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This book looks at the UEFA European Championship (Euro 2012) as both a crowning achievement of, and a way to sustain, the urban entrepreneurial strategy of Poznań, Poland. As the host city of the tournament almost 25 years after Poland’s transformation from a centrally planned to a market economy in 1989, the author focuses on how the local myths and traditions of resourcefulness were invoked to embed an entrepreneurial urban strategy. The book also observes how the very same tradition of resourcefulness was used by the opposition to challenge the urban policies. Contrary to the authorities' expectations, Euro 2012 triggered a discussion about the extent to which large business- and leisure-oriented urban strategy corresponds to local regime of value. Urban Politics of a Football Mega Event will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of subjects, including anthropology, ethnography, sociology of sport, geography, history, political science and European studies.
Teresa Pac provides a much-needed contribution to the discussion on shared culture as foundational to societal survival. Through the examination of common culture as a process in medieval Kraków, Poznań, and Lublin, Pac challenges the ideology of difference—institutional, religious, ethnic, and nationalistic. Similarly, Pac maintains, twenty-first century Polish leaders utilize anachronistic approaches in the invention of Polish Catholic identity to counteract the country’s increasing ethnic and religious diversity. As in the medieval period, contemporary Polish political and social elites subscribe to the European Union’s ideology of difference, legitimized by a European Christian heritage, and its intended basis for discrimination against non-Christians and non-white individuals under the auspices of democratic values and minority rights, among which Muslims are a significant target.
Football in Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe has long functioned as a carrier of the three “non-normal” socio-political drivers that were effective below the surface of modernity, including the official self-image of European political systems, since the second half of the 20th century: Tribal Politics, Imaginal Politics, and Contextual Politics. All three are trends that are currently surfacing prominently on an international and global level. Long before the return of the now proverbial “Political Tribes” by the means of populisms and neo-authoritarianisms in societies around the world, football in Central-Eastern and Eastern Europe worked as a subconscious vehicle of group insti...
The UEFA European football championship was the first European mega-event to take place in post-socialist Europe. Taking this as a departure point, this volume focuses on football as a realm of constructing and negotiating identities using rich ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth media analysis.
AnnaSznajder centers this ethnography of gendered creative practice in the lace-making community of Bobowa, Poland. Grounded in rural gender studies and feminist epistemology, Polish Lace Makers: Gender, Heritage, and Identity is a pivotal historical and modern account of the social and economic behaviors of entrepreneurial craftswomen tasked with preserving the originality and symbolic value of lace. Sznajder traces the evolving work strategies and occupational identities of this community from the early 19th nineteenth century up to the modern day, outlining the challenges of World War II, communist rule, and socialist Poland. The case studies included in this account are emulative of the larger struggle of female entrepreneurs to self-manage, innovate, create, and provide for themselves and their families. This book is recommended for scholars of anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and European studies.