The Political Aesthetics of Justice and the Moral Autopsy of Communism in Poland after 1989
DATE: Friday, 22 May 2026, 12 noon UK time
SPEAKER: Dr Saygun Gökarıksel
ABSTRACT: While communism was proclaimed dead in Eastern Europe around 1989, archives of communist secret services lived on. They became the site of judicial and moral examination of lives, suspicions of treason or 'collaboration' with the criminalized communist regime, and contending notions of democracy, truth, and justice. Drawing on my ethnographic and archival research in Poland, which culminated in my recently released book, Moral Autopsy: Truths, Secrets, and the Judicial Afterlives of Communist Secret Archives (Cambridge University Press, 2025), this Masterclass explores how we might think about the politics of aesthetics in the contentious trajectory of postsocialist transitional justice, which is largely dominated by conservative nationalist groups and rests on what I call as the “moral autopsy” mode of examining communism as a dead past and ideology of treachery and criminality. In particular, I will focus on the experimental post-theater play Small Narration (Mała Narracja), performed by Wojtek Ziemilski about his grandfather, a popular cabaret singer who was accused of being a treacherous communist spy shortly before his death. Through a close study of this play, I explore how we might attend to the power of art to “flesh out” the tensions and struggles underlying transitional justice and fashion alternative, embodied forms of justice and history to counter rightwing sovereignty politics.
BIO: Saygun Gökarıksel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bogazici University, Istanbul. Situated in Eastern Europe and the Middle East/Western Asia, his research and writing engage the politics of law, violence, justice, and memory, especially the field of transitional justice and human rights, from a critical legal and political anthropological perspective. He is the author of Moral Autopsy: Truths, Secrets, and the Judicial Afterlives of Communist Secret Service Archives (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which is based on his longstanding archival and ethnographic research in Poland on the contentious trajectory of postsocialist transitional justice. After finishing his MA at the Jagiellonian University's Centre for European Studies (2003), Gökarıksel completed his PhD in Anthropology at the City University of New York, Graduate Center (2015). In 2022-2023, Gökarıksel was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His writings have appeared in journals and forums across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the US including Comparative Studies in Society and History, South Atlantic Quarterly, Cultural Critique, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Dialectical Anthropology.
REGISTRATION: To register, email Janek Gryta (j.gryta@southampton.ac.uk) by 5 pm on 20 May.