Aleksandra Fila MA

Aleksandra Fila MA

University Assistand prae.doc

Institut für Internationale Entwicklung
Sensengasse 8, 4. Stock
1090 Wien

Mail: aleksandra.maria.fila@univie.ac.at                                         
T: +43-1-4277-641-20

Project description:

In my PhD project, „Young wolves” and „domestic hens”. The feminist political economy of creativity in the Polish neoliberal transformation.”, I combine critical theories of neoliberalism with feminist everyday creativity scholarship while engaging with Poland’s ‘long ‘90s’.  I explore the issue of creativity from the perspective of the commons and discuss the common spaces of everyday creativity and communal creative practices as vital resources for marginalised groups, particularly working-class women. More specifically, I focus on the consequences of the state-owned industry's collapse – or restructuration – for the working-class women from middle-sized Polish cities. I explore how the enclosures of state companies’ “non-productive” parts, previously mediating the reproduction of everyday life and creative practices, were experienced and coped with. While examining the dispossessions of the communal forms of everyday creativity, I also inquire into the processes of re-valuation of different kinds of labour. I deconstruct hegemonic, entrepreneurial and market-oriented modes of creativity that gained prominence after 1989 – embodied by a figure of “young wolf”, and trace the processes of devaluation and housewifisation of women’s labour, symbolically represented by the “domestic hen” figure.