People

For the last several years, I have been working on the rise of right-wing populism in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond. While partially based in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University College London, I co-supervised two large international projects financed by the European Commission. For more information, please consult here. FATIGUE was designed to train 15 doctoral students, while the POPREBEL's goal is to develop a new interpretation and explanation of the rise of populism, particularly its right-wing variety. The Fatigue volume is under production at the UCL Press (open access). We are now preparing the second volume, based on POPREBEL. Its basic gist is presented here. Among the first fruits of my own work in this area are an article on the cultural side of the right-wing populist mobilization in Poland, an article on the relationship between populism and nostalgia, and a blog entry. POPREBEL has a working paper series that I co-edit.

One of my favorite publications is a large, open-access working paper that summarizes one of the most important and innovative parts of our project: a comparative study of people's cultural worlds that shape their political, also electoral, choices. The study is based the method of semantic network analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted by our ethnographers in three coutries: the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland.

My studies took me through several disciplines. After studying sociology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and several years of teaching in the Department of Sociology there, I earned my doctoral degree in anthropology from Columbia University. What am I doing in political science? The answer can be found in my main intellectual passion. As long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the relationship between power and culture, an area that is located at an intersection of several academic disciplines. Later, I developed the lasting interest in social movements and protest politics, again a rather interdisciplinary area of study. My interest in the complex interplay between power (politics) and culture was solidified and became a bit of an obsession in 1980-1, while I was living through the exhilarating experience of the first Solidarity period in Poland. Two bools books, The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power and Anthropology and Political Science (with Myron Aronoff) are the best exemplifications of my approach. I study politics and culture comparatively, but the principal source of my observations and data is Poland and East Central Europe. I draw on my own empirical work in this region and regular collaborations with social scientists who work in and on Eastern Europe.

I have been associated with Rutgers since the early 1990s, but spent almost three years (2015-17) in London, directing the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) at University College London. In 2020 I served as the elected President of ASSEES (The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies).

During the last few years I have also returned to my earlier interest in the epistemological foundations of area studies and the philosophy and methodology of social sciences (particularly interpretive and ethnographic approaches). I have contributed to this area through teaching, writing, and participation in conferences and workshops.

My research is concentrated in three fields: (1) civil society, social movements, and protest politics, (2) the relationship between politics and culture (including the politics of historical memory), and (3) democratization, particularly in the context of post-communist transformations. I draw on these three areas in my recent work on right-wing populism.

For a description of my research agenda, past and present, please click on the "Research" tab.