Research

Racism without others: Everyday mediations in Poland (2018-2023)

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.

Project funding

May – December 2018 Finnish Cultural Foundation, Otto A. Malm Foundation

January – July 2019 Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth Foundation, Kone Foundation

August 2019 – August 2021 Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (Core Fellow)

September 2021 – June 2023 Kone Foundation

Publications

  • peer-reviewed scientific articles

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2020) At the Intersection of Racism and Nationalism: Theorising and Contextualising the ‘Anti-Immigration’ Discourse in Poland. Nations & Nationalism. E-pub ahead of print. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12611.

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2018) The dialectics of care: Communicating ethical trade in Poland. Media and Communication 6(2): 199-209.

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2018) Mediating the agency of distant others: Proper distance in fair trade communication on Facebook. International Journal of Cultural Studies 21(2): 155-172.

Polynczuk-Alenius K and Pantti M (2017) Branded Solidarity in Fair Trade Communication on Facebook. Globalizations 14(1): 66-80.

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2014) Crafting creativity and crafting the self: How female users construct the boundaries of creativity on Pinterest. Comunicazioni sociali—Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies 3(2014): 384-393.

  • non-refereed scientific articles

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2019) ‘Algorithms of Opression’ by Safiya Umoja Noble. Book review. Information, Communication and Society 22(13): 2030-2032.

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2019) ‘The Discursive-Material Knot’ by Nico Carpentier. Book review. Information, Communication and Society 22(9): 1347-1348.

Gustafsson J and Polynczuk-Alenius K (2018) Editorial: Media and Communication between the Local and the Global. Media and Communication 6(2): 145-148.

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2015) Creativity for sustainable development? Creative input of consumers in the zero-waste brand community on Facebook: Manifestation of online environmental citizenship and means of self-expression. International Journal of Cultural Science 8(1): 55-71.

  • monographs and edited special issues

Gustafsson J and Polynczuk-Alenius K (2018) Media and Communication between the Local and the Global. Media and Communication 6(2). Special Issue.

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2018) Ethical trade communication as moral education: A discourse analysis of mediation in context. Helsinki: Unigrafia.

  • theses

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2018) Ethical trade communication as moral education: A discourse analysis of mediation in context. Helsinki: Unigrafia.

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2013) A million DIY projects: The Netnographic Study of Pinterest as a Creative Community for Women. Master’s Thesis, University of Helsinki.

Polynczuk-Alenius K (2011) Daily Newspapers in Politics, Politics in Daily Newspapers. Study based on Helsingin Sanomat and Turun Sanomat. Bachelor’s thesis, University of Warsaw.