Representing Transformations/Transforming Representations: Remaking Life and Work in Nowa Huta, Poland

Nowa Huta (meaning ‘new steelworks’) was Poland’s first socialist city, constructed from 1949 around the new Lenin Steelworks (Poland’s first integrated steelworks and the flagship project of its first communist six year plan) as a deliberate proletarian counter to bourgeois Kraków adjacent. Yet Nowa Huta was also a town of protest and militancy, central to the worker-based Solidarity movement which arose in 1980 and led eventually to the collapse of communism in Poland and beyond. Between these two poles however, there are countless other Nowa Hutas which emerge forcefully from reading texts, images and other representations of the town produced within and beyond Poland over the fifty years of the town’s history. In this paper, I use a selection of illustrative material to explore the representation of life and work in Nowa Huta and their transformation during and after communism. Through this material I discuss the repeated construction and representation of Nowa Huta and the multiple stories which can be told about this town and its place in the world, thinking through the articulations there of class, gender, generation, the state, religion and race, amongst others. In doing this, I link the experiences of Nowa Huta to the wider processes of transformation in post-socialism space and the representation of work and community in contemporary social science.

Paper presented to WES 2001: Winning and Losing in the New Economy, University of Nottingham, 11th-13th September 2001

A copy of this paper in PDF format can be downloaded here.