Affective pedagogy and caring community: Jacek Kuroń’s political milieu in 1970s socialist Warsaw

Abstract

Bonds of friendship and everyday practices like singing and cooking appear trivial, but as this article argues they are, in fact, essential to activists’ everyday lives, from which dissidence emerges. By reconstructing the formation of the ‘caring community’ around the dissident Jacek Kuroń on the basis of oral history and his socialist pedagogy, the author shows how he and his milieu embodied the values of solidarity, care, and cooperation. Key to the formation of the Workers’ Defence Committee (KOR), these values were rooted in earlier experiences in the socialist scout group Walterowcy. Kuroń’s network of friends, informal practices of care, and seemingly private spaces such as his apartment formed the social backbone of this political milieu, forcing us to revise reified boundaries between private life and public activism.