Kate Korycki is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies at Western University in Canada; she is also faculty in the Western's School for Advanced Studies in the Arts & Humanities and in the Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction. Focusing on the meaning and productivity of stories, Kate tracks how narratives of the past are creatively manipulated, how they constitute collective imaginaries, and how those imaginaries structure and justify stratified subject positions in the present. Her research concerns the processes by which group or national identities are imagined and reimagined, and how they implicate gender, race and class in the creation of powerful, benefiting yet oblivious, majorities.

Kate’s first book (Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory, and Jews, Poles, and communists in 21^st Century Poland, Berghahn Books 2023) explores how collective remembering of communism in Poland hallows democracy and progressive politics, and how it constricts the imaginary of the nation. Her next major projects concentrate on Canada. They trace what meaning of Canadianness is being articulated and imagined in a) speeches of political leaders and b) school history textbooks. Kate tracks the meaning and shape of the emergent majority, and she identifies specific discursive mechanisms that allow that majority to stay unaware (“innocent”) of structures of oppression within which it operates and from which it benefits.