Institute Director (since 2024), assistant professor at Contemporary Culture Section. Sociology and cultural studies scholar. His research focuses on postcolonial, decolonial and subaltern studies, and on social contexts of knowledge production, especially popular science knowledge.
Chymkowski published academic articles, among others, in Kultura Współczesna, Kultura i Społeczeństwo, Przegląd Humanistyczny, Stan Rzeczy. He is the author of two monographs monografii Nietożsamości. Tillion, Fanon, Bourdieu, Derrida i dylematy dekolonizacji [Non-Identities: Tillion, Fanon, Bourdieu, Derrida and the Dilemmas of Decolonization] (2019), Autobiografie lekturowe studentów [Students’ Reading Authobiographies] (2011), and the co-author of a school textbook for learning cultural studies. He is also the editor or the co-editor of numerous issues of a academic journals, e.g. Stan Rzeczy/State of Affairs 2024/1 (New Energy Regimes).
His book Nonidentities. Tillion, Fanon, Bourdieu, Derrida and the Dilemma of Decolonization presents the histories of four French-writing, XXth century intellectuals whose biographies were associated with Independence War-era Algiers. Its goal is such a reading of their works that could uncover its Algerian-French duality. On one hand, the experience of close, direct biographic contact with Algiers allowed for a view from a distance (cultural, social and political) on France and Europe, which sharpened the view and imbued it with characteristics of criticism, but on the other education in the French cultural circle allowed for a specific way of writing and thinking about Algiers, a specific way of understanding and experiencing it. At the same time, that specific way (ways), which was shaped by assumptions placed at the foundations of certain traditions of thinking and related interpretative strategies – displays its power, but also its limitations in the confrontation with experience.
https://uw.academia.edu/RomanChymkowski