Malgorzata Mazurek

Malgorzata Mazurek

Research Interests

history of social science
international development
social history of labor and consumption in the twentieth-century
Polish-Jewish studies
Poland

Courses

Spring 2021

  • Human and Social Sciences as History (4 credits)
    HISTG8023 
    This cross-departmental, intense reading seminar examines new directions in global history of social knowledge and science from 1800 to 1950. We will study science in context with a special focus on producers, objects and circuits of knowledge, and a relationship between knowledge, power and politics. We will critically investigate theoretical and practical implications of some major works in political economy, anthropology, statistics, sociology, psychology and psychiatry, including often overlooked scholars of color and female intellectuals. In particular, the seminar looks at the ways in which scholarly reflection shaped modern practices of classification, measurement, data collection, and immaterial objects of scholarly inquiry such as the self and the unconscious. Among others, we will discuss the cultural impact of the Enlightenment, imperial conquest, colonialism, nation-state building, mass politics, war violence, and communist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China. In conjuction, we will study  shifting understandings of community, wealth and social inequalities, citizenship, race, sexuality, cultural norms of behavior, and the very role of science in a society and across continents (metropolitan Europe and colonial territories, North and South America, Eurasia, and the Islamic world). The seminar welcomes students from all social sciences and humanities departments.

Fall 2020

  • Directed Individual Readings (0-4 credits)
    HISTGR9001
    Prerequisites: the instructors and the departments permission. To register for G9000, students must request a section number from the departments graduate administrator.

Bio

Małgorzata Mazurek specializes in modern history of Poland and East Central Europe. Her interests include history of social sciences, international development, social history of labor and consumption in the twentieth-century Poland and Polish-Jewish studies. Her new book project deals with the intellectual history of East Central European involvement in the making of the non-Western world between the late 19th century and 1960s. It investigates the role of Warsaw-based social scientists in shaping Eastern European debates on population, migration and capitalism and further, in transforming this locally produced knowledge into development policies for the so-called "Third World."  She is also a member of an international research project Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third World’ 1945-1991 funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Education

  • PhD, Warsaw University 
  • MA, Warsaw University
  • BA, Warsaw University 

Selected Publications

 

Books

  • Waiting in Lines. On Experiences of Scarcity in Postwar Poland, 2010 (in Polish).

  • Socialist Factory. Workers in  People’s Poland and in the GDR on the Eve of the Sixties, 2005 (in Polish).

Articles

  • "Rewizyta: jak wytwarza się wiedzę socjologiczną” [On Creation of Sociological Knowledge: Self-Reflexive Reassessment of an Ethnographic Revisit], Kultura i Społeczeństwo [Culture and Society] (to be published in issue no. 3/2015.
  • "Morales de la consommation en Pologne (1918-1989)/Moralities of Consumption across the Short Twentieth Century" Annales. Histoire, Science Sociales, No. 2, avril-juin 2013, p. 499-527.
  • For English version, click here:
  • http://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_ANNA_682_0499--moralities-of-consumption-in-poland.htm.
  • (with Paul Betts) "Preface. When Rights Were Social," special dossier on social rights, Humanity. An International  Journal of Human Rights of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development, Vol. 3, Issue 3, Fall 2012.
  • "Keeping it Close to Home: Resourcefulness and Scarcity in Late Socialist and Post-Socialist Poland," in:Communism Unwrapped. Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe ed. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012, p. 404-435.
  • "Figures de la débrouillardise en temps de crise en Pologne, in Fragments du communisme en Europe Centrale ed. Rose-Marie Lagrave, Paris: Éditions EHESS, 2011, p. 113-138.
  • "From Welfare-State to Self-Welfare: Everyday Opposition among Textile Female Workers, Lodz 1971-1981," in Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship. Global Perspectives ed. Jie-Hyun Lim and Karen Petrone Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2011, p. 278-300.

Full List of Courses

  • Contemporary Civilization I and II
  • Society and Political Thought in Modern Eastern Europe
  • Twentieth-Century Poland in Personal Accounts
  • History of Modern Eastern and Central Europe
  • Culture in Polish Lands