KNSS Koło Naukowe Studentów Socjologii Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego

03/08/2026

Enjoy reading the report from the Living Chess workshop organised during our most recent Communication & Culture conference in Wrocław!

A report from the Living Chess workshop at the 26th International Conference “Communication & Culture”, University of Wrocław: how twenty-two participants produced a full game through suggestions, curation and weighted voting.

09/06/2026

Many thanks to everyone who joined us for the
26th Annual International Conference Communication & Culture.

Across two days, we shared presentations, discussions, workshops, questions, doubts, and many small moments that do not always fit into a programme, but make a conference alive.

Thank you to all speakers, participants, guests, organizers, and friends of the conference for your attention, generosity, and presence.

Fingers crossed for C&C27!

PS: The Book of Abstracts will soon be available in the comments, with more insight into the presentations and contributions from this year’s edition.

09/06/2026

The second day of C&C26 continued with individual presentations moving across memory, identity, digital culture, community engagement, protest, and ethical responsibility.

Iryna Zelyk presented “Displacement and Memory: Life Stories of Individuals Relocated from Eastern Poland to Western Ukraine (USSR),” exploring how members of the Lemko community remember displacement, journey, resettlement, trauma, and collective identity.

Mariami Kublashvili presented “The Social Context of Non-Religious Identities in Orthodox Christian Georgia,” examining how non-religious adults construct and manage identity in a society where Orthodox Christianity remains deeply tied to national belonging and moral legitimacy.

Dibya Banerjee presented “Instagram’s Impact on Shifting Self-Perception in Indian Women, Self-Representation, and Bodily Practices,” looking at how young Indian women negotiate body image, self-surveillance, comparison, resistance, and visibility on Instagram.

Bridget Hawryluk presented “Aim Zero: Researchers’ Perspectives on Early Engagement to Inform Research Direction,” reflecting on how communities might be meaningfully involved before formal research begins, so that research questions are shaped closer to lived needs.

Kat Hogan presented “Histories of Resistance: Collective Identity and Protest in Poland and the United States,” comparing protest media, collective memory, censorship, and generational trauma in relation to the Vietnam War protests and the Polish Solidarity movement.

Bushra Sabra presented “The Quranic Social Contract in Surah Al-Ma’idah: Covenants, Civilization, and Human Responsibility,” offering a sociological reading of covenant, responsibility, justice, and social trust as foundations of ethical coexistence.

Many thanks to all presenters for their thoughtful contributions to C&C26.

09/06/2026

It is becoming a meaningful tradition to host dr Agnieszka Bandura from the Academy of Art and Design in Wrocław together with her PhD students. This year, Panel V continued that exchange through artistic research concerned with otherness, perception, image, place, vulnerability, and the politics of visibility.

Introduced by dr Agnieszka Bandura, the panel drew on questions developed within the BIP programme “The other(ness) in art and aesthetics”, including the “an-other gaze” and the “aesthetics of omission.”

Miles Hall presented “Painting Contra Monolithic Digital Simulacra,” reflecting on painting, AI-generated imagery, desire, disembodiment, and the critical force of material artistic practice against technological manipulation.

Aqeel Abbas presented “Between Places and Identities: How Place Shapes Perception and Artistic Identity,” exploring how movement between cultural environments reshapes attention, aesthetic preference, and artistic decision-making through painting, digital work, video installation, EEG, and eye-tracking.

Leila Moosavi presented “Vaccination Against Brainwashing: Contemporary Art Strategies for the Prevention of Psychological Manipulation,” examining how contemporary art can make propaganda, emotional conditioning, cultic structures, and manipulation perceptible without turning art into simple instruction.

Andranik Sahakyan presented “LandEscape: Landscapes of Absence,” an artistic research project on displacement, memory, emigration, and the ways absent landscapes continue to live through perception, belonging, and visual reconstruction.

Through painting, installation, biometric methods, video, fragmented landscapes, and material experimentation, the presentations opened questions that cannot always be answered by words alone.

09/06/2026

The second day of C&C26 opened in Room 203 with Living Chess: A Collective Chess Experience, facilitated by dr Azad Heydarow and Firangiz Aslanova from the Intelligent Systems MA Programme, University of Bonn.
After being presented in earlier editions of the conference as a developing project, this year Living Chess entered the programme as a live workshop with 22 participants.

The session turned chess into a collective decision-making environment. Participants worked in teams, proposed moves, voted under time pressure, and experienced how trust, expertise, hierarchy, humour, hesitation, and improvised leadership emerge when people have to decide together.

The debriefing opened the workshop beyond the game itself. Reflections from Professor Krista Longtin and dr Mateusz Karolak helped connect the experience to broader questions of experiential learning, rapid trust formation, group work, institutional pressure, and the fragile space between comfort, uncertainty, and collective action.

Many thanks to all participants for entering the experiment so openly!

08/06/2026

The first day of C&C26 closed with a historically and theoretically dense panel on symbols, rituals, exile, diplomacy, and the making of cultural meanings.

Adam M. Aksnowicz revisited the Polish exile state and its armed forces during and after the Second World War, questioning inherited national and military historiographies through a cultural-symbolic lens.

Boris Fonarkov turned to early modern Sino-Russian diplomacy, showing how ceremony, bodily conduct, and ritual were not ornamental details, but part of political communication itself.

F. Berkant Yavuz examined the history of anti-positivist epistemology, asking how debates on culture, rationality, construction, and incommensurability became central to the humanities and social sciences.

A sharp closing panel for the first day, bringing historiography into contact with political memory, diplomatic practice, and the unstable life of concepts.

08/06/2026

The first day of the conference continued with individual presentations that moved across q***r cultural memory, literary-philosophical interpretation, and participatory art with migrant and international communities.

Adam Kruk, MA
Icons of Chilean Q***r Culture: Characteristics, Significance, and Contexts

Adam Kruk presented research on Chilean q***r culture across three historical moments: the Pinochet dictatorship, the democratic transition, and the contemporary period. Drawing on archival work, oral-history interviews, participant observation, and audiovisual analysis from his 2025 research residency in Santiago de Chile, the presentation explored how q***r cultural practices, figures, spaces, and memories have moved from the margins into broader cultural circulation, while being re-signified through literature, visual arts, film, and heritage narratives.

Ruixia Sun
The Abyss Is Gazing into You: An Analysis of Science Fiction Flowers for Algernon under Nietzschean Framework

Ruixia Sun offered a philosophical reading of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon through Nietzschean concepts such as the Übermensch, herd morality, nobility, and self-overcoming. Her presentation focused on Charlie Gordon’s struggle for dignity, recognition, and internal coherence, tracing the tensions between intelligence, vulnerability, social cruelty, and the fragile boundary between human aspiration and collapse.

Irem Gul, MA
Culture in Pieces: A Collage Workshop for Migrant and International Communities in Wrocław

Irem Gul presented a participatory art workshop developed in collaboration with NOMADA, bringing together people from different migrant and international communities in Wrocław. The project uses collage as a shared language for people whose experiences may not easily pass through words alone. Through images, fragments, photographs, magazines, and personal materials, the workshop opens a space for migration stories, social connection, intercultural exchange, and collective reflection.

08/06/2026

In his Key Note Speech,

“Pearce Was Right: Communication Is More Complex Than We Thought,”

Professor Parrish-Sprowl invited us to think about communication as a complex, relational, and deeply consequential process through which social worlds, health practices, institutions, and possibilities for action are continuously shaped.

08/06/2026

Panel II continued the first day of C&C26 with a powerful discussion on health communication, institutional responsibility, women’s experiences in healthcare, and the ethical possibilities of empathy.
The session opened with Krista Longtin, PhD, whose presentation, “Qualitative and Critical Research Methods for Women’s Health Communication,” traced the methodological transformation of patient-provider communication research. Their contribution showed how feminist, interpretive, narrative, and intersectional approaches have challenged older biomedical models by bringing women’s lived experiences, embodied knowledge, and structural inequalities into the centre of health communication research.
Elif Ertem, PhD presented “Ineffective Institutional Mechanisms and Communications: Workplace Violence Against Female Healthcare Workers.” Based on qualitative interviews with female healthcare workers in Türkiye, her paper examined how formal systems of protection may fail in practice. Through the lens of gendered citizenship, the presentation showed how bureaucratic barriers, workplace hierarchies, gendered power relations, and fear of professional consequences can restrict women’s access to justice and institutional protection.
The panel also included Mike Polites, MA, with the presentation “Speaking from a Place of Empathy: How We Can Create a Comfortable Culture.” His contribution approached empathy not as a vague moral ideal, but as a communicative practice that can shape classrooms, workplaces, healthcare encounters, and everyday social relations.
Together, the presentations opened an important conversation on how communication can either reproduce vulnerability or become part of more attentive, humane, and equitable forms of care.

08/06/2026

The programme began with “The Future of Human Connection: Re-evaluating Knowledge, Health, and Communication in a Digital Age.”
With presentations by Zhanel Galymzhan, Zélie Fumat, Zeynep Eda Kemal Colak, and Pénélope Frantzen, the panel explored algorithmic authority, mental health in digitalised societies, communication and criticism, and the colonial and gendered legacies embedded in health knowledge.
A strong opening conversation for C&C26, reminding us that digital transformation is never merely technical. It is social, cultural, political, and deeply human.