Seminar with Barbora Vacková. Within this seminar Barbora Vacková will first introduce Zlín, as an example of a modernist city with very sophisticated urban and social system.
An essential part of this coherent system was also the housing policy and the activity of the building department of the company. It developed a system consisting of different types of housing for different types of inhabitants. She will show the participants the main types of blue-collar houses. These were originally intended as houses of a limited time of existence, but thanks to the historical coincidence, they are still there and inhabited. Nowadays, they are considered as a historical heritage, and some of the districts in Zlín are protected. Hence, she will show how these houses and districts are introduced to the public as historically valuable, and how differs the specific methods of their musealization.
Barbora Vacková works at the Faculty of Education, Department of Civics, and Faculty of Social Studies, Department of Media Studies and Journalistic, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Yet, she is a sociologist, and at the Faculty of Education, she teaches Sociological theory for teachers, Methods of social-science research and Media studies for teachers. At the Department of Media, she is teaching the course on sociology of media. In her research, she is based in the qualitative research methods. As she studied in the 90s, she is deeply involved by the cultural studies of Stuart Hall, the philosophy of Michel Foucault, the sociology of Max Weber, and the theory of capitals of Pierre Bourdieu.
Her research is mainly based in the field of urban studies. Her dissertation was a theoretical analysis of the picture of the city in the pre-modern and modern social utopias. From this issue, it was just a step to the study of the realization of the modernist urban visions in Zlín. With her colleagues, she also led the research in suburban localities of Brno (as residential suburbanization had a very specific form at the begging of the 21st century in Czech Republic). All these projects also focused on the ways of dwelling, the lifestyles of the people and their home-making practices. This was also the main issue of the project on solo-living people. Actually, Barbora is a part of an interdisciplinary applied research taking place in a small Czech town – UNESCO site and basically, it is focusing on the forms of communication in a small town with this specific status.