• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• Research data close
• Other research products close
• Jagiellonian University Repository close
• Religions close
• OpenAIRE close

Whilst Poland appears today as a paradigmatic example of a homogeneous, exclusive national and cultural identity, reinforced by the hegemonic historical policy of a semi-authoritarian state, it is also challenged by Polish minority histories (civilian, multi-ethnic, non-Catholic, women). The main concern of the present article is the plural ‘Polishness’ that emerges from the constellation of these non-default histories. To examine the frictions of historical narratives in action, authors use spaces of historical museums as a field of observation, perceiving them as memory agents fostering not only confrontational but also negotiative memory politics. To identify situations in which tensions between the ‘central’ Polishness and its unorthodox variants are particularly evident, the paper takes a look at ‘non-central’ Polish territories i.e. ‘post-German’ areas, characterized by a complex heterogeneous past in which Germanness and Polishness, but also ‘Silesianness’ or ‘Borderlandness’ mutually clash and dialogue. Analysis of selected exhibitions’ construction reveals peculiarities of different local contexts in transitional spaces and strategies of resolving creeping conflicts between ‘the Polishness’ and plural, peripheral ‘Polishnesses’. As authors argue, these case studies – instead of a static model of open memory conflict and binaries – offer dynamic models of memory, and allow to introduce the concept of memory frictions.

This article focuses on the first historical museum in Serbia, established in Sombor in 2019 (the Museum of the Danube Swabians), with an exhibition devoted to the presence of Germans in Vojvodina. The artefacts presented at the exhibition, left behind by the Germans who used to live in Vojvodina, have been recognised as part of Serbia’s difficult heritage (the term coined by Sharon Macdonald). The article analyses the permanent exhibition and the museum’s efforts to involve the local residents in creating said exhibition. The article also asks whether the museum in Sombor can shape the collective identity of Serbs and undermine its ethno-nationalist character.

The essay investigates the notion of queer heritage with regard to Central Europe and identifies a number of challenges related to the process of researching queer art history and heritage in Central Europe. Having addressed the status of largely “queer-philic” Western historiography, the paper offers a brief discussion of the Józef Czapski Pavilion in Krakow which is seen as an illustration of the problematic condition of queer heritage in Central Europe. Finally, by bringing the example of the 2017 show Dziedzictwo (Heritage), the essay attempts to offer the region-specific definition of queer heritage.

Landscapes are socially produced and reproduced spaces. This is easily recognizable for large-scale urban groups with built environments that dominate living places. But it also pertains to all types of societies and cultures, even small-scale hunter–gatherers, once the ontological beliefs structuring landscape perception and use are acknowledged. The foragers of south–central and southern California and the Great Basin illustrate this fact. They maintained a widely shared ontological perspective supported by a fundamental cognitive postulate. This is that supernatural power, the principle causative agent in the universe, was differentially distributed among individuals and places. The distribution of power, revealed by certain geomorphological features and natural events, structured their perceptions of landscape. These perceptions were expressed in ritual and symbolism, including petroglyphs and pictographs as durable manifestations of ceremonies on the landscape. The ontological relationship between power and landscape explains a longstanding question in hunter–gatherer archaeology: Why were rock writing sites created at specific locations? It also explains another equally significant but rarely considered and related problem: Why do some localities have massive quantities of rock writings that dwarf most other sites? The landscape symbolism of and the placement of sites by Native Californian and Great Basin tribes is explained by reference to their shared ontological beliefs, illustrating how they structured their ritual practices and archaeological record.

The topic of cultural heritage is the subject of many interdisciplinary studies. So far, these studies have focused on the issues of classifying particular types of heritage, their functions and benefits, components and determinants. However, relatively less attention was paid to the dimension of a methodical approach to education and rebuilding cultural identity through heritage. Meanwhile, generational changes, especially in the dimension of knowledge perception, indicate such a need. The aim of this article is to present the perspective of using open innovations in the transfer of cultural heritage used in shaping cultural identity and education. Our review and conceptual article is an attempt to draw attention to the problem of changes in the perception of cultural heritage by generations born in the era of the digital revolution and the need to take these changes into account in heritage education. Taking these conditions into account allowed the authors to develop a model for generating open innovation in the outside-in process and then to develop a model for making it available through the inside-out process. The role of education in this process was also emphasized.

This book aims at conducting a comprehensive diagnosis and evaluation of the achievements, challenges and prospects of Polish intelligence studies (IS). Against the background of global intelligence studies, the popularity of this research field has been growing in Poland for two decades. However, research activities and their outcomes have been highly dispersed and unstructured, most often carried out by single researchers or small teams. The lack of a vehicle integrating the scattered research foci and entities in the IS area – in the form of a website, a flagship journal or a cyclical conference – furthers an identity crisis and organizational dispersion. We propose an in-depth systematization of how intelligence services and their activities are investigated in Poland. We carry out an intellectual inventory of this area, analysing key themes, threads and products. We consider Polish IS as a whole, looking at dominant research trends, identifying degrees of insights into specific aspects of IS, highlighting topics which have not yet been sufficiently investigated, and suggesting issues that deserve a detailed examination. We present the centres where Polish IS have been developing, treating them as equally important, with each of them having its own vital role to play, “spécialité de la maison” and achievements. Concurrently, we argue that a significant atomization of the IS epistemic community is one of its core weaknesses. The conclusions drawn from the research presented in this study are far from optimistic. However, they should not be treated as “sounding the alarm”; rather, this book is meant as a kind of “call to arms”.