Western Africa in Eastern Europe: On the History of Decolonization Discourses and Comparative Knowledge in Polish Sociology

ZGW Kolloquium

Vortrag von Dr. Joanna Wawrzyniak (University of Warsaw)

Against a larger background of the global circulation of knowledge in the 1960s, the talk offers a case study of interest in decolonization by Polish sociology. At the time it was shaped by several competing and complementary trends: its institutional revival after the discipline was removed from the academia in the 1950s; some international opening facilitated by soft diplomacy of Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and by global aspirations of communist expert culture; an anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic purge at the end of decade; and dominant research interests in various aspects of industrialization, working class and urban studies. All this resonated in various and very particular ways with the wider circulation of ideas on the biggest political concern of the 1960s.