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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how uncertainties were verbalized in the public discourses of two small towns in Czechoslovakia in ca 1928-1948, and how they were given meaning in the ways that helped reproduce a sense of agency and capacity to navigate through what were essentially uncontrollable conditions.

Paper long abstract:

Uncertainty is the inherent condition for small towns, which have to cope with unpredictable future and sudden ruptures, while also facing vulnerabilities characteristic for this kind of settlement. Yet, in order to reproduce themselves as (imagined) actors capable of navigating through historical process, small town communities deploy a range of stabilizing strategies, such as discourses of local planning “as if life goes normally”, or more dynamic narratives of historical hardships and resilience, or languages of challenging yet manageable future. Taking this as the point of departure, this paper enquires into how uncertainties were channeled into and verbalized in the public discourses of small towns and how they were translated into bearable discursive frames that reproduced a sense of normality or helped mobilize local community and legitimize proactive measures to strengthen local resilience. Adopting historical approach and focusing on towns as collective quasi-actors, the theme will be examined on a sample of two ordinary small towns in Bohemia (Kdyně and Heřmanův Městec) in ca. 1928-1948, a period that witnessed both long-term (or structural) and more abrupt sources of uncertainties, such as the Great Depression, tensions in international and domestic political system, occupation and war, and postwar transformations, which tangled with locally-conditioned pathways, such as decline of local industries or change in towns’ status. The paper exploits a range of sources, such as local periodicals, promotional books, local histories, poetry and archival documents (public records) that testify to how contemporaneous actors gave sense to uncertainty in the shared public discourse.