Jagiellonian University Krakow
Founded in 1364, the Jagiellonian University is the oldest university in Poland and one of the oldest universities in the world. Located in the heart of Krakow, the university grounds contain the Krakow Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university consists of thirteen main faculties, in addition to three faculties composing the Collegium Medicum. It employs roughly 4,000 academics and provides education to more than 35,000 students who study in 166 fields. The main language of instruction is Polish, although around 30 degrees are offered in English (and some in German, Russian, and Ukrainian).
Research at the Jagiellonian University
With its roughly 4,000 academics, the Jagiellonian University houses a wide range of research fields and traditions. With hundreds of research labs, the university offers interested students and research partners the opportunity to work within a focused specialization and/or to work interdisciplinarily. The university offers exciting research collaborations with psychologists, pedagogues, philosophers, sociologists, religious scholars, as well as with scholars from the natural sciences.
In 2024, the Institute of Pedagogy co-organized an international conference titled “Memory, Myth, and Reality. The Second World War and the German occupation of Polish Lands“. The participants of this interdisciplinary conference were psychologists, historians, pedagogues, sociologist, and philosophers. This illustrates our commitment to approaching complex and important “real world” phenomena in a manner that is both interdisciplinary and methodologically inclusive.
Our approach to cultural psychology, while rooted in the discipline of psychology, explicitly acknowledges that other disciplines and subdisciplines provide equally important perspectives on the human condition. On the one hand, individual disciplines offer important, unique perspectives and thus disciplinary boundaries should be respected. On the other hand, the phenomena under study exist in a manner that no discipline can fully contain, and thus they can be more richly explored by crossing those disciplinary boundaries.
How to get involved?
There is close collaboration between the Jagiellonian University’s Department of Pedagogy and the Sigmund Freud University in Berlin, Germany. Students from both institutions are invited to collaborate with students and scholars in Germany and Poland while working on their bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD theses. Students have been involved in a number of projects, some of which have led to academic publications.
Below are a few examples of such published work (*denotes student collaborators):
- Mazur, L. B., *Nika, C., *Knorr, A. (in press). Political engagement and extremism. Observations from the interpretive social sciences. In Ventsel, A. & Selg, P. (Eds.), Power of emotions: On the affective constitution of political struggle. A multidisciplinary approach. Springer.
- Mazur, L. B., *Richter, L., *Manz, P., & *Bartels, H. (2022). The importance of cultural psychological perspectives in pain research: Towards the palliation of Cartesian anxiety. Theory & Psychology, 32(2), 183-201. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593543211059124
- Mazur, L. B., *Alterkawi, M., *Kontny, J., *Müller, M., & *Papas, M. (2021). Female and male body image ideals among Arab immigrants and Germans in Germany. Biodemography and Social Biology, 66(3-4), 261-271. https://doi.org/10.1080/19485565.2021.1983759
- Mazur, L. B. & *Sticksel, I. (2021). An empirical study of psychology and logic. Abduction and belief as normalizing habits of positive expectation. New Ideas in Psychology, 63, 100874. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2021.100874
- Mazur, L. B. & *Gormsen, E. (2020). Disgust sensitivity and support for organ donation. Time to take disgust seriously. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35(8), 2347-51. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-020-05734-0
Conference participation:
Representative
Lucas B. Mazur completed his PhD in psychology at Clark University (Massachusetts, USA), and his habilitation at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland). He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and master’s degrees in both psychology and sociology. His interdisciplinary research on higher psycho-social processes covers a wide range of topics and he makes use of a wide range of research methods. His work is conducted in the spirit of interpretive social science, which is to say that its foundational assumptions are that the phenomena under study are of a largely symbolic nature and thus need to be historically and socially contextualized. Whether working qualitative or quantitatively, the data produced are not treated as what Charles Taylor called “raw facts”—objective and unmediated reflections of reality—but are themselves representative of the semiotic meaning making processes under study. In other words, research on higher psychological processes can only be understood when attention is paid to the context in which they take place, with context including not only history and society, but also both the people under study and the researchers engaging with them in the research process. Research methods are not neural but also help to shape the processes under study.
Articles and paper presentations (selection):
- Mazur, L. B. (in press). “The Victim” and the democratization of victimhood. Journal of Philosophical and Theoretical Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/teo0000290
- Mazur, L. B. (in press). National borders, ethnic identity, and historical violence. How a contemporary assumption affects perceptions of history. Ethnopolitics.
- Mazur, L. B. (2024). The desire for power within activist burnout. An illustration of the value of interpretive social science. Sociology Compass, 18(2), e13186, https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13186
- Mazur, L. B. (2023). The Victim. Observations on a new social type. Human Studies, 46, 583-605. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09671-9
- Mazur, L. B. (2022). Experimentation within the social identity approach. History, highlights, and hurdles. In M. Bamberg, C. Demuth, & M. Watzlawik (Eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Identity (pp. 435-459). Cambridge University Press.
- Mazur, L. B. (2022). Breaking the link between ingroup projection and outgroup derogation: Encouraging civility in disagreements about social responsibility. Peace & Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 28(2), 214-225. https://doi.org/10.1037/pac0000594
- Mazur, L. B. (2021). The epistemological imperialism of science. Reinvigorating early critiques of scientism. Frontiers in Psychology. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 11, Article 609823. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.609823
