Heterotopias of Nationalist Youth Organisations in Poland: Communitarisation and Entry/Exit System

Authors

Helena Ostrowicka, Kazimierz Wielki University, PolandFollow
Klaudia Wolniewicz-Slomka, Kazimierz Wielki University, PolandFollow

Abstract

The article presents the results of an analysis of the discourse of nationalist youth organisations in Poland. The authors have attempted to reconstruct the common “us” of two youth organisations based on the materials made available by them as well as articles in the press published in 2018 in selected journals and weeklies. This was the year when Poland celebrated its 100^th anniversary of regaining independence, which made this an exceptional time in the context of discourse about the community. The article focuses on two youth organisations – the All-Polish Youth (APY) and the National Radical Camp (NRC). The study answers the question of how the “us” community is construed within the organisation, what are its dimensions, and are they places where the two heterotopic principles are implemented: (1) The principles of openness and closedness of a community or communities, and (2) the rules for compiling several different heterogenous spaces within one organisation. This article was prepared within a research project which is in line with the so-called topographical turn in discursive research and refers particularly to the concept of heterotopia of Michel Foucault. The research showed that the discursive constructions of youth communities reflected these two heterotopic principles.

Keywords

discourse analysis, nationalist discourse, nationalist youth organisations, community, heterotopia

Author Bio(s)

Helena Ostrowicka holds a postdoctoral degree in social sciences, in the field of pedagogy. She is a university professor and serves as Head of the Chair of Research Methodology and Discourse Studies as well as Dean of Faculty of Pedagogy at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz. Her research interests focus on the interdisciplinary area of discourse studies, including problems of constructing knowledge about youth. She is the principal investigator of the research project on “Heterotopias of Citizenship: Educational Discourse and Pedagogies of Militarization in the Spaces of Youth Organizations. A Critical-Analytical and Comparative Approach.” The author of six monographs and numerous articles. Please direct correspondence to hostrowicka@ukw.edu.pl.

Klaudia Wolniewicz-Slomka, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Research Methodology and Discourse Studies at the Faculty of Pedagogy, Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz. She is a post doc in the project “Heterotopias of Citizenship. Educational Discourse and Pedagogies of Militarization in the Spaces of Youth Organizations. A Critical-Analytical and Comparative Approach.” She holds a Ph.D. degree in public policy. Her research interests focus on public policy, especially family policy, social policy on a local level, and media discourse. She has participated in many national and international research projects carried out at the University of Warsaw, Polish Academy of Sciences and University of Exeter and financed by National Science Centre and Erasmus Plus.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Centre in Poland under Grant No. 2019/35/B/HS6/01365.

Publication Date

11-12-2022

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5708

Recommended APA Citation

Ostrowicka, H., & Wolniewicz-Slomka, K. (2022). Heterotopias of Nationalist Youth Organisations in Poland: Communitarisation and Entry/Exit System. The Qualitative Report, 27(11), 2528-2545. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5708

ORCID ID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2500-9581; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8839-9113