Introduction

To create just and fair democratic societies, gender equality must be achieved. Yet, in societies around the world, past and present, gender equality is elusive.

To achieve equality, we need knowledge of the world, past and present. We need to know what the world looked like then and what it looks like now. We need to tell the story of how generations have struggled to make their societies equal, then and now.

Welcome to the project Women, Politics, and Protest in Central and Eastern Europe. This website is designed to provide basic knowledge for audiences unfamiliar with the history and current issues of gender and politics in these regions.

We tell the story of gender and political change from the rise of Communism, the revolutions of 1989, and on to the present day within the following topics:

About the Authors

The website’s authors are from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences:

Adrianna Zabrzewska is an interdisciplinary feminist researcher, a Fulbright scholar, and a children’s literature translator. She has a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School for Social Research (Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences). Adrianna is the co-editor of Gender Quotas in the Post-Communist World: Voice of the Parliamentarians and Gender, Voice, and Violence in Poland: Women’s Protests during the Pandemic (both from IFiS PAN Publishers and with Joshua K. Dubrow).

Magdalena Grabowska is a sociologist and a professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. She holds a doctoral degree from Women and Gender Studies Department, Rutgers University. Between 2010-2014, she was a European Commission Marie Curie International Re-Integration Fellow at the University of Warsaw. She is the author of the book Broken Genealogy: Social and Political Women’s Activism after 1945, and Contemporary Women’s Movement in Poland (2018, Scholar Scientific Publishers). Her academic interests span history of emancipation movements in Central and Eastern Europe, post-coloniality, post-socialism, and transnational feminist movement. She also conducts engaged and activist research on violence and sexual violence, reproductive rights, women’s equality, feminist and queer social mobilizations. She is a co-founder of the Foundation on Equality and Emancipation STER.

Joshua Dubrow is a PhD from the Department of Sociology of The Ohio State University, a Professor of Sociology from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), Project Coordinator for Cross-national Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training program (CONSIRT.osu.edu) and a lecturer at the Graduate School for Social Research of IFiS PAN. His research is on politics and inequality. His work can be found at https://politicalinequality.org/ and https://www.occams.press/.

Irina Tomescu-Dubrow is a PhD from the Department of Sociology of The Ohio State University, a Professor of Sociology from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN), the Director of the Graduate School for Social Research of IFiS PAN, and co-Director of Cross-national Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training program (CONSIRT.osu.edu). She is the lead author of Dynamics of Class and Stratification in Poland (2018, CEU Press) and Subjective Experience of Joblessness in Poland (2019, Springer).

Funding for this website comes from the Title VI Comprehensive National Resource Center grant from the International and Foreign Language Education division of the U.S. Department of Education, awarded to The Ohio State University’s Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (CSEEES).