Kate Korycki
Assistant Professor
MA (McGill), PhD (UofT)
Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies & Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction
Office# LH3235
kate.korycki@uwo.ca
Brief Bio
Kate is a comparative political sociologist interested in collective memories and group imaginaries. Focusing on the meaning and productivity of stories, Kate tracks how narratives of the past are creatively manipulated, how they constitute collective imaginaries, and how those imaginaries structure and justify stratified subject positions in the present. Her research concerns the processes by which group or national identities are imagined and reimagined, and how they implicate gender, race and class in the creation of powerful, benefiting yet oblivious, majorities. In Kate’s research, collective remembering is as much a tool of oppression as liberation.
Having spent half her life in communist Poland, Kate came to Canada at 18. Shortly after arrival she joined the Canadian public service. Her last posting took her to the Northern Ontario where she was responsible for the outreach and the delivery of the Common Experience Payment - a troubled gesture of reconciliation between Indigenous victims of Residential Schools and the Canadian state.
Research Interests
Identity politics; collective memory (and amnesia); critical theory, critical race theory & critical whiteness theory; structural intersections of gender, race and class; French post-structuralism; anti-communism and neo-liberalism.
Specific Research Projects
Kate’s first book (2023) explores how collective remembering of communism in Poland hallows democracy and progressive politics, and how it constricts the imaginary of the nation. Her next major projects concentrate on Canada. They trace what meaning of Canadianness is being articulated and imagined in a) speeches of political leaders and b) school history textbooks. Kate tracks the meaning and shape of the emergent majority, and she identifies specific discursive mechanisms that allow that majority to stay unaware (“innocent”) of structures of oppression within which it operates and from which it benefits. The study weaves together collective memory, critical whiteness and nationalism studies; and it responds to the calls of Indigenous and race-scholars and activists who seek racial justice, reconciliation and decolonization, and who maintain that none of these goals are possible without critical involvement and examination of whiteness and its connection to national imaginary.
Courses
GSWS 1024 Introduction to Equity, Diversity and Human Rights; GSWS 2710 Marriage in Feminist and Queer Persepctives; GSWS 2263 Intersections: Race, Class and Gender Sexuality; GSWS 3173 Introduction to Queer Theory; GSWS 3333 Homophobia & Resistance Across the Globe; GSWS 3316 Women and Other Deviants under Communism and Capitalism; GSWS 9500 Memory, Identity & Race; GSWS 9459 Professional Development.
Selected Publications
Recent Book
Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory, and Jews, Poles & Communists in the 21st Century Poland. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. 2023
Theoretically, the book explores why and how elites politicize the past and how they affect democracy and national belonging. Empirically, it traces how stories of the past are used to create exclusionary societies in the present.
Book Chapter and Articles (in print)
“De-commemoration as healing and conflict: Canada and its colonial past and present." In Sarah Gensburger & Jenny Wüstenberg’s (eds.) (De)Commemoration: Making sense of contemporary calls for tearing down statues and renaming places. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books. 2023
“Le décommémoration comme guérison et conflit au Canada.” In Sarah Gensburger and Jenny Wüstenberg (eds.) Dé-Commémoration: Quand le monde déboulonnes des statues et renomme des rues. Failard. 2023
“Political Parties,” In Jenny Wüstenberg and Yiffat Gutman’s (eds.) Rutledge Handbook of Memory Activism, Rutledge, 2023
“Politicized Memory in Poland: Anti-communism and the Holocaust.” Holocaust Studies, 25:3, 2019
“Out of Gay and into Class Closet - On Politics of Identity and Reflexive Sociology in Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis - Conversation between Kate Korycki and Anna Zawadzka.” Studia Litteraria et Historica, No 7, 2018
“Memory and Politics in Post-Transition Space: the Case of Poland.” East European Politics and Societies, and Cultures. Vol. 31, Issue 3, 2017
““To Kill the Indian in a Child,” on Cultural Genocide and Transitional Justice in Canada: Interview with Kate Korycki.” Studia Litteraria et Historica, No. 5, 2016
“Desire Recast: Production of Gay Identity in Iran” (with Abouzar Nasirzadeh). Journal of Gender Studies. Vol. 25, Issue 1, 2016.
“Homophobia as a tool of Statecraft: Iran and its Queers” (with Abouzar Nasirzadeh). In Meredith L. Weiss and Michael J. Bosia (eds.) Global Homophobias: States, Movements, and the Politics of Oppression. University of Illinois Press, 2013
Articles in Preparation or Under Review
“Collective Memory, History Textbook and an Imaginary of a Nation: a case of Canada” under review with Nationalities Papers
“Ethnography of a Method or the Limits of Numbers: Content Analysis and the Study of Collective Memory Narratives Woven in History Textbooks,” (with Jacob Evoy) under review by Qualitative Research
Popular Media Publications
“Who’s Afraid of Gender?” Order from Ashes Podcast (with Lobna Darwish & Naira Antoun). The Century Foundation, May 12, 2022
“The Politics of Moral Panics, a Roundtable” Transnational Trends in Citizenship (with Sabiha Allouche, Haira Bouteldja, Karma R. Chaves, Lobna Darwish, Maya Magdashi, Emma Spruce, Anna Younes and Naira Antoun). The Century Foundation, May 9, 2022
“Polish Women Reject the Catholic Church’s hold on their country.” The Conversation. November 17, 2020
Commissioned Book Reviews
“Queen of the Maple Leaf: Beauty Contests and Settler Femininity, by Patrizia Gentile.” Canadian Letters, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 91, Issue 3: 366-368, 2020
“Memory, Identity, Tourism and Photography - Kate Korycki reviews David Walkowitz’s Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World, and Jonathan Webber’s Rediscovering Traces of Memory, with photographs by Chris Schwarz and Jason Francisco.” The Polish Review, Vol. 65. No. 3, 2020
“African American Philosophers and Philosophy: an Introduction to the history, concepts, and contemporary issues, by John McLendon III and Stephen C. Ferguson II, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 43, issue 13, 2020
