Romanienko, Lisiunia A. | Poland

Lisiunia A. Romanienko completed her BA in Sociology from Rutgers University, her MS in Nonprofit Management from the New School for Social Research, and her PhD in Sociology at Wroclaw University in Poland. For over fifteen years she has conducted research and advocated on behalf of the ethnic poor throughout the United States and Eastern Europe. This experience spans a variety of institutional appointments including the New York City Health Department, Rikers Island Correctional Facility, the Parish Criminal District Court in New Orleans Louisiana, and numerous NGOs throughout Poland. Her dissertation entitled “Body Piercing and Identity” analyzing anti-technological sentiments among youth is being published by Palgrave Macmillan (February 2011). Her other research has been published in Women in Management Review, the Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, the International Social History Review, the International Encyclopedia for Civil Society, and Museum Management and Curatorship (forthcoming).
 

Project at IAS-STS: The role of ICT in unifying alterglobalization activists

Though the role of computers in unifying fragmented communities is a relatively new area for scholarly inquiry, ICT recommender systems and the egalitarian platforms they provide are becoming the key element in the unification of diverse disenfranchised publics. For our analytic purposes, user and environmental awareness of diasporic deprivation will be shown to be the primary unifying concept enabling philosophically diverse, geographically-distinct alterglobalizers to access the online content they require to advance, legitimate, and occasionally unify (through articulation of public dissent) their geographically fragmented but periodically coalesced oppositional consensus movement. In the process, they exhibit highly efficient, technology-driven, defiant community construction capabilities among world system saboteurs around the globe. While there may be many geographic, ideological, dogmatic, educational, and philosophic distinctions among its members, the online alterglobalizing platform has provided a discursive space to explore the interconnectedness of contemporary social problems, which in turn leads to discourses on the interconnectedness of solutions, which in turn leads to interconnectedness of a mass societal world-wide resistance endeavor to publicly implement these devolutionary tactics. The precision path and pattern recognition available through ICT platforms sensitizes users to specificities of alterglobalization through content that brings about a level of awareness that has not merely resulted in protests or other participatory democratic attacks on hegemonic agents of dependency stratification on and offline, but has directed content that has actually increased cultural capital among resistors as they exchange aesthetic, social, cultural, political and other informative resources throughout their consensually oppositional digitized network. This has led to a powerful form of insurgency and related community building within the constraints and limitations of different formations of struggle.
 

Selected publications

“Criminalizing Dakar: Off Road Motorcycling as the New Normative Instrument of Hegemonic Empire” International Journal of Motorcycle Studies [revise and resubmit]

“Aesthetic and Legal Communities in the Struggle for Sexual Human Rights in Poland” UNESCO Observatory on Multi-disciplinary Research in the Arts 1(2):1-16 2008

”Disputing Marxian Alienation and Hegelian Dialectics Through The Elective Affinities Of Techno Music” in No Walls Leicester, UK: De Montfort University 2001

“Gender Differences in Adaptation Patterns Among Scientists in Developing Nations: Ghana, Kenya, and Kerala” in Women and Technology: Historical, Societal, and Professional Perspectives Piscataway, NJ: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 1999

“Computer Acculturation: Technological Ramifications for International Development” Computer Underground Digest V. 11 (28):3 1999