We are pleased to announce that our former doctoral student, Emilia Sieczka, has successfully defended her PhD thesis, “National hysteresis in post-transition Poland. Social and political (dis)adaptation to time dislocations in Polish cleft national habitus in macro and micro perspectives”, under the supervision of Prof. Marta Bucholc. In her dissertation, enthusiastically received by international reviewers, she developed an original, innovative framework for the study of nationalist-populist mobilizations as hysteretic identity-temporal dislocations, based on an integrated reading of Eliasian and Bourdieusian theory. She placed particular emphasis on the overlooked cases of such mobilizations, not only at the level of political discourse but also in the contexts of schools and families, at the core of the socialization process. 

Emilia was a junior researcher on the project “The national habitus formation and the process of civilization in Poland after 1989: a figurational approach,” coordinated by Prof. Marta Bucholc.  During her studies she was affiliated with and cooperated with many local and international institutions, including Centre de civilisation française, Centre for Figurational Research and The Department of History of Social Thought at the University of Warsaw, Department of Recent Political History at the Institute of Political Studies PAN, Norbert Elias Foundation, Centre Marc Bloch, the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam  and finally, the Center for Psychoanalytic Thought at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology PAN on the occasion of co-organized international workshop “Violence and its Sublimation within Fantasy-reality Continuum.”

During her studies at GSSR, she was also a recipient of many scholarships, including the Dianne Widzinski Visiting Fellowship at the University of Michigan, the Richard Pipes Scholarship, and, most recently, the Józef Tischner Junior Fellowship at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. She was also a visiting researcher at Center de recherche en science politique (CReSPo) at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, in the framework of NCN scholarship, and at the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam, thanks to the support of the Volkswagen Foundation. She is a fellow in the international research network “Scaling the Transnational: Entangled Political Imaginaries and Practices in East and West Europe”, where she is a member of the team Normalization and Exoticism: Academic Transfers and Social Agency.

Currently, as a Tischner fellow, she is working on the project at the IWM Vienna. ‘Between floating and empty signifiers in the post-transition discourse on Solidarity’. In the near future, she is going to continue her recent work on the ERC grant  ‘Using Human Rights to Change Abortion Law: Involvement Patterns and Argumentative Architectures in the Global Figuration of Human Rights’, where she is going to apply her program of relational studies of nationalism to the changes in reproductive rights law. She also hopes to prepare two monographs, one based on her dissertation and one resulting from her stay in Vienna, the latter being a genealogical study of Polish post-transition populist dynamics, complementing her consistent and ambitious research agenda.