The Transformations of Contemporary Culture and Their Social Consequences

Contents

Preface

Anna Śliz and Marek S. Szczepański

Multiculturalism in the social space: illusion or reality?

Krzysztof Wielecki and Rafał Wiśniewski

Consequences of intercultural communication from the perspective of Margaret S. Archer’s concept of human

Marek Rembierz

Traces of transcendence… Contemporary religious thinking in the face of the pluralism of worldviews and intercultural relations

Janusz Mariański

Human dignity in the social context: opportunities and threats

Paweł Prüfer

Humanity in individual and social reintegration. The perspective of a linear-cyclic metamorphosis

Monika Bukowska

Human being, culture and values

Wojciech Kojs

The issues of the subject, subjectification and subjectivity in the structures and functions of educational activities

Bogusław Śliwerski

The category of educational agency in contemporary pedagogy

Samuele Sangalli

The challenge of being human in our techno-age

Silvia Cataldi

On a giant shoulders. Three merits of Archer’s contribution

Contributors

Preface

We are pleased to present our new, third volume of the publication Archerian Studies. The idea that inspired us from the very beginning was to bear witness to the activity of the Polish scientific movement, which has been emerging since 2014, focused on the idea of critical realism. Then, for the first time, we invited Professor Margaret Scotford Archer to cooperate with the Institute of Sociological Sciences of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, and the Professor responded to us positively, even cordially.

Since then, she has come to us every year to chair Social Thought Master Courses focused on the concept of critical realism. It is always accompanied by two or three scientific conferences devoted to two or three main topics, as well as seminars for PhD students, consultations for them, as well as fascinating conversations and discussions. From the beginning, we also knew that these extraordinary meetings should be documented as a sign of a Polish meeting, but also with the participation of representatives of other nations of the scientific community, with an outstanding thinker of our time and one of the most important scientific orientations of the 20th and 21st centuries. It was also a matter of preserving the testimony of the extraordinary generosity of the Professor. This was the idea of the creation of a fairly cyclical publication in English, to which we have given the name Archerian Studies. By following the subsequent volumes, we can observe how the critical realism movement is developing in our country. In subsequent volumes, texts by scientists of various specialties appeared, which proves the wide impact of the Professor’s concept on the humanities in general, and not only on sociology. We also present texts by people from other countries, which shows that the Polish critical realism movement also widens into other communities, contributing to the development of interest in critical realism. In parallel to Archerian Studies, which is intended to help familiarize representatives of critical realism in the world with what is happening in Poland, as well as to promote this orientation in Poland’s neighboring countries, which determined the English language of the publications, Polish-language books have been published, although less frequently, to propagate critical realism in Poland. Both of these publishing lines draw on the achievements of the aforementioned conferences organized at the Institute of Sociological Sciences at UKSW. We select the texts that are most valuable, or most symptomatic of the successive phases of the development of this “theoretical framework” in Poland.