Religious Materialities, Aesthetics, and Protests in Urban Poland: Religious Icons and the Re-Emergence of Civil Society
Issued Date
2023-01-01
Resource Type
ISSN
17432200
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85181960307
Journal Title
Material Religion
Volume
19
Issue
5
Start Page
506
End Page
524
Rights Holder(s)
SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
Material Religion Vol.19 No.5 (2023) , 506-524
Suggested Citation
Zawiejska N., Maćkowiak A.M. Religious Materialities, Aesthetics, and Protests in Urban Poland: Religious Icons and the Re-Emergence of Civil Society. Material Religion Vol.19 No.5 (2023) , 506-524. 524. doi:10.1080/17432200.2023.2285568 Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/20.500.14594/95677
Title
Religious Materialities, Aesthetics, and Protests in Urban Poland: Religious Icons and the Re-Emergence of Civil Society
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Author's Affiliation
Corresponding Author(s)
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Abstract
In this paper, we reflect on the creativity and social change nexus in urban Poland by focusing on the recent religion-linked materialities in Kraków. Such materialities, or religious icons, are directly involved with transformations and the emergence of a new type of Polish civil society and activism. Therefore, we elaborate on the notion of religious icons involved in the recent re-emergence of the protest culture in Poland. We reframe them in terms of powerful socio-religious mediators that open the way to re-imagining and claiming new (re)configurations between social and religious fields in Poland. We acknowledge the role played by affective, creative, and semantic modalities of aesthetics vis-à-vis social change and suggest rethinking the link between creativity and religion, which we consider emblematic of current epistemologies of post-secular urbanities in Poland. We claim that the religion-creativity nexus should be included in the analytical framework examining contemporary developments of Polish civil society in general and social movements in particular.