We are pleased to announce an online lecture by
Kacper Pobłocki
(University of Warsaw)

The Rise and Fall of Atlantic Capitalism

This lecture is going to be a part of the
American Studies Colloquium Series.

Thursday, November 8 2018
at 4:00 p.m

Where?

American Studies Center, room 317,
al. Niepodległości 22, Warsaw.

What?

This lecture explains how work, space and money have become the pillars of capitalism – a system that is now becoming a thing of the past. This epoch-making event is an opportunity to raise a number of fundamental questions once again: Did the West invent modernity, democracy and urbanization? Or maybe it just appropriated them? Was capitalism created with the British Industrial Revolution or is it as old as humanity? At what point did the people living in the territory of modern Poland enter the current of global history? Was 1989 a real breakthrough and did Americans win the Cold War? Our instinctive answers to these kinds of questions usually lead us nowhere. Due to the fact that our attention has been focused on the West for a very long time, we have also been looking at ourselves through its prism. Therefore, this talk gives the audience another mirror in which they can look at themselves from a new, global perspective.

Who?

Kacper Pobłocki holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University. He is also a graduate of University College Utrecht and was a visiting fellow at The Center for Place, Culture and Politics at CUNY (directed by David Harvey).

He published on urban movements, class and uneven development in East and Central Europe in a number of edited volumes and journals (e.g. in Critique of Anthropology or Polish Sociological Review). His dissertation “The Cunning of Class: Urbanization of Inequality in Post War Poland” won the Polish Prime Minister’s Award for Outstanding Dissertations. Actively involved in Polish and Central European urban activism from their very onset. He was the co-organizer of the first national Congress of Urban Movements in 2011 and he coauthored a legal manual for urban activists titled “A guide for the helpless: practicing the right to the city” (2013). Currently he is working on a book manuscript that will analyze the relationship between global economic shifts and trajectories of urbanization in Poland in a longue durée, comparative and non-occidental perspective. In 2017 he published “Kapitalizm. Krótka historia trwania”.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 19: Between The Mundane and the Heroic: Vietnamese Presence in State Socialist Poland

December 19, 2024

We are delighted to invite you to the fifth lecture of the American Studies Colloquium Series in the 2024/2025 Fall semester! This talk will examine the depictions of the (North) Vietnamese as freedom fighters within the context of the state socialist public sphere and the everyday life of Vietnamese students in Poland across generations. From idealized wartime reportages to mixed-race couples, the Vietnamese presence was marked by a multifaceted experience of adaptation, challenges, opportunities, and dynamic, interactive bonds with Polish society. This history continues to exert a profound influence on the contemporary Vietnamese diaspora and Polish-Vietnamese relationships.

Year 2024/2025

December 18: The Trump Transition – What is New and What is Not

December 18, 2024

Leadership Research Groupis inviting all those who would like to put the Trump transition to a presidential scholarship context and better understand the Trump transition decisions, the prospects for the future in domestic and foreign policy areas they bring, and the impact that Trump leadership may have on the political scene in Washington to a talk followed by a Q&A session by Professor Stephen Farnsworth.

Year 2024/2025

December 17: We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice

December 17, 2024

During the workshop “We Want Change NOW! The Feminist Manifesto in Theory and Practice”, Aleksandra Julia Malinowska, a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw,will delve into the history of feminist manifestos and their pivotal role in the women’s movement in the United States. We’ll explore how activists of the second wave of feminism used grassroots publications to raise awareness, voice the demands of emerging women’s groups, and build communication networks between organizations spread across the country. Together, we’ll analyze the literary techniques that make the manifesto genre a powerful tool for inspiring activist mobilization beyond the pages of the text.

American Studies Colloquium Series

December 12: Technological Imaginaries and the Universal Ambitions of Silicon Valley

December 12, 2024

Drawing on her new book, Appropriate, Negotiate, Challenge: Activist imaginaries and the politics of digital technologies (University of California Press), in this talk Ferrari shows how these discourses, which she calls “technological imaginaries”, shape how we experience digital technologies. She discusses how, for the past 30 years, Silicon Valley tech actors have produced and popularized a specific way of thinking about digital technologies, which has become mainstream. This dominant technological imaginary brings together technocratic aspirations and populist justifications. While arising out of the peculiarities of Silicon Valley and of the American 1990s, this dominant imaginary has posited its universality by presenting its tenets as if they were global, unbiased, and equally suitable for everyone, everywhere. She argues that to really curb the socio-political influence of Big Tech companies we also need to understand, critique, and resist the power of their technological imaginary.

News

ASC Library has received funding from the Social Responsibility of Science

December 12, 2024

ASC Library has received funding from the Social Responsibility of Science (SON) program — “Support for Scientific Libraries,” implemented by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.