Dominika Vergara Polanska

Dominika is an associate professor of sociology and professor of social work. Since her 2011 dissertation on gated communities in Poland, she has focused on social movements in Eastern Europe, as well as Sweden, that work with housing and residential issues. Her research interests include: urban social movements, squatting, informal organizing, non-traditional forms of civil society engagement, and tenant organizing. Her latest research deals with residents' experiences of renovation.

Dominika's main research interests can be summarized in three themes:

- Privatization of the city: gentrification, displacement, and the role of housing

- Urban social movements: squatting, tenant mobilization, and the right to the city

- Civil society and non-traditional civic engagement

She has conducted empirical studies in Poland and Sweden. She is interested in how cultural and political contexts condition the emergence and development of specific protests and movements, and above all the motivation behind these mobilizations. An important aspect of her research has been to go beyond the East/West divide and the established way of conceptualizing civil society. In her research, she maintains a critical perspective by taking into account less “successful” or visible cases of mobilization, focusing on excluded perspectives, and working closely and often together with the “research subjects.” Dominika has researched how extensive renovations affect tenants, focusing on experiences of renovation, individual and collective resistance to renovations among tenants, legal practice, tenants' rights, influence in consultations, and comparing renovations of rental apartments with those in condominiums.

She has also researched the social sustainability of Swedish housing policy and is part of the Fundament collective. Her current research focuses on engagement in times of crisis, and she leads the international research program “Sustain Action,” which analyzes and compares the resilience and ingenuity of civil society in countries such as Poland, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. The project examines how civil society responds and organizes itself collectively around several simultaneous crises, such as the economy, housing, climate, food, pandemic, and equality. The goal is to understand how civil society can maintain its commitment and work for social change under difficult conditions.