Work group
Human Rights
Claudia Kraft is a Professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna since March 2018. She specializes in 20th century comparative European and particularly Central and Eastern European History. Her main fields of research are gender history, history of everyday life in state socialist societies after World War II, history of forced migrations after World War II, memory cultures and politics of history in Central and Eastern Europe, comparative legal history, and new approaches to area studies (as developed for instance in the concept of “phantom borders”). She has recently published a special issue (together with her Viennese colleague Tim Neu) about “Social Struggles and the Entanglement of Political Participation and Fundamental Rights” with Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 36/1 (2025).
Research Project
Mexiko-Stadt 1975: Menschenrechtsdiskurse und Wissensproduktion über Geschlechtergleichheit im Spannungsfeld von Kaltem Krieg und Dekolonisierung
The 1970s were characterized by global deliberations about gender equality. While the women's movements in North America and Western Europe were arguing for establishing equality by readjusting the political and recognizing differences, the USSR and its allies focused on the goal of equality primarily through the lens of material adaptation, whereas the political issue of women’s rights in the Global South was embedded in debates about economic development. Looking at the 1st UN World Conference on Women in 1975 as a transnational event and with a focus on the social science knowledge production, it becomes clear that instead of juxtapositions of cultural, political and material equality, much more complex analyses regarding the restructuring of the institutional and cultural order were discussed. The research project focuses on the knowledge production that enabled the experts to talk about discrimination of women without assuming an identity, but rather to relate situational and structural discrimination to each other. In this way, the project traces the formulations of universally conceived rights that derive their legitimacy from the conscious addressing of particular experiences.