Bohdana Kurylo (UCL) and Tadeusz Wojtych (Cambridge) are the co-winners of the BASEES PGR Best Article Prize
BASEES is happy top announce the winners of the PGR Best Article Prize.
The co-winners this year are Tadeusz Wojtych (Cambridge) and Bohdana Kurylo (UCL)
Tadeusz Wojtych, ‘Politics, Community, and Entertainment: The Reception of Soviet Guitar Poetry in Poland’, Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas 69, no.2, (2021): 183–208. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27153357.
Wojtych’s article offers an insightful analysis of an important, if rarely discussed, aspect of twentieth-century Polish culture: the reception of Soviet guitar poetry (avtorskaia pesnia). Based on extensive interviews, Wojtych’s excellent study brings this part of Polish musical culture into dialogue with similar phenomena in other post-communist countries. Combining sensitive use of oral history with astute understanding of its limitations, this piece draws our attention to the importance of local and personal perspectives on transnational political history as represented in popular cultural practices. The jury was especially impressed with the care and deep self-awareness demonstrated in the analysis of the oral history sources, as well as with Wojtych’s command of a wide range of theoretical and historical sources. Elegantly written and clearly structured, Wojtych’s article poses important questions, relevant for several overlapping fields: musical, public and political history; memory, counter-culture, and national identity studies; and cultural anthropology.
Bohdana Kurylo, ‘Counter-populist performances of (in)security: Feminist resistance in the face of right-wing populism in Poland’, Review of International Studies, 48, no.2, (2022): 262-281. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210521000620
In this rigorous and well-researched article, Bohdana Kurylo puts forward an original argument that feminist activists can resist right-wing populist constructions, namely on (in)security, by selectively and strategically appropriating them. Her case-study examines how feminist movements in Poland subverted the dominant, elitist, and exclusionary constructions of (in)security exemplified during the Independence March through introducing their own counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security around the 2020-21 Women’s Strike pro-choice protests. Kurylo convincingly shows that they did so by establishing ‘the feminist people’ as an alternative collective political subject of security, and by presenting society’s marginalised groups, among them the LGBTQ+ community and disabled people, as the real ‘people in danger’. Building on Judith Butler’s theory of embodied and plural performativity, Kurylo makes her own impressive contribution to critical theory by expanding existing frameworks for analysing the interaction of populism, security and feminism. The article thus holds significance to several fields including Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, Social Sciences, International Relations, and Gender Studies.
Highly commended (runner up):
Jessica Lovett, ‘“The Fate of the Nation”: Population Politics in a Changing Soviet Union (1964–1991)’. Nationalities Papers, (2022): 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2022.27
The jury would like to officially commend this impressive article that builds on extensive archival work and skilfully examines the contradictions of Soviet population control policies in various parts of the USSR.