My project concerns epistemic encounters between foreign sociologists, anthropologists, and ethnographers conducting fieldwork in Socialist Romania in the 1960s-1980s and local social scientists. Based on the publications stemming from their fieldwork, autobiographical sources, oral history interviews, and archival research, I ask how the post-colonial anthropological sensitivities, the new left political commitments, and the second-wave feminist thought of the 1970s were met and transformed by the everyday realities of real-existing socialism, as well as how they integrated and built into local ideas about the social. I argue that reconstructing the epistemic feedback loops between foreign and local social scientists during state socialism is essential for understanding the afterlife of these encounters for the perception of academic inequality in the post-socialist period, the (dis-)empowerment of local forms of knowledge production, and the sociological imaginary informing social policies after 1989.

This study was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P3-3.6-H2020-2020-0035.