Poland Archives - Page 6 of 9

Feature

The Thick Line

On the impossibility of coming to terms with a dark past

March 16, 2018 • by Santiago Mandirola

"We split away the history of our recent past with a thick line. We will be responsible only for what we have done to help extract Poland from her current predicament from now on." – Tadeusz Masowiecki As Poland’s first post-Communist prime minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki sought to draw a thick line between the ...

Democracy

Democracy Dies in Darkness

A keynote address from the Dramaturgies of Resistance conference

February 28, 2018 • by Elzbieta Matynia

I have been fascinated by a dimension of political life that occurred in the latter part of the twentieth century in both non-democratic and democratic contexts. I think of this dimension -- something I experienced myself -- as closely related to the politics of hope, and I call it performative. Just ...

Feature

Position of the Helsinki Committee in Poland

An open letter

February 20, 2018 • by Ewa Letowska

In the opinion of the Helsinki Committee in Poland, the two years since November 2015 have brought the greatest number of challenges and threats to human rights and freedoms of the entire post-1989 period. The Committee, as a civic initiative monitoring the violation of rights and fundamental freedoms since 1983, examines ...

Position of the Helsinki Committee in Poland

Feature

To the Directors of the National Museum in Krakow

An open letter

February 6, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This letter addressed to Andrzej Betlej and Andrzej Szczerski, the directors of the National Museum in Krakow, came across my screen on Sunday. We are publishing it here today both for what it says about the struggle against the new authoritarianism in Poland, and also because, it seems to me, it ...

To the Directors of the National Museum in Krakow

Feature

Gray is Beautiful Revisited

On the Politics of Sex and the Crisis of Democracy at Home and Abroad

December 23, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

This week I am returning to my appreciation of the color gray, a theme I promised to explore regularly here, which unfortunately I have only returned to occasionally, and not recently. I am returning to the theme on this the darkest of days -- I started writing this during the winter solstice ...

Feature

Poland’s Growing Authoritarianism

On Facing the Implications of Recent Events

December 22, 2017 • by Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer

In order to restore real justice, unlike the EU-enforced one, there are no holds barred; and just because something is written in law doesn’t mean it’s just. It doesn’t even matter that some of these laws were created during the previous 2005-2007 PiS-led government or that they were signed by ...

Education

Cultural Studies Threatened in Poland

An Interview with Ewa Majewska

November 2, 2017 • by McKenzie Wark

Ewa Majewska, could you first sketch out for me a little about your own work? I am a feminist philosopher who is currently working on theories of subaltern counter-publics in the peripheries, weak resistances, and the avant-gardes. I am also interested in the resistance to fascism, and for this some Habermassian belief ...

Feature

Mourning Poland’s Burning Man

Polish man sets himself on fire after distributing letter condemning PiS Party

October 26, 2017 • by Sławomir Sierakowski

The text of the letter is eminently rational. It carefully enumerates and decries actions taken by Poland’s government that, according to Polish and international courts alike, amount to an attack on the rule of law and liberal democracy. The letter accuses the government, controlled by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, ...

Education

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere IV

Concluding Remarks

August 29, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

It has been an eventful summer. As my dear friend and colleague Robin Wagner-Pacifici would put it, a restless eventful summer: “The world seems out of whack, and everyday routines are, at the least, disrupted. People … experience a vertiginous sensation that a new reality or era may be in the ...

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere IV

Feature

A Sign of Resistance; A Symbol of Hope

An Interview with Mateusz Halawa, Head of Social Sciences and Humanities at the School of Form in Poland

August 24, 2017 • by Susan Yelavich

As Polish citizens gathered to protest a bill that signals a national shift away from democracy, thousands of them brandished, clung to, wore, and waved one simple graphic designed by Luka Rayski: a poster saying “Konstytucja”, which means “constitution” in Polish. Colored to emphasize the “ty” (“you”) and “ja” (“me”), ...

Education

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere II

The Sphere of Publics and its Bifurcation

August 19, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

As our seminar on authoritarianism and public life progressed, we focused on the work of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, and Joshua Meyrowitz to develop an understanding of mediated public life. Their sociology of media is a sociology of mediated interactions, rather than studies of the media, i.e. major newspapers, ...

Education

The New Authoritarianism and the Structural Transformation of the Mediated Public Sphere I

Reviewing the work of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt with an assist from Nancy Fraser

August 18, 2017 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

It’s been two weeks since my return from Wroclaw. I am getting over the shock of teaching about the rise of the new authoritarianism, as the Polish parliament, The Sejm, seemed to be hammering the final nails into the coffin of Polish democracy. It turned out to be a little ...