Title: Can We Think Postcolonially about Central and Eastern Europe? Perspective from Poland.

Speaker: Dr. Kasia Narkowicz, Sociology Department, University of York, UK

[The seminar will be on live feed on the TISS Patna YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmW0wA9e3iI62tLEngUk79Q/featured ]

Abstract: The talk will consider the theoretical and practical use of postcolonial theory in Central and Eastern Europe, with the focus on Poland. It will look critically at the applicability of postcoloniality to a region that have not been colonised, at least not in the same ways in which countries such as India have been. Drawing on theoretical insights in the field, questions around the usefulness of the term in a post-socialist context will be engaged, highlighting potential risks of appropriation as well as possibilities of resistance. Beyond theory, the talk will show how post- and decolonial perspectives are currently used, and at times appropriated, by various political movements on the ground in Poland.

About the Speaker

Dr Kasia Narkowicz works on issues of Otherness in Europe, focusing on racism, Islamophobia and gender. She holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK, where she investigated conflicts around religion, race and gender in the Polish public sphere. She has since worked at the University of Cambridge and the University of York and is currently based in Delhi. Her work has been published in journals including Ethnic and Racial Studies, Gender, Place and Culture and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.  Kasia tweets at @kasianarkowicz. Website: https://york.academia.edu/KNarkowicz

About "Dialoguing between the Posts"

TISS Patna is taking an initiative to start a dialogue on conjunctures of postcolonial and postsocialist conditions. A seminar series titled Dialoguing Between the Posts will start at TISS Patna from February 2018. In these exchanges, instead of looking at similarities and disparities in these two conditions, the emphasis is on those processes of politics and political economy that constitute these two conditions. The goal is to demonstrate that political economy, social movements, and governance in these two conditions are actually shaping the form of contemporary global capitalism. Global capital, as it were, is constituted by these two conditions spatially, temporally, and in terms of human capital. The idea is to initiate a dialogue, publish papers out of these seminars, and ultimately design interdisciplinary research projects which will investigate issues of political economy, politics, and culture at the conjuncture of these two conditions.