The text Editorial gives an introduction to the issue entitled “Chowanna”. Krzysztof Maliszewski considers here the possibility of changing unfavorable educational and socio-political trends with the help of, among other ideas, Alain Touraine’s sociology of the subject, Margaret Archer’s notion of agency, and William Ayers’s reflections on helplessness. Next, from the articles that make up this issue, Maliszewski extracts a structure of change which can be regarded according to these five aspects: transformation, utopia, crisis, retrospection, and creativity.

This article discusses meta-pedagogical transformation contexts in the areas of human actions and the course of human life from the perspectives of hermeneutics, critical reflection, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and the project of “applied humanities.” The following problems are addressed: 1) Shifts of the dominant among factors participating in professional processes and practices, such as dialogue, the rationality of actions, the understanding of tradition, freedom, changes, and the ideal of the space of actions; 2) Transversality, structural duality, and oscillations around dilemmas of action and dominants in psychosocial development; 3) Traps, limitations, and gaps in traditional approaches to relations between factors in a person’s identity transformation; losing track of discontinuities and internal tensions; 4) The anti-positivist breakthrough in considering the explanations of processes and the trifold “explosion effect” in transformations of agents’ emotive-cognitive representations, including their auto-transformations and interactive alliance in actions; 5) Alternative approaches to the conceptualizations presented in this article.

It can be assumed that two biblical myths ‒ about Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden and about the builders from Babel ‒ are interesting expressions of the utopian imagination, because these myths narrate about two places where projects of sufficiently perfect social order were implemented in two different ways. At present, the school is one of the places that could be understood as the ambiguous effect of an implemented utopia of the industrial revolution era; the school is an education space designed as an important part of the project of a sufficiently perfect social order. Two original readings of the mentioned biblical myths ‒ by Erich Fromm and George Steiner ‒ shall contribute some new themes and outlooks to the discussion of the condition of the modern school and the discourses of critical pedagogy or the pedagogy of resistance and hermeneutic pedagogy.

The article attempts to describe the symptoms of the crisis of interpersonal bonds in the perspective of the crisis of emotional culture. The core of the analyzes of the causes and symptoms of the crisis of interpersonal ties are the concepts related to the emotional turn and the discursive dimension of affective life. The crisis of emotional culture is described in the text in the light of progressive individualization and diminishing intimacy, which supersedes the commonality of goals and attitudes. The main thesis of the text is that the invasiveness of expert discourses and consumer culture leads to the wind-down of emotional culture, rationalization of the private sphere and breaking axio-normative constraints that regulate social attitudes, also in the dimension of creating and maintaining interpersonal bonds. 

Łukasz Michalski discusses the content of Zygmunt Mysłakowski’s 1938 book Totalizm czy kultura (Totalism or Culture). He points to the consonance between book’s diagnoses of the socio-political situation in the late 1930s and Timothy Snyder’s description of the second decade of the twenty-first century. He argues that we can see an analogy between the dynamic growth of totalisms in the interwar period and the mechanisms that can be observed in Europe, America, Russia today. Mysłakowski and Snyder leave no illusions in their descriptions of their present milieus. However, in Mysłakowski’s book there is a cognitive incongruity inasmuch as, alongside the main line of the argument with its recognition of the value of democracy, there is also an appreciation of the figure of the leader (Marshal Józef Piłsudski). Michalski examines this tension as the context of the diagnoses of our contemporary situation.

The aim of this article is to examine the orientation towards positive sources of development and creativity as well as boundaries and transgressions in the process of self-realization. This examination of the process of self-realization takes into account personal resources, potential and possibilities, and promotes a developmental vision of the person as an active being who creatively transforms the environment and themselves. A person’s motivation to pursue creative changes and to strive for achievements is related to human transgressiveness. The nature of self-realization according to Abraham Maslow is similar to Józef Kozielecki’s concept of transgression. It assumes that man is an active agent and that human agency is intentional, autonomous, and goal-oriented, and that it tends to transgress the existing possibilities. Halina Monika Wróblewska’s approach to self-realization, presented in this study, can help to the optimize human development and to make possible the expanding of the boundaries of the self. A person will embrace his or her creative competences through the process of self-realization and thanks to transgressive activities.

This article discusses bodily aspects of emotional crises and crises of interpersonal ties. The analysis is based on the sociological theory of emotions by Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger, who emphasized the importance of interpersonal ties for the resolution of conflicts and for successful coping with difficulties. Every emotion has its own motor equivalent in the body, which records and stores traumatic experiences and broadly understood conflicts together with the resulting stress. If the accumulated emotions are not released, the body may get sick, which is why psychological interventions must be combined with parallel work on the body. Case studies, which constitute an important part of the author’s research, show the significance and effectiveness of choreotherapy, which, in combination with other treatment methods, helps to resolve crises and reduce emotional strain.

The review discusses the book by Dorota Koczanowicz titled Pozycja smaku. Jedzenie w granicach sztuki [The Position of Taste. Eating within the Boundaries of Art]. The book contains an interpretation of the texts collected by its author in order to answer the following question: Can food be considered art?