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Racism without others: Everyday mediations in Poland

Application summary

This postdoctoral project cross-fertilises communication studies, sociology, history and social geography to understand racism in Poland where the racialised others are physically absent but continuously present in everyday communication. It does so in two steps. Firstly, it develops an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective on ‘racism without others’ as an appropriation of racist discourses circulated in global media to the local socio-cultural and politico-historical particularities. Secondly, it applies this perspective to the Polish context via three studies on how global racist discourses are mediated by the nation’s liminality. The studies employ Foucauldian discourse analysis to see how racist discourses manufacture the racialised others and the racist subject position, and which socio-cultural and/or politico-historical repositories they mobilise. The first study probes how orientalist discourses are mediated in social media by Poland’s spatial liminality caused by its suspension between East and West as a post-socialist EU member state. The second study looks at how the discourse of threat associated with migration is mediated in national media by Poland’s temporal liminality that mobilises the interpretative frames developed in the interbellum. The third study scrutinises how the discourse of worthiness of the racialised others is mediated in the urban environment by moral liminality caused by the Polish nation’s position as both victim and culprit of racism.

Racism without others: Everyday mediations in Poland

In my postdoctoral project I cross-fertilise communication studies with disciplines such as sociology, history and social geography to understand racism in Poland where the racialised others are physically absent but continuously present in everyday communication. Decentring a recent racist turn in political and public discourses, I turn to the mundane communication avenues as sites where globally circulated racist discourses are articulated through the local socio-cultural and/or politico-historical repositories. In Foucauldian spirit, I examine how these discourses construct the racialised others as objects of knowledge and, in doing so, contribute to the augmentation of racist subjectivities in the Polish society. I theorise that in Poland racism is discursively instrumentalised to uphold the self-congratulatory national self-definition.

The project pursues this proposition in three case studies. The first study probes how orientalist discourses prefigure representations of the racialised people and destinations that circulate in the blogosphere. The second study looks at how the discourse of threat, spuriously associated with multiculturalism, plays out in the national legacy media. The third study scrutinises how the discourse of un/worthiness of the racialised others intersects with the marginalisation of ethnic minorities in the built urban environment.

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