‘Westernization’ of the Polish Academic Field:
Life Trajectories at the Backdrop of Socio-Political Transformation (1980-2020)
PhD project
In the context of growing competition between international and national model of academic reproduction in Poland, accounted in numerous contemporary debates and ongoing political media campaigns, it seems especially important to situate a recent exacerbation of such a normative conflict within the biographic experiences of the scholars themselves. More and more frequently, the normative conflict between promoting ‘internationalization’ of Polish research versus protecting the national research from ‘unfair’, global competition, especially in the fields of humanities and social science, is told through the prism of theories of post-dependency that have been internalized by academics and policy-makers. In other words, both the promoters of incentives toward ‘internationalization’ and towards national protective mechanism, accentuate the need to overcome the peripheral conditioning of Polish academia, although through two differently oriented strategies. At the same time, a striking feature of this debate is on the one hand, a presentism and normative, rather than empirical framing, as if both strategies were to be invented from anew, outside specific historical conditioning and historical precedents; on the other hand, a persistent treatment of academia and science as hypostasized entities, functioning outside of the actual experiences and life trajectories of the scholars themselves, but also – outside both international and national systemic exclusions in what concerns gender and class contexts of the academic career.
Therefore, I assess that accounting for various experiences of the scholars fluctuating in their careers between the structures of the Western European and Polish academia is especially needed in order to relocate the public debate in three crucial aspects, 1. in what concerns ideologizing the normative divisions between ‘international’ and ‘national’, ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, that in Polish case is additionally entangled with various narratives about successes and failures of political transformation, frequently understood as a geopolitical shift to the Western sphere of influences; 2. in what concerns a deeper understanding of the systemic barriers in individual careers, strategies of adaptation to political incentives in both pro and anti-mobility aspects; 3. how the symbolism of geographical imaginaries and uneven distribution of recognition between national academia in Eastern and Western Europe influenced specific career choices, “self-images” and “we-images” of the scholars working in both contexts. In this sense, my research agenda could contribute to three areas of research: theories of post-dependency in European higher education (and the limits of their application in the context of European integration and “Westernization” of the ECE academic field from within), research on the shifting geographical imaginaries of the “West”, and sociological studies on academic mobility and migration between the countries of Western Europe and Poland. This will be done through critically analyzed biographic narratives about an academic, ‘mixed’ career (in Poland and abroad) and the discursive alterations of the geographical imaginaries in a life course and cross-generational perspective.
In order to take into account the historical specificity of the academic field in Poland (and its significant transformations), the study focuses on the biographical experiences of academics working in humanities or social science, who migrated from Poland across four decades out of professional motivation: 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. For each decade, 10 biographic accounts will be collected thematizing the life course of Polish-born scholars, whose career has been divided between Polish and Western European HE institutions (the criterium being at least one employment contract in Polish and Western HE institution respectively, including short-term contracts). For the sake of consistency of comparisons, Western European institutions will be exemplified by France and Germany, enjoying similar, elevated status in European academia.
During her stay at ZZF Potsdam Emilia Sieczka researches in Dept. V: Globalizations in a Divided World.
About Emilia Sieczka:
She is a sociologist with a background in history and political science. A PhD candidate at the Graduate School for Social Research (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology) at the Polish Academy of Sciences. A junior researcher in the project ‘The national habitus formation and the process of civilization in Poland after 1989: a figurational approach’ coordinated at the University of Warsaw and in the project ‘Biography & Academic Imaginary. Polish intellectual diaspora in the autobiographies of migrant scholars’ at the University of Łodź, both funded by the National Science Centre (NCN). A recipient of Joseph Tischner Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Dianne Widzinski Visiting Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Richard Pipes Scholarship, Bourse du Gouvernement français and scholarship of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was a visiting researcher at Centre de recherche en science politique (CReSPo) at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles. A member of the team ‘Normalization and Exoticism: Academic Transfers and Social Agency’ under the auspices of the Centre Marc Bloch and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam in the international research network “Scaling the Transnational: Entangled Political Imaginaries and Practices in East and West Europe” (STEPPE).