DPU

Aarhus Universitets segl

CHEF Talk: Recent student protests in Poland: Why? What next?

Chair: Associate Professor, Rikke Toft Nørgård, Danish School of Education

Oplysninger om arrangementet

Tidspunkt

Torsdag 6. marts 2025,  kl. 14:30 - 15:30

Sted

The event will take place as a hybrid event, with physical participation possible at Aarhus DPU campus, and online on Zoom. Location Aarhus: Building 1483, 5th floor, room 556 (Inspiratorium), Nobelparken, Jens-Chr. Skous Vej 4, 8000 Aarhus

Abstract
Academic protests are not common in Poland. However, a number of student protests have been organized recently, including dormitory occupations in Poznań in December 2023 and in Kraków in May 2024, as well as an occupation of teaching rooms in Wrocław between June and December 2024. A student conference “Trzeba bronić uniwersytetu” (“The University Must Be Defended”) was also organized in Warsaw in April 2024. I will describe this remarkable change in student self-organization, discuss its possible reasons (e.g., the thematization of rental and housing prices as a widespread social problem in Poland), consider its relationship to other recent shifts in Polish academia (e.g., the increasing visibility of the role of the national R&D budget), and speculate on potential future developments. The talk will be based on conversations with people involved in the protests, but also on already available data, which are quite extensive – for instance, the protesters from Poznań and Kraków have already published two books in Polish documenting the dormitory occupations.

Bio note
Stanisław Krawczyk is assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wrocław, Poland. After defending a PhD on the Polish field of science fiction and fantasy literature (2019), he worked as postdoc in the Scholarly Communication Research Group at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2020–2022). In 2024, he was visiting researcher at the Danish School of Education at Aarhus University and at the School of Engineering and Sciences at the University of Chile. His academic activity focuses on the use of different languages in scholarly communication, regional-scale international research, language diversity in game studies, and the notion of national video games.