Agnieszka Pasieka wird für ihre Forschungen zur extremen Rechten und radikalem Nationalismus in Europa ausgezeichnet.
Recent political developments—the global rise of populist and radical right-wing parties, “Brexit,” and heated debates on immigration, to name but a few—have prompted a search for new explanations for far-right successes. Although the scholarship on the subject is increasingly interdisciplinary, anthropological investigations into the far-right have been scarce. Similarly, while there exist a rich body of research on far-right ideologies and political agendas, we know very little of the social actors who craft such agendas and put ideas into practice.
In order to fill this gap, in her work Agnieszka Pasieka examines youth far-right networks and civic activism pursued by Italian, Polish and Hungarian militants. Since 2016, she has been conducting a “multi-sited ethnography,” exploring how far-right subjectivities emerge in a variety of spaces: from music concerts through “soup kitchen” projects to lectures on philosophy. Her long-term study of and direct engagement with far-right activists allows her to make critical and novel contributions to the scholarship on the far right on the empirical, methodological and theoretical levels.
First, in exploring the phenomenon of “transnational nationalism,” she provides insights into hitherto overlooked areas of inquiry. Focusing on far-right networking, she demonstrates that what has taken to be a paradox—that is, the contemporary far-right’s simultaneous orientation towards the local and the transnational— is actually a factor behind the recent surge in the far right. The way the far-right movements operate affords young people an opportunity to be active and to be members of a community at different levels. While their activities are based locally, they are cast as being part of a broader transnational project with global ramifications and impact. She thus demonstrates that this imbrication of the local and transnational is the key to understanding the far-right appeal.
Second, her work proves the value of the ethnographic approach for the study of the far right. Unlike other methodological approaches, ethnography allows us to reconstruct the social worlds far-right activists inhabit, confront what they say with what they do, and understand them as both individuals and members of groups. In attending to the personal accounts of far-right militants and providing ethnographic insights from a variety of fieldwork encounters, she offers rich insights into social worlds unfamiliar to the broader public due to both the inaccessibility of far-right milieus and the reluctance on the part of scholars to engage with them.
Third, in focusing on the far-right activists’ moral practices and moral claims, her work contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on anthropology of politics and morality, social movements and civic and political mobilization. In arguing in favor of a more systematic research into far-right moralities and far-right social movements, she shows the importance of such investigations not only for the understanding of the far right but for the social theory more broadly. In so doing, her scholarship engages with a set of enduring issues, such as the relationship between politics and morality and the very question of what prompts people to act.
Agnieszka Pasieka hat 2012 im Fach Ethnologie an der Universität Halle-Wittenberg promoviert. Anschließend war sie wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (2012 bis 2015). Es folgte eine Stelle als Marie Sklodowska-Curie Stipendiatin am Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte der Universität Wien (2015 bis 2018), sowie zahlreiche andere Positionen als Gastprofessorin und Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin (u.a. Yale University, Dartmouth College und Central European University). Seit September 2018 ist Agnieszka Pasieka Elise Richter-Stipendiatin am Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie der Universität Wien. Neben ihrer Monografie Hierarchy and pluralism. Living religious difference in Catholic Poland veröffentlicht sie in zahlreichen Zeitschriften zum Thema politische Anthropologie und ist Co-Editorin von zwei Sammelbänden. Ihr zweites Buch, das 2023 erscheinen wird, befasst sich mit transnationalen Netzwerken von jungen Aktivist:innen der radikal rechten Szene in Europa.
Agnieszka Pasieka ist seit Oktober 2022 Vertretungsprofessorin am Lehrstuhl für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie der Universität Bayreuth.