Projects
The main aim of the project is the analysis of the development and changes of the idea of civil society during the transformation period. I want to rethink its evolution in a particular historical context and its repercussions. Specifically, I concentrate on the question about the effectiveness of the idea of civil society as the mobilizing frame, with particular emphasis on the discursively constructed boundaries between what is civic and non-civic. I am interested in how the
discourse of civil society has “distributed” and relegated civic activity, how the discrepancies between the idea and reality were determined, where their causes were perceived. During the analysis I will concentrate on special features of this discourse – its binary mode (Czyżewski,2008) and pedagogical overtone (Starego, 2008) observed in Poland. In the research I will use the discursive analyse approach. Hence, the newspapers’ articles concerning civic (dis)activity,
social organizations and movements will create my data corpus. It will be constructed in a way which allows observation of the discourse evolution, as well as an examination of the reminiscence of the civil society idea shape in contemporary applications. Additionally, in order to broaden the conclusions of the empirical findings, I will place them in the context of the observations and conclusions from other post-socialistic societies, asking the question about the universality of the idea of civil society and its undemocratic potential.