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In the present work, a solution blow spun nanofibrous mat comprised of chitosan (CS) and poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) was obtained as vaginal platform for tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) to prevent sexually transmitted infections. Apart from physicochemical and mechanical analysis, the specific steps involved studies on nanofibrous mat mucoadhesive and swelling characteristics upon pH fluctuations over the physiological range. Physicochemical analysis showed uniform drug distribution within the CS/PEO mat volume and pointed toward physical interactions between the drug and polymers. TDF-loaded CS/PEO nanofibrous mat was shown potentially safe when evaluated by the MTT metabolic activity and JC-1 assays in human vaginal epithelial cells VK2-E6/E7. In vitro antiviral studies indicated inhibition efficacy of TDF-CS/PEO nanofibrous mat toward HSV-2 virus and proved the SBS process does not change the microbicidal activity of drug molecule. Fluctuations in the physiological vaginal pH range of 3.8 to 5.0 substantially affected mucoadhesive and swelling behavior of chitosan which in turn impacted drug dissolution rate from polymer carrier. The rate of permeation and accumulation of TDF in vaginal tissue differed in response to vaginal pH. Faster drug permeation assessed at pH 5.0 suggests that an increase in vaginal pH could improve TDF bioavailability at earlier time points.

This article revisits the category of self-criticism, which, as a speech act, plays a special role in the discourse of the intelligentsia, emerging from the peripheral status of Poland and from the imperative to catch up with the West. In contemporary Poland, self-criticism has revived as a discursive strategy in the context of coming to terms with the democratic transformation. For the right-wing intelligentsia, self-criticism is mainly a postulate that is addressed to political adversaries. For the left-liberal intelligentsia, self-criticism is not only a political weapon but also a strategy of introspective enunciation directed at the post-transformation society. A qualitative discourse analysis of selected acts of self-criticism performed by Polish left-liberal elites between 2013 and 2019 highlights two interconnected conflict-generating fields of debate: (1) reckoning with the neoliberal and pro-Western model of the 1989 democratic transition and (2) retribution on the post-transition intellectual elites that patronized the people and the attribution of responsibility for the Elite-People Division. The distinguished functions of self-criticism point to the political and class conflict as well as to the growing delegitimacy of the dominance of the neoliberal narrative about the Polish model of modernization.

This study examined the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 on Polish patients with depression and schizophrenia. It has been hypothesized that possible changes in symptoms may be predicted by the subjective risk perception related with the Russo-Ukraine War (RUW) as well as by temperamental traits. The study was conducted with 80 patients with schizophrenia or depression. A questionnaire measuring sociodemographic characteristics, perception of risk, temperamental characteristics, and symptoms of depression and schizophrenia were used as research tools. Symptom intensity was compared with the average symptom intensity calculated on the basis of archival symptom measurements from the three consecutive months preceding the outbreak of the RUW. Predictors of change in symptoms were also analyzed, taking into account sociodemographic variables, the level of risk perception, and temperamental traits. The results indicate the specific patterns of reactions to war danger for patients with different types of psychiatric diagnosis. Depressed patients reacted with an increase in seven symptoms related to unworthiness and/or guilt, lack of interest, and/or pleasure and pessimism. The response of schizophrenic patients was related only with an increase in positive symptoms. This study highlights the need to provide more support to psychiatric patients in acute emergencies.

This study examined the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 on Polish patients with depression and schizophrenia. It has been hypothesized that possible changes in symptoms may be predicted by the subjective risk perception related with the Russo-Ukraine War (RUW) as well as by temperamental traits. The study was conducted with 80 patients with schizophrenia or depression. A questionnaire measuring sociodemographic characteristics, perception of risk, temperamental characteristics, and symptoms of depression and schizophrenia were used as research tools. Symptom intensity was compared with the average symptom intensity calculated on the basis of archival symptom measurements from the three consecutive months preceding the outbreak of the RUW. Predictors of change in symptoms were also analyzed, taking into account sociodemographic variables, the level of risk perception, and temperamental traits. The results indicate the specific patterns of reactions to war danger for patients with different types of psychiatric diagnosis. Depressed patients reacted with an increase in seven symptoms related to unworthiness and/or guilt, lack of interest, and/or pleasure and pessimism. The response of schizophrenic patients was related only with an increase in positive symptoms. This study highlights the need to provide more support to psychiatric patients in acute emergencies.

Celem artykułu jest nakreślenie miejsc wspólnych socjologii historycznej i analizy dyskursu. Polem, gdzie synergia obu podejść może być szczególnie cenna poznawczo, są komunikacyjne relacje polskich elit i ludu. Mimo historycznie zmiennych desygnatów pojęć ludu i elit dyskursywne sposoby odnoszenia się do siebie przedstawicieli tych kategorii wykazują dynamiczną ciągłość. Empiryczna część artykułu dotyczy praktyki komunikacyjnej obecnej w dyskursie elit liberalno-lewicowych, tj. mówienia w imieniu i na rzecz tzw. klas ludowych, wprowadzania i zapośredniczania ich głosu w debacie publicznej, i jej historycznych prefiguracji. Współczesna realizacja tej praktyki została przedstawiona na przykładzie analizy audycji Świat się chwieje Grzegorza Sroczyńskiego w radio TOK FM, pt. Profesorka, nauczycielka i elektromonter – wszyscy pracujemy na taśmie, wszyscy przykręcamy śrubki z 1 listopada 2020 r.

As COVID-19 puts older people in long-term institutional care at the highest risk of infection and death, the need for home-based care has increased. Germany relies largely on migrant caregivers from Poland. Yet the pandemic-related mobility restrictions reveal the deficiencies of this transnational elder care system. This article asks if this system is resilient. In order to answer this question, the research team conducted interviews with 10 experts and randomly selected representatives of brokering and sending agencies in Germany and Poland. We interviewed 13 agencies in Germany and 15 in Poland on the agencies' characteristics, recruitment strategies, challenges of the pandemic, and impact of legal regulations in the sector. The analysis shows that the system could mobilize adaptive capacities and continue to deliver services, but its absorptive capacity is limited. To enhance resilience, policies working toward formalization and legalization of care services across national borders are required.

The power of nationalism is evident in how people perceive the world around them as ‘normal’. A national normality is constituted through education and media but also in everyday encounters with the state or state-regulated institutions in the fields of education, welfare provisions, medical care, finance and others. When people migrate between countries, their sense of ‘normality’ can become disturbed. Migration might impact how people think of their relationship to the state and its institutions. This article is based on analysis of 120 interviews with Polish migrants in the UK and Germany. It asks if migration creates a ‘post-national situation’ in which national categories are questioned and negotiated anew. The contexts of Poland, which is undergoing a return to conservative national identity, the UK and its struggle over Brexit, and Germany in its claim to European leadership, provide an instructive case for the discussion of intersections between nationalism and post-nationalism.

This article analyzes migrant narratives on masculinity through an intersectional perspective that is sensitive to spatial aspects. Drawing on research with migrants in Berlin and Munich in Germany, we unpack how (self-identified) Polish men in these cities negotiate their gender identities vis-à-vis other people whom they perceive as ethnic, religious, gender, and sexual others. We address how their social and ethnic backgrounds shape their narratives on foreign masculinities and femininities at the intersection of ethnicity and gender. In particular, we draw attention to how these negotiations are entangled with local discourses over the presence and visibility of various immigrant groups and cosmopolitan queer communities in the cities. The intersectional approach helps us to formulate how masculine identities change within the context of migration.

The article aims to present the compositional idiom of Paweł Szy-mański (b. 1954) as conceived by Andrzej Chłopecki (1950–2012), an outstanding Polish music critic and musicologist. His opinion-forming texts, written in a distinctive language, resonated widely in the Polish and international music community. The article has the character of a review, presenting quotations from Chłopecki’s texts regarded by the author as the most significant, confronted with self-reflections of the composer himself, as well as references to other researchers’ com-ments. The initial part of the article describes Chłopecki’s promotional activities in relation to Szymański’s work. As an active employee of the Polish Radio, Chłopecki was in a position to commission works, prepare programmes on the subject of the composer’s music, as well as organise a monographic festival presenting the majority of his works. The next section of the article recapitulates the first important text by this opinion-forming critic which discusses the works of Szymański, titled W poszukiwaniu utraconego ładu. „Pokolenie” Stalowej Woli [In search of lost order. The Stalowa Wola „generation”]. In it the critic emphasised the role of tonality and the Baroque as the arche-type always present in the composer’s music. The central part of the article discusses the main features of Szymański’s music, the subject of Chłopecki’s later texts; these included heterophony, bidirection-al composing, and the dialectic interplay between structure and its transformations. The last section of the article talks about the charge made by the critic against the composer, that of remaining within the same aesthetics, even though placing his compositions among the most significant and individual phenomena of postmodernist music.

The article discusses uses of dispositif analysis inspired by Michel Foucault’s late works, in a context different from the original one. The author presents the main methodological assumptions of dispositif analysis and the factors which result in its critical and interdisciplinary potential not being fully exploited at present. Based on a literature review of dispositif analysis in post-socialist Eastern Europe, the author formulates an interdisciplinary research program aimed at adapting this approach to the study of East European power networks, taking into account both its different historical, cultural, and geopolitical context – compared to the one of West European countries – and Foucault’s conception of neoliberalism. Methodological recommendations are presented in two research areas: 1) labor in the Polish post-transformation society; and 2) reactions to pedophilia in the Polish Catholic Church. Artykuł dotyczy zastosowań analizy dyspozytywu, inspirowanej przez późne prace Michela Foucaulta, w innym kontekście niż oryginalny. Autorka prezentuje główne założenia metodologiczne analizy dyspozytywu oraz czynniki, które blokują pełne wykorzystanie jej krytycznego i interdyscyplinarnego potencjału. Na podstawie przeglądu dorobku analizy dyspozytywu w postsocjalistycznej Europie Wschodniej autorka formułuje propozycję interdyscyplinarnego programu badawczego. Jego celem jest zaadaptowanie tego podejścia do badań wschodnioeuropejskich siatek władzy przy uwzględnieniu zarówno innego kontekstu historycznego, kulturowego i geopolitycznego niż w krajach Europy Zachodniej, jak i specyficznego postrzegania neoliberalizmu u Foucaulta. Rekomendacje metodologiczne są przedstawione na przykładzie dwóch obszarów badań: 1) pracy w polskim społeczeństwie potransformacyjnym i 2) reakcji na pedofilię w polskim Kościele katolickim. &nbsp

Revisualising Intersectionality offers transdisciplinary interrogations of the supposed visual evidentiality of categories of human similarity and difference. This open-access book incorporates insights from social and cognitive science as well as psychology and philosophy to explain how we visually perceive physical differences and how cognition is fallible, processual, and dependent on who is looking in a specific context. Revisualising Intersectionality also puts into conversation visual culture studies and artistic research with approaches such as gender, queer, and trans studies as well as postcolonial and decolonial theory to complicate simplified notions of identity politics and cultural representation. The book proposes a revision of intersectionality research to challenge the predominance of categories of visible difference such as race and gender as analytical lenses.

The introduction to Revisualising Intersectionality explains the proposal for a revisualising of intersectionality as a double strategy of revising intersectionality and infusing it with a stronger focus on visual perceptions of similarity and difference to understand social stratification and inequality. Haschemi Yekani and Nowicka briefly situate the book within what by now has become the transdisciplinary field of intersectionality studies.

In the conclusion of Revisualising Intersectionality, Nowicka and Haschemi Yekani underscore the need for a transdisciplinary revision of the visual anchoring of difference in scientific knowledge production. In cognitive and psychological research, the habitual use of gender or race as categories that can be accessed by relying on visual inputs needs to be questioned. In the social sciences, a careful analysis of scopic regimes of difference can help overcome simplifications both of social constructivism and of biological determinism. In analyses of cultural representation, circular explanatory models of stereotypes producing “bad images” which would be alleviated through “positive images” should be avoided. To this end, the authors suggest learning from artistic research and practice to assume another point of view and disrupt preconceived orders.

This chapter engages with seeing as a socio-cultural process and asks if it is possible to see beyond established categories. Nowicka illustrates how people struggle to order others into neatly delineated groups related to their gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Drawing on research from cognitive science and philosophy, the chapter investigates how we arrive from a messy sensory visual experience to discrete social categories. Thereby, the central interest of this chapter is the question how we could arrive at categories that better correspond to the intersectional experience of being in the world. Finally, the chapter points to the central role of attention and discusses the significance of the scientific gaze and the potential of artistic enquiry for a more intersectional form of seeing.

Postfoucauldian discourse analysis is a vigorously developing approach to discourse studies focusing on the analysis of power, discourse, knowledge and social practice. This comprises studies deriving from Michel Foucault’s thought, reinterpreting it, however, with the aim at application to an analysis of empirical data, also from the field of pedagogy and education. The purpose of this paper is to present main concepts and categories of postfoucauldian discourse analysis (e.g. enunciation, discursive formation, discursive practice, procedures for the control of discourse, dispositive, regime of truth) and guidelines for conducting research on the example of an analysis of chosen public texts concerning the debate on liquidation of middle schools in Poland as a result of the reform of education carried out by Law and Justice’ government.

This chapter discusses the post-Brexit condition from the perspective of the margin: of an outsider to Britain as well as of Britain’s marginal men, migrants from Poland. It considers anti-immigrant populism and austerity as transnational rather than national phenomena. Thereby, the chapter address the neoliberal reforms as well as the newest political context, including the advance of nationalist rhetoric, the ‘war on gender ideology’, as well as anti-immigrant populism in Poland. The chapter uses the case of Polish migrants in Britain to critically discuss how the interest in the return of migrants is interwoven with neoliberal as well as culturalist logics. These two logics represent migrants either as rational economic agents or passive victims of anti-immigrant populism. Both perspectives underestimate the dynamics of migrants’ aspirations as well as the complexity of their embeddedness in multiple locations. The lesson learnt from studying Polish migrants’ aspirations is a new perspective on the nexus of anti-immigration populism and austerity in Europe.

The arrival of refugees from predominantly Muslim countries in the core of Europe has fuelled discussions on European solidarity. This article explores the sources of solidarity in Europe in the aftermath of the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015. By focusing on migrants’ attitudes towards refugees, the article considers solidarity in light of contradictory public discourses on refugees in Europe. Drawing on data from a survey among Polish migrants residing in Germany and applying a conjoint analysis, the article demonstrates that religion and gender are the main criteria for boundary-making between the respondents and the refugees. In this process, national and ethnic identities are subordinated to the idea of belonging to an imagined Christian community. Our results suggest that new exclusionary solidarities shaped by boundary-making between Christians and Muslim refugees are being established within Europe. As a result, Islamophobia emerges as a transnational European exclusionary project evading ethnic and national boundaries.

The objective of this study was to examine the clinical characteristics of adolescents hospitalized after a suicide attempt or instrumental suicide-related behavior. Participants included thirty-six adolescents from the pediatric unit of a Polish hospital who made a nonfatal suicide attempt (SAA) or engaged in instrumental suicide-related behavior (IBA), as well as a general population sample (GPS). Psychosocial features were measured using the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (K-SADS), the Social and Occupational Functioning Assessment Scale (SOFAS), the Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire&ndash, Revised (SBQ-R), the Psychache Scale (TPS), the State&ndash, Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), the Center of Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale for Children (CES-DC), and the Prodromal Questionnaire (PQ-16). The SAA group scored significantly higher than the IBA group and the GPS in modules related to irritability and anhedonia, voice hallucinations and delusions, suicidal acts, thoughts and ideation, and medical lethality. Additionally, the SAA scored higher on the SBQ-R and PQ-16 compared to the IBA group and the GPS. Although anxiety, mental pain, and depressive symptoms could not independently distinguish between the SAA and IBA groups, psychotic symptoms were more frequently present within the SAA group. The above symptoms may be important to consider when screening for suicide risk in the general population.

The institutionalized inclusion of the Freie Wohlfahrtspflege in state social policy is not only a special feature of the political system in Germany, but is also seen as a model of success. This study examines social services provided by migrant organizations in terms of their scope, quality, and the conditions of provision.

This contribution looks back at the last years of the conviviality debate which attempts to grasp the chimerical nature of mundane human encounters. It uses the term ‘fantasy’ to point to how conviviality emerges in the literature as an imaginary of the relationship between me/us and them/others. It argues that this imaginary is embedded in the Western modern normative order that perceives of an individual as a collaborating social being. It argues that shifting of the debate’s attention away from collaboration of individuals towards sociality would be productive and allow us to address issues otherwise omitted, such as relations of family, friendship, care, intimacy, private sphere, power and identity and gender relations. In turn, Thinking of conviviality beyond the Western modern imaginary could thus help us it developing the full potential of the term conviviality.