In the Blog/Varia section we publish project-related news, such as information about conferences, workshops, information about our publications and organised events, curiosities. It is also a place where short notes prepared by students cooperating with us appear.

At Cork’s EASR Conference we participated in the exciting panel on Alternative Religiosities in the (Post)Communist East-Central European Countries: Emerging (Trans)Formations, Continuations and States of Freedom. Our contribution developed on the links between religious materialities and protest in contemporary Poland. The starting point of our presentation, titled Protest and reframing Polish Catholicism: transformation and continuity, was the reflection on the public display of religion in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We argued that while looking at the presence of religion in CEE’s public sphere, it is relevant to investigate the post-secular framework elaborated in Western academia by providing locally related context. In Poland, the link between religion and activism is a particularly rich field of analysis owing to the recent re-emergence of civil society. This re-emergence can be linked with the presence of multiple religious icons acting as specific mediators of social change. We have studied religious materialities (i.e. placards, banners, stickers, performances) engaged in protests concerning the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and refugees. We argue that the protest movements deliver new types of religious icons that are managed by affective, creative and semantic modalities of aesthetics.

Consult the programme of the conference here