, Anna Mazurkiewicz, Ioana Macrea-Toma, Anca Șincan) draw on their particular areas of expertise to reflect on core aspects of Cold War research (dissent versus collaboration, transnational intellectual exchange, religious phenomena) that demand explicit historiographic and ethical choices related to highly polarized and epistemically different sources. These choices are theorized in this issue, with the aim of offering other scholars more general clues about how to work with ideologized sources belonging to opposed truth regimes (state or secret police archival sources versus the alternative sources belonging to community archives, personal memoirs or Western media institutions).

Participants:

James Kapaló
Szabolcs László
Ioana Macrea-Toma
Anna Mazurkiewicz (online)
Anca Șincan

Discussant:

András Mink

Venue:

Research Room, Blinken OSA Archivum at Central European University