We are looking for hired a post-doctoral scholar and a graduate research assistant to be part of the research team led by dr. hab. Joshua K. Dubrow at IFiS PAN on the implementation of the international research project funded by the National Science Centre, Poland (2021/43/B/HS6/01155) entitled “The Construction of Post-Pandemic Society: Covid-19 Street Protest in Poland.” (see here for a popular description in Polish).

Here were the announcements, now closed: (a) Post-doc announcement on the IFiS PAN website; (b) Graduate Research Assistant announcement on the IFiS PAN website

About the NCN grant on post-pandemic society

Whereas theories in political sociology explain the causes of protest emergence, they do not explain well the consequences of protest. This is because many factors, besides protest, can lead to social change.

The Covid-19 pandemic challenges and pressures democratic institutions and social relations, and thus has been the subject of protests worldwide. The consequence of these challenges, pressures, and protests will be a post-pandemic society, but political sociology has yet to develop theories and methods to properly understand this near-future society’s form and direction.

This project makes the needed innovative leap that the actions and demands of street protest are subjective projections of the future, i.e. visions, which are a set of empirically observable paths toward social change. Protests, conducted by street-level actors, are attempted social constructions of reality. They reveal the hopes of social groups – e.g. various intersections consisting of precarious frontline occupations, women, and Covid skeptics, among others — and thus form a perceptual basis from which post-pandemic society will emerge.

Research questions

In this theory-driven qualitative project, we ask: In Poland, what are, and what drives, protesters’ visions of post-pandemic society?

How we will address the research questions

To address our research questions, we will construct and analyze a qualitative dataset that consists of the universe of protest events about the pandemic in Poland. We build these data from primary and secondary sources: extant protest event data, newspaper articles, and publicly available videos. From these sources we will construct detailed Protest Event Reports, from which we will extract the protestors’ visions of post-pandemic society. In addition, the project will interview ca. 20 representatives of NGOs in Poland on the Covid-19 protests and their visions of Polish society after the pandemic.

See also

• Gender, Voice, and Violence in Poland: Women’s Protests during the Pandemic, edited by Adrianna Zabrzewska & Joshua K. Dubrow
• Political Participation and Democracy
• The Meaning of Political Voice