Rooted in anthropological and ethnological traditions, this volume offers analytical insights into the workings of agency in late industrialism revealed in interactions between a coal power plant and a local community in Opole Silesia, in southwestern Poland. In this context, the authors show by the use of the ethnographic method, how variables and forces of various scales shape political events centered around the power plant; grassroots economic dynamics and entrepreneurship; the local semiosphere uniting the divided social group; affective dimensions of a social protest; (un)doing gender in the industrial workplace; and the mobile livelihoods of migrant industrial workers. By doing so, they concretize in different ways both the concept of late modernity and agency.

Monika Baer teaches social and cultural anthropology at the University of Wroclaw. Her main research areas comprise postsocialist transitions and Europeanization processes in Central/Eastern Europe with a special attention given to gender/sexuality, activism, and political engagement of social sciences and humanities.