Kategoria aisthesis rozumiana jako doświadczanie, doznawanie, postrzeganie zmysłowe, czyli proces poznawczy zapośredniczający zmysły, przeciwstawiana bywa ‘rozumowi’ czy ‘racjonalności’. Wydaje się także, że to wzrok jako najważniejszy i najbardziej rozwinięty spośród zmysłów człowieka – zwłaszcza zaś homo vidensa – jest tym kanałem, na który próbujemy ‘przełożyć’ to wszystko, co nieuchwytne wzrokowo: emocje, nastroje, zapachy i smaki. W artykule chciałabym ukazać ważność kategorii doświadczania –gr. aisthesis– zarówno dla ekonomii jako konceptualizacji odnoszącej się do aktywności człowieka gospodarującego, jak i dla pola rozważań estetycznych, których tradycyjnym przedmiotem jest pole artystycznej aktywności człowieka, które – jak należy zauważyć –współcześnie wykracza poza sztukę, kierując się także ku innym obszarom. Przykładem takiego poszerzania oddziaływań refleksji estetycznej może być obszar reklamy.
The article aims to reflect upon the possibility to visualize the collective memory and (un)memory in the urban space. The author focuses on a kind of evolution of the ways of commemoration: from the traditional monuments raised in the public space of the city in order to commemorate an event or an eminent person important to the community, to the (counter)monuments as a contemporary, critical reaction of the artists to what is often deliberately (un)remembered, omitted in the historical narrations or wanders verging on the collective memory. The analysis of the installation titled „The Missing Image” (2015) by Ruth Beckermann will serve as an example of possible, multiple interpretation of the function and multitude of meanings of the (counter)monuments in the urban space, in the context of visualizations of the (un)memory.
This article reflects upon the possibility of the visualisation of different forms of collective memory in the city. It focuses on the evolution of the ways of commemorating in public spaces. It juxtaposes traditional monuments erected in commemoration of an event or an "important" person for a community with (counter)monuments as a modern, critical reaction geared towards what is either ignored in historical narratives or what remains on the fringe of collective memory. While following a theoretical exploration of the concepts of memory and their fruition in monuments as well as (counter)monuments, the eventual multimodal analysis central to the paper looks in-depth at Ruth Beckermann’s work The Missing Image (Vienna, 2015). The latter is treated as an example of the possible and manifold interpretations of the function and multiplicity of meanings that (counter)-monuments bring to contemporary urban spaces.
The paper is an attempt to highlight the significance of gender in reflections on the crisis, whose outcome, though mainly regarding the sphere of economic activity, in the perspective adopted in this paper goes beyond the domain of economics in a narrow sense. Reflections on the effects of the crisis makes one consider women's condition in three spheres: production, reproduction and consumption. This enables to show both problems they encounter outside their homes and specific opportunities which arise for women in the age of so-called crisis.
The article elaborates on the links between low participation of women in the Polish public sphere and processes of communication, education and socialisation. Drawing on my earlier research on women in the Polish media, I analyse diverse gender roles constructed discursively in handbooks for first, second and third grade pupils of Polish elementary schools. The schoolbooks are treated here as key tools in educating future participants of the public sphere whose ‘preferences, values and standpoints – of consumers and citizens – are created in the earlier processes of education’ (Jürgen Habermas). Analysing the schoolbooks, I point to the links between the processes of socialisation (and communication of gender roles – in private and public life – via schoolbooks and other teaching materials), the social construction of gender identities and the reasons of the still very low participation of women in the Polish public sphere.
This chapter aims to point to the major problems encountered in the Polish public sphere by its standard „other‟ – mainly women, including lesbians, and homosexual men. The major aim of the article is to show how/where those „other‟ are positioned in the Poland‟s post-1989 transforming public sphere. The chapter also explores how the public visibility and audibility of the „other‟ is consequently disallowed or diminished with the key „symbolic‟ representatives of the suppressed categories pushed regularly into the (disrespected) private domains of the society.
In the article, I discuss the possibilities of deploying multi-semiotic tools of (non)remembrance in contemporary urban spaces. The challenges of such deployment are discussed in the context of sociological and social-theoretical reflection on the urban human condition and the urban space as well as on the role of monuments in traditional pathways of urban remembering. Departing from the latter, I argue for new forms of commemoration and remembrance, especially via the so-called counter-monuments that constitute contemporary artists' discursive response towards hegemonic narratives and practices of memory-making. As an example of counter-monumnetal remembrance in contemporary urban spaces, I analyse Gunter Demnig’s famous Stolpersteine (stumbling-block) installations. Commemorating the Holocaust and placed across several major European cities, the Stolpersteine constitute a very prominent example of counter-monuments that both undermine the long lasting narrations of the urban history as well as propose new, ‘lived’ as well as dialogic format of dealing with the urban’s problematic pasts.
Kwestie związane z zagadnieniem elit we współczesnym społeczeństwie demokratycznym zdają się być, na pierwszy rzut oka, tematem delikatnej natury, gdyż - niejako ex definitio - zainteresowanie tworzeniem się czy sposobem funkcjonowania wąskiej, uprzywilejowanej w pewien sposób grupy osób, jakoś przeczy demokratycznemu duchowi czasów. Merytokratycznie rozumiana równość szans w dostępie do dóbr, takich jak szacunek społeczny, prestiż, dobra materialne, władza polityczna czy symboliczna zdaje się być postrzegana jako atrybuty typu idealnego polskiej demokratycznej rzeczywistości społecznej po 1989 r. Jednak wydaje się, że warto zastanowić się nad zjawiskiem elit i ich tworzenia, w kontekście zarówno polskiej rzeczywistości post-transformacyjnej, która jest niejako kontekstem wyznaczającym możliwości (ale i limitującym) aspiracje kobiet oraz samego ruchu kobiet i jego wpływu na kształt i treści uznawane za ważne/ nieważne w polskiej sferze publicznej po 1989 r. Niniejszy tekst jest wzbogacony o krótki szkic tematyki związanej z tym, czym są i jaką rolę pełnią elity po to, by zastanowić się, czy może być to perspektywa, której użycie w interpretacji tego, co dzieje się polskim ruchu kobiet – zwłaszcza w odniesieniu do corocznie organizowanych Kongresów Kobiet - może być heurystycznie pożyteczne. Dla uzyskania pełniejszego obrazu środowisk emancypacyjnych w Polsce po 1989 r. sygnalizuję historię najnowszą ruchu kobiet oraz zagadnienia związane z procesem społecznej stygmatyzacji i tego, gdzie w odniesieniu do emancypacyjnego ruchu kobiet po 1989 r., ów proces można wskazać. Obydwa zaś nurty rozważań – dotyczące procesów tworzenia się elit, jak i ważne dla tego, co nazywamy stygmą: elityzacji i stygmatyzacji - mają przysłużyć się poszukiwaniom odpowiedzi na pytania postawione przez Marię Janion, która zastanawia się dlaczego kobiety w Polsce nie stały się, na równi z mężczyznami, beneficjentkami transformacji ustrojowej. Janion powiada, że w Polsce po 1898 r. „prawa kobiet znalazły się poza prawami, o które walczyła Solidarność. Energia obywatelska kobiet została stłumiona a nawet odrzucona [a- przyp. N.K.] demokracja w Polsce okazała się demokracja rodzaju męskiego”
The present study deals with the problem of apparent absence of women from socioeconomic processes as well as from the related theoretical and methodological reflections within the field of economics. The article points to the fact that gender-related ideas as well as their relevance for women’s activity in the public sphere are central to undertaking issues of women participation in economy. It does so from the perspective of such trends of scholarly reflection as feminine economics as well as the more emancipation-oriented and inequality-centred feminist economics.
This article provides reflection on the state-of-the-art and key challenges of qualitative discourse studies as a social science research method in Poland. It focuses on the so-called Workshops in Discourse Analysis [Warsztaty Analizy Dyskursu], a multidisciplinary research collaboration that, initially taking place informally at the University of Lodz, eventually evolved and became institutionalized as a national Consortium for Discourse Studies [Konsorcjum Analizy Dyskursu]. At its core, the article provides a critical review of the volume The Discourse of Symbolic Elites: Towards a Diagnosis (Dyskurs elit symbolicznych. Próba diagnozy [M. Czyżewski, K. Franczak, M. Nowicka, J. Stachowiak, eds., 2014]), which is the first major publication resulting from works of (selected) members of the aforementioned research consortium. As is argued in the article, the focal publication displays the significant amount of challenges faced by the multidisciplinary collaboration within the area of discourse studies. These challenges not only stem from the fact that discourse analysts working in Poland come from different arts & humanities and social science disciplines, but also are rooted in the fact that these researchers draw on various—and often significantly different—traditions in qualitative discourse studies, and often do not engage sufficiently in a constructive dialogue with existent and well-established approaches to discourse research. Hence, the article not only summarizes the key distinctive features of the volume under review, but also attempts to position the state-of-the-art of discourse analysis in Poland within the contemporary international landscape of (critical) discourse studies.
W niniejszych rozważaniach próbuję ująć problematykę związaną z funkcjonowaniem kobiet w sferze ‘poza- domowej’ po to, by spróbować naszkicować tradycyjne aporie związane z rozpatrywaniem/uznaniem wkładu kobiet w dziedzinę związaną z gospodarowaniem oraz namysłem teoretycznym, którego przedmiotem jest gospodarowanie (w wymiarach zarówno deskryptywnym jak i normatywnym), który znajduje swój najpełniejszy wyraz w obrębie ekonomii. Aporie definiuje się jako rzeczywistą lub pozorną trudność teoretyczną, niemożliwą do przezwyciężenia przy użyciu tradycyjnie stosowanych środków poznawczych lub powszechnie uznanych reguł postępowania. Owe (rzeczywiste lub pozorne) trudności, z którymi warto się zmierzyć, gdy myślimy o kobietach w sferze gospodarowania i w ekonomii, swe źródło zdają się mieć w sposobie w jaki już Arystoteles – a za nim zadziwiająco zgodnie nam współcześni – konceptualizował role kobiet i mężczyzn w powiązaniu ze sferą prywatną (współcześnie sferą życia rodzinnego) i publiczną (obejmującą aktywności ‘poza - domowe’).
This paper aims at highlighting the importance of (critical) discourse studies for contemporary social research. By looking closely at critical discourse analysis (CDA) as one of the leading paradigms within the critically-oriented discourse research, this work emphasises the importance of both theoretical and empirical impact of CDA on studies located within the paradigm of feminist gender studies. After pointing out diverse theoretical and methodological synergies between (critical) feminist gender- and discourse-research, the paper exemplifies these synergies by means of case study of the constructions of motherhood/fatherhood in the Polish public discourse. As the paper shows, such, and other, CDA-based theoretical and methodological synergies applied in practice might, in fact, be pivotal for the development of both academic reflections and social understandings of gender (and parent) roles in contemporary society.
I attempt to analyse the discourse on the place and role of women in the public sphere, as revealed by media accounts of the so-called "sex-scandal" in SamoobronaRP. I have tried to show how the problem of women accidentally present in the public sphere, reiterated by the media, makes itself manifest in reports and comments about the scandal. According to J. Turowski (1992: 13) "by the term «public» many authors understand not only the common good, but also actions leading to its achievement, and the public's participation in these actions. They write about «the public sphere», while describing the functioning of large social groups, the state, the global society". In some approaches, like R. Senett's, "the public sphere" really means "political life in a given society, i.e. outside family social structures" (Turowski 1992:13). For Habermas "the public" is situated "between civil society and the state, where critical public discussion concerning questions of general interest is guaranteed" (McCarthy 1999: xi, Habermas, 2008:98).Multiplicity of public discussions is related to the notion of democracy as "a modus of historical awareness, openness to discourse, multiperspectivity, pluralism and recognition of recipients and their aims" (Ziółkowski 2001: 84).
The aim of this essay is to sketch the evolution of Polish critical art on womanhood in general and motherhood in particular. The overall argument is that both before and after 1989 – marking the major point of accelerating socio-political transformation and social change in Poland - critical women artists were exceptionally outspoken about the tensions related to motherhood. They have done so while depicting mothers’ complex subjectivity as well as mothering practices through and within art practices. The focus of this paper is, specifically, on three generations of Polish women-artists along with looking in-depth at how their critical-artistic discourse, both before and after 1989, has constructed various ideas, visions and perceptions of motherhood, both from the women-centred and the wider social perspective.
This article aims to analyse, and point to the reasons of, the low participation of women in the public sphere. in particular, it focuses on the image of women’s involvement created in Poland and other EU-member-states in the recent campaign preceding the 2004 Elec- tions to the European Parliament.
The empirical material used in the study comes from the international Research Project “Gender and European Elections”, co-ordinated by Karen Ross (Coventry University, UK) and focusing on the role of women in EP-Election Campaign in ‘old’ and ‘new’ EU- member-states. The detailed examination of Polish daily newspapers: the liberal ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’ and the communist ‘Trybuna’ (constituting the Polish part of the said project) is in the main focus of the analysis. The latter is further supplemented with, and compared to, results from other countries such as Lithuania, Czech Republic and France.
As it appears from the analysis of the Polish case, the very limited interest in the EP elections among Polish voters (evading in the, eventually, very low EP-electoral turnout in Poland) stems from the fact that Poles still have a very limited knowledge about the his- tory and functioning of the EU in general, and of the European Parliament in particular. accordingly, the image of the European Parliament which appears from the study sees the EP as a ‘distant’ and ‘supranational’ body which bears little influence on the life of ‘ordi- nary’, Polish citizens. Therefore, prior to the analyses described above, my study provides an extensive introduction highlighting the institutional and political ontology of the EP, while it also focuses on the earlier studies analysing Polish attitudes towards the European Parliament.
This study analyses of the Living Memorial: a counter-monumental installation located since 2014 in the highly contested Szabadság (‘Liberty’) Square in central Budapest, Hungary. The focus on the LM allows showcasing it as a unique type of commemorative installation that not only contests the current Hungarian top-down, hegemonic narrations and practices of memory but also counteracts the country’s politicised and ideologised narrations of the past. The LM is explored as a dialogical ‘nexus’ of, on the one hand, individual, lived experiences of the Holocaust in Hungary in 1944–45 and, on the other, of the wider historical and contemporary socio-historical narratives as well as commemorating practices. Presented in the article – and set against the wider input from memory and commemoration research – the systematic, discourse-ethnographic analysis of the Living Memorial links its discursive and visual as well as spatial aspects with the exploration of various types of spectator engagement. In doing so, the article connects the wider context of memory and commemoration in the national and city spaces – and specifically in the often strongly politicised capital milieus – to the specific, localised contexts of ‘commemorative battlegrounds’ wherein ‘official’ displays of memory clash with, and are opposed by, their bottom-up, counterhegemonic contestations.
Na przykładzie pomnika Przeciwko Wojnie i Faszyzmowi (The Monument against War and Fascism), zamówionego przez miasto Wiedeń i zrealizowanego w 1988 roku według projektu austriackiego rzeźbiarza A. Hrdlicki, można wskazać na problemy, z jakimi muszą się zmierzyć zarówno twórcy genre, jakim jest antypomnik, jak i odbiorcy, będący niejako współtwórcami wielości sensów, które w niejednoznaczny sposób ewokuje antypomnik. Warto także pokazać, jak niezbyt udany antypomnik stwarza możliwości do uobecniania na nowo (nie)pamięci oraz jak jego reinterpretacje odzwierciedlać mogą zmagania ze zbiorową pamięcią i tożsamością.
This paper critically explores how contemporary practices of commercialised self-mediation by "celebrity mothers" increasingly normalise a strongly commodified and consumption-driven vision of motherhood. Drawing on the affordances of mediatisation and self-mediation embedded in the wider neoliberal and celebrity culture mindset, the article analyses how motherhood becomes increasingly linked, in public discourses, to economic relations of acquiring or gaining material goods - rather than being viewed as a socially or individually significant process or role. Looking at mediated discourses in Sweden and Poland, the paper shows how, over time, strong commodity and product orientation becomes a major feature characterising "good" mothers but also a fundamental way of expressing contemporary maternal identities and emotions. However, in doing so, the ever more hegemonic discourse of the commodification of motherhood normalises the wider vision of motherhood as set within a strictly consumption-related mindset founded on social and material status - closely associated with the affluent middle-class - whilst ideologically and tacitly excluding women and mothers who cannot follow discursively constructed celebrity-like lifestyles or patterns of consumption.
This article analyses strategies of material commemoration in contemporary urban spaces. Deploying a philosophical and social-theoretical interpretation systematised by, in particular, Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies and its analysis of material commemoration, the article compares the semiotics of modes of commemorating through monuments and counter-monuments. As is argued, counter-monumental commemoration aligns much better than the traditionally static and non-dialogic monuments with the ongoing post-modern transformation and fluidity of contemporary urban spaces. By the same token, counter-monuments also allow commemoration of complex and difficult past events – such as the Holocaust – that are traditionally surrounded by multiple interpretations and often-conflicting attempts to commemorate them. The analysis at the core of the paper looks in-depth at counter-monumental installations known as Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Blocks, developed since the early 1990s by the German artist Gunter Demnig as a form of commemoration of victims of National Socialism and especially the Holocaust. As is suggested, counter-monuments such as the Stolpersteine carry multiple meanings and have multiple functions which allow for diverse patterns of interaction with past/present. They also allow embedding the dialogue between forms of commemoration (monument/counter-monument) various recipients (locals/tourists, spectators/passers-by) as well as their varied interpretations and expectations of commemoration in the discourse of contemporary urban space.
This article analyses Polish media discourse about gender parity by arguing that the latter is not only a call for the increased participation of women in Polish public life but also a reason for the discursive redefi nition of different visions of Polish democracy. The analysis focuses on a period between the fi rst and second Polish Women’s Congress (2009–2010) when the idea of gender parity – and, later on, of the related offi cial legal acts – became one of the central elements of Polish public debates. Anchored in the Discourse-Historical Approach in critical discourse analysis (CDA), the qualitative discourse analysis focuses on the constructions of arguments against gender parity in selected articles from key Polish broadsheet newspapers. The systematic analysis of those arguments allows establishing that gender is, in fact, treated as a decisive factor for one’s participation in the Polish public life. By the same token, the article explicates that media-based perceptions of parity as vital or marginal are directly related to broader defi nitions of gender as either social/cultural or biological. These, as the article shows, influence relevant conceptions of democracy and constructions of its key principles in acts of either discursively supporting or rejecting gender parity.
This essay illustrates the extent to which crisis has had an impact on public perceptions and discourses of contemporary migration in Poland. We focus on the actual moment of the coming together' between crisis- and immigration-related discourses and argue that this connection has arisen as part of the recent political strategies of Poland's right-wing populist government Law and Justice' (PiS) party. The strong anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric orchestrated by PiS across the Polish public sphere has also played a pivotal role in countenancing xenophobic as well as outright racist sentiments in wider Polish public discourse and society.
(Współ)przestrzeń wydaje się być terminem intrygującym. Używając go, deklarujemy zainteresowanie specyficznymi przestrzeniami zarówno sztuki, jak i ekonomii oraz ich (tradycyjnymi) granicami, szkicowanymi jednak tylko dlatego, by zająć się tym, co najbardziej interesujące – ich przekraczaniem – po to, by dać się prowadzić wszystkim tym obietnicom, które kryją się w słowie ‘pomiędzy’. Owo inspirujące do myślenia ‘pomiędzy’ wyznacza też tok myśli Autorek i Autorów tekstów zgrupowanych w niniejszym tomie. Jednocześnie można na nowo stawiać pytania, odnoszące się do tego, że gdy pewna literatura, filozofia, społeczeństwo, sztuka, dział sztuki już istnieją, jakim jest stan duchowy, który je wytworzył? I w jakiej relacji pozostaje ów społeczny "stan ducha" do praktyki gospodarczej i (szerzej) wartości i norm przyświecających obszarowi refleksji teoretycznej powiązanej z ekonomią.
This article highlights how the recent discourse of 'the new normal' - re-initiated and widely used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in national and international media and political discourse - marks the advent of a new approach to 'crisis' in the normalisation of far-right populist politics. Drawing on the example of the analysis of 'policy communication' genres pre-legitimising the Polish right-wing populist government's recent actions aimed at curtailing media freedom and controlling opposition media, the article shows that, in the context of an undisputed crisis such as the recent pandemic, the right-wing populist imagination has gradually and strategically altered its usual, highly ambivalent approach to crisis. However, the latter's new, (quasi) 'factual' imaginary has, as is shown, become a tool in the further escalation and normalisation of far-right political strategies and policies, especially with regard to new far right strategies of media control aimed at the systemic colonisation of the wider public sphere. Therein, as the article shows, far-right actors often resort to a very peculiar - and by now common - adoption of many pro-democratic arguments while 'flipsiding' them in favour of far-right arguments and pre-legitimising their own undemocratic politics of control and exclusion.
This article highlights the increasingly prevalent process of so-called“ conceptual flipsiding”: that is, of strategic reversal of notions once closely associated with liberal democracy, and of its key values of freedom, equality, tolerance, and the like, for the pronouncedly illiberal gains. Viewing the said process as part and parcel of the wider normalization of an illiberal imagination through strategic discourses and practices in and beyond the field of politics, the article contends that conceptual flipsiding increasingly allows recontextualizing and eventually normalizing a deeply illiberal understanding of polity, society, and community. Seeing these as increasingly redefined in recent years in many formerly liberal-democratic contexts by, especially, the far right and its numerous affiliates in politics, media, and/or un-civil society, the article argues for theoretical and analytical elaboration of conceptual flipsiding in order to depict its wider exploratory usability in grasping the current illiberal conceptual and discursive fluidity. The article emphasizes that, following the discourse-conceptual logic behind the conceptual flipsiding dynamics, one is able to deconstruct the ongoing infusion of key social and political concepts and discourses with new and often deeply illiberal understandings.
This position paper argues for an interdisciplinary agenda relating crises to on-going processes of normalization of anti- and post-democratic action. We call for exploring theoretically and empirically the ‘new normal’ logic introduced into public imagination on the back of various crises, including the recent ‘Refugee Crisis’ in Europe, COVID-19 pandemic, or the still ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Gathering researchers of populism, extremism, discrimination, and other formats of anti- and post-democratic action, we propose investigating how, why, and under which conditions, discourses and practices underlying normalization processes re-emerge to challenge the liberal democratic order. We argue exploring the multiple variants of ‘the new normal’ related to crises, historically and more recently. We are interested in how and why these open pathways for politics of exclusion, inequality, xenophobia and other patterns of anti- and post-democratic action while deepening polarization and radicalization of society as well as propelling far-right politics and ideologies.