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WELCOME! WITAJ!
Welcome to nowahuta.info, a website established to support the dissemination of results from an ongoing research project, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, following earlier funding from the HSBC Holdings of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). The project aimed to investigate the relationship between large-scale socio-economic transformations and their local, lived experiences, exploring the creation of ‘spaces of socialism’ in post-war east central Europe and analysing the contemporary challenges of globalisation and marketisation faced by the those spaces and their populations. In particular, it examined the restructuring of lives and work, economies and identities in the town of Nowa Huta, Poland under socialism and post-socialism. Nowa Huta is a town that was built for socialism, founded in 1949 and centred on Poland’s first integrated steelworks, yet was also central to socialism’s collapse in Poland. The research examined the ways in which life and work in Nowa Huta have not only been shaped by the construction and contestation of socialism and by nascent capitalism but have also shaped those processes of change. The project employed a range of discursive and ethnographic methodologies, including ‘expert’ interviews and archival work but placed a particular emphasis on developing in-depth interview work in an east central European context. The website will continue to be developed as the dissemination progresses but is intended to function as an introduction to Nowa Huta and, more broadly, to studies of post-socialist transformation at the scale of the everyday. It is my intention to develop a parallel Polish site at some point, funding permitting.
Follow the links on the left to find out more about the project and its key findings. Alison Stenning, Newcastle upon Tyne, May 2003.
Big thanks to John Couperthwaite for his assistance in setting up this website.
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