„Demolishing and Redeveloping History in Post-Socialist Poland” – nagranie seminarium

Zapraszamy do oglądania nagrania seminarium „Demolishing and Redeveloping History in Post-Socialist Poland” z udziałem dr. Jaro Stracula, które odbyło się  20.05.2015.

O seminarium:
In recent years social scientists have increasingly drawn attention to the significant role that materials play in political life. Yet while materials have come to animate political debate, they also figure prominently in the endeavors of actors and institutions to create new social worlds and political orders. Drawing upon research conducted in the Polish city of Gdańsk, on the Baltic Sea, the paper examines the discourses surrounding the proposed redevelopment of the shipyard that was the birthplace of Solidarity, the mass social movement that contested the legitimacy of the Socialist state in the 1980s. It illustrates the ways in which an area formerly devoted to the production of material goods will be turned into a place for living, leisure, and business through the construction of luxury apartments, offices, supermarkets, and a shopping mall. In advocating the project, both state and municipal institutions set out to turn the shipyard into an icon of the victory of capitalism over Socialism. Yet at the heart of the project lies a paradox: even though the proposed redevelopment figures prominently in the Polish state’s attempts to craft a new social and political order, when it will come to completion and what form it will actually take still remain open questions. The paper pursues the argument that although the production of new built environments is central to the politics of the post-Socialist state, in fact the existence of such environments is bound up with the production and circulation of information.

Jaro Stacul is Research Associate at the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and has held full-time positions in various academic institutions in Britain, Bulgaria, and Canada. His research focuses on issues of nationalism and the state in Europe (Poland and Italy). Since 2008, he has been working on a research project on the redevelopment of post-industrial spaces in Gdańsk. The project examines public discourses surrounding the redevelopment of the shipyard that was Solidarity’s cradle, and the ways such discourses are manipulated by certain political élites to impose their own interpretation of the downfall of state socialism.

Spotkanie odbyło się 20.05.2015 w ramach projektu „Antropologia dziś – otwarte seminaria naukowe” finansowanego ze środków Ministerstwa Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego. Projekt jest realizowany przez Stowarzyszenie „Pracownia Etnograficzna” im. Witolda Dynowskiego we współpracy z Instytutem Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej UW.