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We are observing how contemporary failure regimes increasingly challenge ignorance and social injustice, and how this opens expectations for public policy to move beyond effectiveness and to pursue more emancipatory and progressive aims. Policy reinterpretations and expectations of failure however, are not coming solely from critical and alternative groups in the society. They are first and foremost political, which raises the question how does the moral economy and epistemology of just futures unfold? What are the effects of political exploitation and contamination? Our answer is to review political risks of emancipatory activism in abortion debates, which manifest high levels of polarization and contestation in relation to reproductive justice and human rights. We map out various hazards, showing how they produce what we term post-failure, and sustain emancipation fantasies and alternative policy futures that are linked with oppression effects. With this exploration we see that addressing ignorance and social injustice in policymaking has never been more essential, yet also unpredictable and convoluted in the political risks that it poses.

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The main aim of this paper is to identify the anticipated political and social consequences for the security of Poland and its citizens due to the presence of hate speech in public discourse. A morphological method was used in the research. The paper consists of an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion. Introduction outlines the research problem and presents elements of research methodology. The second part provides examples of hate speech against refugees, migrants, national minorities, people with different culture, skin color, religion, while the third part characterizes attitudes and behaviors expressed in hate speech against LGBT people. The fourth part characterizes examples of hate language used in the political debate taking place in Poland. The conclusion summarizes the research results obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who gets to benefit from failure is a hot topic in recent research on science and innovation. This article articulates the phenomenon of failure privilege on the terrain of public policy, that is, circumstantial and institutionally ingrained dispositions to use policy downfalls, derailments, and crises as resources of policy action, tools of integration, and dynamism. Building on analyses of policy failures, the article advances a typology of three forms of privilege: exploitation, (in)visibilization, and projection of policy futures. It brings illustrations from abortion policymaking in Poland. Here, failure privilege interacts with a bio-political and culturally polarized setting that further blends neoliberal mechanisms of failing with post-Communist transformation of cultures of failure. This leads to the argument that exploitation and controversial interventions in public policy demand legitimacy that is today constructed by advancing imaginaries and models of failure that allow actors to both visibilize new futures and advance a policy stalemate. Failure is a powerful resource of integration and even surveillance, as well as a factor furthering the politics of waiting. Redefining it is a crucial policy win and entails complex and implicit mechanisms impacting policy agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European migrant crisis constitutes one of the greatest challenges of the second Decade of the 21st century. Controlled by the populist Law and Justice, the Polish government has been one of the few to oppose receiving refugees, although it is obliged to through the cooperation of EU states. The authors analyzed 852 parliamentary speeches of 24 Polish political leaders since 2011 to 2019. Considering the analysis results, it is possible to conclude that the more severe the crisis became, the more dynamically the number of reports on the migrant crisis increased in parliamentary discourse. The research confirms that the two biggest parties present dramatically disparate views on the issue. The study also confirms that the views and declarations of the analyzed political leaders are compatible with the views of their electorates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 2015 up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Polish citizens have undergone a major decline in their willingness to allow foreigners to reside in Poland. The following text empirically investigates whether antipathy to newcomers is driven more by cultural or economic concerns, and what role the ethnicity of immigrants plays in this antagonism. The findings suggest that the ethnicity of immigrants is significant in both the salience of the expressed hostility and in the importance given to individual factors. When considering the acceptance of immigrants of different ethnicity, Poles are most concerned about preserving their national culture, whereas worries about the burden on the national economy are uppermost when considering ethnically similar newcomers. Antipathy against ethnically similar immigrants is also much weaker than against those of different ethnicity. The over-time comparison tells us that support for the government, religiosity, and opposition to universalism values became the most important predictors of restrictionism after 2015. We assume that the increase in anti-immigration attitudes was not that much caused by the unprecedented wave of immigration, but rather by the rule of the nationalist-conservative government which politicized the issue of non-European migration and contributed to the change of public discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ethnological Forum / Etnoloska Tribina is the property of Etnoloska Tribina / Ethnological Forum and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article analyses a popular survey on national identity in Poland. However, the analysis of the survey is a pretext to remind one of the limitations of crude quantitative methods and to look at the Polish national identity itself. The article shows that the survey questions are far from unambiguous, and respondents might attribute different meanings to them. The survey does not "measure" national identity existing in the world, rather it serves to maintain the hegemonic concept of Polishness. It diminishes the significance of Catholicism and the perceived biological dimension of Polishness. It ignores public sentiment linking Whiteness and Polishness, contributing to maintaining the dominant image of Polishness as free of racism. Under the guise of objective research, the survey is one of the elements sustaining the image of a relatively open and inclusive Polishness. Referring to my own qualitative research and recent literature on the topic, I argue that Polish identity must be seen in terms of selective racism without racism—that is, it is an identity based on racial premises but which at the same time neglects its racial character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]