Dr. Krzysztof Świrek

Krzysztof Świrek - doctor of sociology and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw, where he lectures on classical sociological theory and holds seminars on critical social thought and visual discourse among other topics. Świrek published the book 'Theories of Ideology at the Junction of Marxism and Psychoanalysis' (Warsaw, 2018, in Polish), and several papers in Polish and international journals. He is a member of the editorial team of the journal View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture.

Research Project

Hidden Class Particularism in Human Rights Discourse? Polish Case and Global Right-wing Populist Strategies

During recent years, much attention is devoted to the relation between right-wing populism and the question of citizenship and human rights. Right-wing populists present themselves as champions of the 'common man', and attack rights consensus as based on exclusion of moral majority's point of view.

The aim of this project is to analyse how certain uses of the rights and citizenship discourse can produce exclusions that can, in consequence, play into the hands of right-wing populists. I will devote special attention to the Polish case to present how certain understanding of democracy and human rights, developed by liberal-democratic elites during 1980s and 1990s, actually excluded working classes from politics. The understanding of democratic order that was connected mainly to political and not social rights pushed the notion of citizenship in distinctively middle-class direction. This elitist understanding of democracy was subsequently prone to critique, which could use discourse of human rights and citizenship as an example of elitist appropriation of universalist values.

The wider commitment of the project is a conviction that in order to tackle the right-wing populist appropriation of the working classes representatives' position, democracies need to tackle the ‘class blindness’ of rights and citizenship discourse.