Rūta Kazlauskaitė

Trained as a political scientist at the University of Helsinki, Finland, I am an interdisciplinary scholar, interested in the political dimensions of embodiment, philosophy of history, history education, and innovative forms of storytelling in the new digital media (VR/AR).

Currently, I am working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki in an Academy of Finland funded project "Whirl of Knowledge: Cultural Populism in European Polarised Politics and Societies (WhiKnow). I am examining affective polarization in public debates during the run-up to the 2019 Polish parliamentary elections as well as the 2019 European Parliament elections.

Recently, I have worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in a Helsingin Sanomat funded project "Mobilizing the Disenfranchised: Post-Truth Public Stories in Finland, France, and the United States,” where I was examining the use of affects in right-wing online media outlets in the US and Poland.

I have also recently completed my PhD project (2012-2018) at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Title: Towards an Embodied History: Metaphorical Models in Textbook Knowledge of the Controversial Polish-Lithuanian Past. The doctoral project examined the underlying metaphorical models of cognition which shape the representation of contested shared past in Poland and Lithuania. It adopted a novel theoretical approach – enactive embodiment – to studying international historical disagreements in school-history education. The findings of this study can be applied in diverse post-conflict contexts and are relevant to the disciplinary fields of political science, philosophy of knowledge, historical theory, and history education.