Department of Cultural Studies

The research activities in the Department are conducted in two scientific disciplines: art studies and culture and religion studies. The team’s research activities focus on the following research areas:

1. Modern and contemporary artistic culture

• ways of organizing the field of production, distribution, and reception of art, with particular emphasis on the material and institutional conditions of artistic practices;
• analysis of artistic ideas and practices as an element of modernization programs, especially in peripheral countries;
• the issue of “effectiveness” and “agency” of socially and politically engaged art, participatory art, community arts and artistic activism;
• reconstruction of translocal and transnational networks of contacts and exchanges, travel trajectories and migrations of artists;
• the practices of Polish neo-avantgarde in the conditions of Peoples’s Republic of Poland in the 1870s and 1980s.;
• artistic self-organization in the realities of political transformation and modernization after 1989;
• art criticism after 1945 in Poland and Central East Europe,
• contemporary museology and curatorial practices in the expanded field of art; exhibition histories as a methodology for researching artistic culture,
• comparative analyses of artistic culture of Central and Eastern European countries in the context of global art history

 2. Cultural production industries

• creative industries producing cultural goods and services (films, books, games, television programs);
• theory of culture and cultural production;
• the place of cultural production in the economy and society, the history of cultural production and its contemporary specificity;
• creative economy, also known as the cognitive economy or knowledge-based economy

 3. Cultural memory and the processes of its cultivation and institutionalization

• “difficult legacy” referring to collective traumas, considered both from the perspective of victims and perpetrators;
• the condition of post-conflict and post-traumatic societies;
• the presence of past events in broadly understood artistic creation and cultural production.
• connection between historical memory and domestic and international politics, the use of memory politics in (ethno)nationalist and religious discourses;
• urban mnemonic landscapes and the relationship between the politics of memory and the development of the city fabric;
• connections between memory discourses and the cultural industries (e.g. memory in cultural texts, “black tourism”)

The team of the Department of Cultural Studies uses a wide range of philosophical approaches and methodological tools developed within broadly defined cultural studies, starting from cultural materialism, through ethnographic methods, archival research, reception studies, discourse analysis, genealogy, up to new materialist affirmative, diffractive and cartographic criticism.

The most important research projects currently developed by the members of the Department of Cultural Studies:

EUTERPE – European Literatures and Gender in Transnational Perspective (2022-2026) , within the HORIZON EUROPE program. The project develops an interdisciplinary perspective in literary and cultural studies, focusing on the issues of multilingualism, migration, transnational exchange in the field of literature, and intermedia translation. One of the expected effects of the project is the creation of a dictionary of transnational women’s literature in Europe. 

https://www.euterpeproject.eu/

Infrastructures of Memory. Actants of the Globalisation Process and their Impact on the German and Polish Memory Culture (2023-2027), funded by the Polish-German Research Foundation. The project aims to develop a new methodology in memory studies, concerning the role of technological developments, organizational transformations in cultural institutions, as well as material conditions and non-human actors in the process of cultural production. The project focuses on historical and artistic exhibitions as an increasingly important medium in the contemporary culture of memory. 

https://infrastructuresofmemory.com

A substantial complement to the team’s research activities are teaching tasks within the curriculum of the Cultural Studies (BA), and Contemporary Culture and the Arts master’s studies in the Institute of Contemporary Culture.