IUSE

The project’s objective is to explain the meaning of habitual mental and bodily practices for the nineteenth century Catholic laywomen’s program of developing modern pious womanhood and further interprets those women’s interest in habit as part of the broader contemporary religious, intellectual, and socio-cultural inquisitiveness in routinized actions. The research employs a transnational approach privileging individuals, networks, and debates in France, Germany and Partitioned Poland between 1878-1914. The Catholic laywomen’s focus on habit will be retrieved through analyses of their pedagogical writings and educational models and subsequently confronted with contemporary conceptualizations of habitual action as found in the epoch-making theological, philosophical and scientific theories and selected social practices. It is argued that in a context in which women could formally engage with theology, philosophy and science in very limited ways those lay activists’ religious or pedagogical writings and educational practices were distinctive ways of participating in major contemporary disquiets over the limits of human agency and plasticity of human behavior. With their interventions in the concept of habit those Catholic laywomen joined the nineteenth century efforts of overcoming body-mind, freedom-necessity, and spirit-matter dualisms. The research adds to the field of women’s history by proposing new motives and periodization of the nineteenth century Catholic laywomen’s activism’s emergence and providing novel interpretations of their actions in a transnational perspective. This multidisciplinary project will expand my competences with insights from several fields of academic inquiry. Marie Curie Fellowship will provide me with triple experience as a researcher, project manager and a science communicator, which will give me confidence in planning, executing and delivering projects independently in the future.

Communists into Liberals: The Transformation and Demise of the Left as Precursor to the Illiberal Turn in Poland ‘Communists into Liberals’ (COMLIB) seeks a historically grounded explanation to the recent ‘illiberal turn’ in Poland by pursuing a new line of inquiry into the country’s transition from state socialism to a European liberal democracy. Rather than focusing on relatively short-term political and economic structural contingencies, the project aims to bring both historical process and agency of key protagonists to the fore as a factor precipitating the developments of the past years. In doing so, three historical processes spanning from 1968 to the mid-2000s are placed in correlation to each other: the demise of communism and transition to liberal democracy in Poland, exchanges of ideas that transcended the Cold War divide of Europe, and the political trajectory of the Polish and European Left. Within this framework, the project examines the agency of a particular group of politicians and activists from the Polish Left and investigates how their ideas and policies set the stage for the recent so-called ‘illiberal turn’ fueled by populism of the Right. In doing so, it aims to re-examine the dynamics of reform communism prior to 1989 as well as its impact on the transition afterwards highlighting two issues: the ‘social-democratisation’ of communism and the ‘neoliberalisation’ of social democracy. COMLIB’s working hypothesis is that the Polish Left’s gradual abandonment of social democratic values during the post-communist transition contributed to their demise in the mid-2000s and facilitated the ‘illiberal turn’. The project’s methodological framework adopts a collective biography approach based on oral history, archival research and qualitative analysis of written sources.