Networked Cultures of Protest Now and Then: What Legacy of Dissent Can Tell Us about Fragility and Resilience of Protest Movements Today?

A seminar by Dr Piotr Wciślik (Polish Academy of Sciences) as a part of the School of Language, Literatures and Cultural Studies Seminar Series (SLLCS).

What makes social movements thicken, rather than thin out, over time? What is the role of social media? These questions have been central to the debate on networked protests that proliferated in the global 2010s but largely failed to achieve a lasting change. In this debate that connects the networked forms of organisation, commitment to horizontalism and prefigurative politics, the fragility of the contemporary protest culture is often contrasted with the resilience of the dissident culture of protest in state socialist Central Europe before 1989. But has the dissident experience been well understood?
In this talk, based on collaborative research with Barbara J. Falk, I will disentangle the history and the present of the networked protest cultures in order to rethink lessons for the future. The talk will offer a critical reading of the contemporary debate on cultures of networked protest, and its peculiar rendering of the dissident experience. Next, it will explain why samizdat activism matters for that debate. Finally, it will examine the Polish case to conclude that media-driven horizontalism, rather than an “infantile disease”, is essential for building a protest culture that is resilient. However, as movements mature, thick horizontalism acquires an inertia difficult to reconcile with the more traditional institutions and forms of political action.
Bio:
Piotr Wciślik is assistant professor at the Digital Humanities Centre of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he develops interdisciplinary approaches in research on dissent and independent culture in Poland and Central Europe in the Cold War. He is the author of Dissident Legacies of Samizdat Social Media Activism Unlicensed Print Culture in Poland 1976-1990 (Routledge 2021). During his stay at TCD, as Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange and Trinity Long Room Hub Fellow, he is cooperating with the digital humanities scholars in the Hub and with the Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies, working towards a data-rich history of unlicensed print culture in Poland.

The School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies Seminar Series (SLLCS) promotes Literary and Cultural Studies, including political and social thought, narratology and imagology, film, textual and visual studies, questions surrounding language learning and translation studies, and also practice-led research. We encourage comparative, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, as our intellectual inquiry is in the service of national and international debate and knowledge advancement, particularly on the construction of identity and otherness in literature and culture. The seminar series provides a forum for the dissemination and exchange of current and developing research from staff and postgraduate researchers within the school, and also from national and international guest speakers.

Please indicate if you have any access requirements, such as ISL/English interpreting, so that we can facilitate you in attending this event. Contact: ahmedm4@tcd.ie