HT-fakulteterna är mycket glada att kunna meddela att Elzbieta Darazkiewicz nu anslutit till oss och institutionen för kulturvetenskaper. Elzbieta beskriver sig så här:
”I completed my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2012. Before moving to Lund I have been a tenured Senior Research Fellow at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Previously I held full-time lectureship at the Maynooth University in Ireland. The core of my work constitutes political anthropology which allows me to explore such fields as international development, state-NGOs relations and most recently tensions over conspiracy theories and democracy in Europe.
I am a Principal Investigator of the ERC CONSPIRATIONS project examining conflicts over conspiracy theories in Europe. This project pushes beyond the scholarship that assumes that conspirational thinking is a problem of singular groups that endorse conspiracy theories. Rather than focussing exclusively on organizations and individuals who produce and endorse conspiracy theories, CONSPIRATIONS will also pay attention to the worlds of those who oppose them: organisations dedicated to countering misinformation, policy makers and NGOs. By expanding the scope of study from conspiracy theories to conflicts over conspiracy theories, this project will offer a major contribution to our understanding of the complicated relationship linking stakeholders separated and connected by the conspiratorial divide. Consequently, CONSPIRATIONS offers a ground-breaking study exploring the possibility that these worlds are not simply opposite but instead are mutually constitutive. Analytically, this approach goes beyond the question of who is right and what to do about it, and instead offers a deeper understanding of the conflicts themselves, which are clearly of urgent importance for contemporary Europe, as well as other parts of the world. That understanding in turn will provide better knowledge for tackling the damaging effects of the conspiratorial divides.
This project is a result of my long-term engagement with the topic of conspiracy theories. I am a PI on the CHANSE project REDACT where together with colleagues from the UK, Germany, Estonia and Croatia we analyse how digitalisation shapes the form, content and consequences of conspiracy theories. Between 2022-2023 I led a PanTruth project exploring conspiratorial milieu in Visegrad countries. Between 2018 and 2020, I have been analysing conflicts over the HPV vaccine in Ireland. The findings of that research led to several articles and an open-ed in Nature as well as a special issue ‘Does truth matter? The role of social sciences and humanities in dealing with conspiracy theories’ which I coedited with dr. Jaron Harambam (University of Amsterdam), and which appeared in Journal for Cultural Research.
In addition to researching conflicts over truth, I am also strongly interested in global political economy and democratic participation and the world of NGOs. I am an author of Institutionalised Dreams: the art of managing foreign aid (Begrhahahn, 2020) where I analyse the moral economy of foreign aid industry and examine the processes that shape Official Development Assistance structures in Eastern Europe. This book is based on extensive fieldwork among Polish aid actors and research conducted in South Sudan and Poland. Building on my extensive knowledge of Polish aid industry and its involvement in Ukraine, most recently I led a Forum on Russian’s Invasion of Ukraine that appeared in Social Anthropology Journal.”
Bästa hälsningar,
Johannes