Jadwiga Staniszkis

Jadwiga Staniszkis (26 April 1942 – 15 April 2024) was a Polish sociologist and political scientist, essayist, a professor at the University of Warsaw and the Wyższa Szkoła Biznesu (Higher Business School), a Polish campus of National-Louis University.

Biography

Staniszkis was the granddaughter of the interwar politician Witold Teofil Staniszkis who was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1941 during the German occupation of Poland. Jadwiga Staniszkis studied sociology at the Warsaw University Faculty of Philosophy, obtaining a PhD in 1971 ("Patologie struktur organizacyjnych"). In 1978, she completed her habilitation in the humanities, in the department of sociology. From 1991, she worked as a university professor.

After her graduation, Staniszkis worked at the Department of Sociology at her alma mater. She actively contributed to political life at the university and was dismissed from the university and arrested for seven months for attending the protests of students and intellectuals against the communist government of the People's Republic of Poland during the 1968 Polish political crisis.

Staniszkis was the author of several books on phenomena of socialism. Her first book about the dialectics of socialist society was translated into Japanese, but the Polish manuscript was confiscated by the secret service (SB) and lost. Her second book on the Solidarity movement has never been translated to Polish due to controversy, although it was published in French (two years before the 'original' English edition). The fate of her book about the dynamics of transformation in Poland was similar, as it has not been published in Poland. Most of her works have been published since the transformation of the political system in Poland.