mgr Katarzyna Szarla
Biography
Katarzyna Szarla is a PhD student at the Department of History, University of Warsaw. She holds a degree in medicine from the Medical University of Warsaw and has also studied history, bioethics, and culture studies (specialisation: visual culture) at the University of Warsaw. Her dissertation on the social history of HIV/AIDS in Poland in the 1980s and 1990s, explores how the HIV/AIDS reveals changes in the postsocialist social order and politics of care. Her research interests include critical medical humanities, social history of medicine, history of sexuality, and history of transformation in East Central Europe, as well as research ethics in the humanities and social sciences. She is a member of the European HIV/AIDS Research Network.
She is also an oral historian, engaged in several oral history projects. These include her own research on HIV/AIDS, a study on the early history of assisted reproductive technology in Poland (2022 — present), and the collective project “Oral Histories from the Rybnik Coal Basin” (2024 — present), which investigates local memories of transformation in the postindustrial region of Upper Silesia.
Title of the doctoral dissertation
The HIV/AIDS Crisis and the Politics and Practices of Care in Transforming Poland, 1985–2000
Research topics
The People’s Republic of Poland recorded its first case of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) in 1985. While the socialist order began was disintegrating at an increasingly rapid pace, the number of reported cases rose steadily, peaking alarmingly in 1989. The spread of the new infectious disease thus proved to be one of the most significant public health challenges during the final decade of state socialism and faced by the newly democratic postsocialist cauntry. The HIV/AIDS reveal the intricate motivations, emotions, and dynamics involved in the renegotiations of politics and practices of care at the time, shaped by the broader economic and social crisis of the 1980s, the impending ideological shift of responsibility from the state to the individual, and the increasing privatisation of care that reinforced mechanisms of exclusion and familialism, renegotiations that would later shape postsocialist models of healthcare and welfare.
Drawing on archival sources and oral history interviews with people living with HIV/AIDS, healthcare professionals, caregivers, and activists, among others, the study critically explores relations within spaces such as hospitals, outpatient clinics, homes and shelters for people living with HIV/AIDS, and family households. It seeks to understand how care was distributed and embodied at the time, and to interrogate the roles played by various social actors (including state institutions, the healthcare system, families, chosen communities, and activist networks) in the contemporaneous renegotiations of the very notions of illness, disablility, sexuality, otherness, as well as care, charity, and social solidarity.
If you would like to get in touch regarding this research or to share archival materials or your story related to HIV/AIDS, please feel free to contact me at kszarla@uw.edu.pl