Visiting Scholar Presentation

“Learned Helplessness or Forced Resourcefulness?

Coping with Poverty in the Post-Collective State Farms of Russia and Poland”

Presentation of research by UCL SSEES Polish Visiting Scholar Piotr Binder (Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw).

The presentation will be followed by a drinks reception. All welcome.  

Poland and Russia are neighbours with a long and complicated history of mutual relations, countries that since early 1990s have followed very different routes of systemic changes and social transformations. Nevertheless, the consequences of some of the ideological projects introduced in both countries have lasted significantly longer than the old regimes, despite the efforts of free-market oriented enthusiasts of the new era.

One of them was collective farming in all its forms, something that came to the attention of social researchers in Russia and Poland, in most cases, only after the farms themselves were formally liquidated. The communities where the state farms were located were soon described as epicentres of social problems, social exclusion and dysfunctions, where communist/socialist authorities had successfully generated homo sovieticus, a group that represents a clear example of learned helplessness, that is not only unable, but unwilling, to function without external (state) support, and in a broader sense constitutes a burden to real market democracy.

The talk is based on a recently published monograph “Youth and Poverty.  Strategies of Coping with Poverty in the Post-Collective State Farms of Russia and Poland” (IFiS Publishers, 2014) [in Polish]. The idea behind this book was a dialogue with the attitude to the communities of post-collective state farms that dominated Polish academic discourse since the early 1990s, with theoretical categories popular in this area of study (including learned helplessness and homo sovieticus), and also with researchers who have kept their influential positions in public debate often without presenting empirical evidence.

Piotr Binder is an Assistant Professor (Adiunkt) at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw), where he is an active fieldwork researcher and also teaches a course on Qualitative Research Methods. His research interests focus on various aspects of the European part of the post-soviet space, sociology of poverty and methods of qualitative inquiry.