Lukas Becht

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M.A. in Political Science, Sociology, and Philosophy from the University of Freiburg/Breisgau in 2012. Internship at the Sejm of the Republic of Poland. Scholarship of the binational Polish-German doctoral school “Poland and Germany in Modern Europe” in 2014 and 2015, PhD-candidate at the Institute of Eastern and Southeastern European History at Ludwig-Maximilian University Munich, and the University of Vienna (cotutelle). Short-term fellow at DHI Warsaw in fall 2016–17. Since 2019 the coordinator of the international research project “Economic Collectivism Old and New: Lessons from the Communist and Post-Communist Past” at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna.

Research Interests: History of knowledge, economic knowledge in socialism and post-socialism, past futures, politics in Poland after 1989.

Current Research Project: “From ‘perspective planning’ to ‘strategic adjustment’. Polish Future Research and the transformation from late to post-socialism” (working title) 
What happened to the future during the transformation from late socialism to post-socialism? This general question motivates my thesis to trace the barely known history of Polish future research – a field of scholarly activity that emerged in Poland in the late 1960s and re-negotiated notions of future anticipation and planning. I describe, first, the formation of futurology as a field of knowledge production in Poland under late socialism; second, changing institutional and personal entanglements with science and politics; and, third, futurology’s changing images of “society” and its future, reflecting the structural social and political changes during the 1980s and 90s. The research project, in its early phase, has been funded by LMU Munich’s Institutional Strategy LMUexcellent within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative. 

Publications:

  • “From euphoria to frustration. Institutionalizing prognostic research in the Polish Peoples‘ Republic, 1969–1976”, in: Acta Poloniae Historica 116 (2017), pp. 277–299.
  • [with Piotr Filipkowski]: “Ćwiczenie wyobraźni socjologicznej: Polska futurologia naukowa lat 70 dwudziestego wieku”, in: Stan Rzeczy 1:14 (2018), pp. 41–69.
  • “Zukunft, die nicht beginnen konnte. Stefan Żółkiewskis Futurologie an der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften vor 1968”, in: Jahrbuch des Wissenschaftlichen Zentrums der Polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien 9 (2018), pp. 217–235.