In the extensive polemic with the book Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past by Ethan Kleinberg, the reviewer comments on the innovative potential of deconstruction as it enables the conception of various scenarios of the future. Kleinberg’s reflections on the ontology (or hauntology) of the past are located within the current discussion about “the ontological turn.” The reviewer compares Kleinberg’s take on a deconstructive approach to the past with similar considerations presented by Sande Cohen in the US as well as by Keith Jenkins, Alun Munslow and, more recently, Berber Bevernage in Europe.

This article reflects on key concepts of historical thinking proposed by doctoral students and young researchers. Established concepts such as the social role of history, professional historian and (imagined) space are still important to the new generation of historians. At the same time, some new concepts are emerging, such as political exhumations, mass graves, motion, embodied historical research, ahistorical memory politics, websites as historical sources, critical heritage studies and heritagisation, treason, preposterous history – an idea taken from Mieke Bal, and “Supreme Peace” – a notion drawn from the Chinese philosophy of history. To interpret these concepts, I build word clouds as a way of creating knowledge involving non‑human factors (algorithms) while enabling speculative interpretations of the relations between words. The idea of a secure past comes to the fore and I therefore examine whether historical security and being secure in history could be considered important elements of interdisciplinary security studies.

In this interview, conducted during the XXIII International Congress of Historical Sciences in Poznań (2022), Olufunke Adeboye (Professor of Social History at the University of Lagos, Nigeria) discusses the problems of decolonisation of African history, the relations between academic historiography and popular history, new trends in historical writing, the importance of theory for historical research, and the problems of historical education in Nigeria.

In this analysis of 'Zarys historii historiografii polskiej ('An Outline History of Polish Historiography') by Andrzej F. Grabski, the Author stresses the ideological dimensions of historiography and the relation between historical knowledge and political power. If modem academic history can be viewed as the ideological support of the nation-state, then the study of Polish historiography can serve as a useful introduction to the history of Poland itself. This is so, because the history of the nation cannot be separated from the different representations of it.

This article explores the reception of French Theory in Poland after 1989. I argue that post-modern tendencies entered the Polish humanities in a distorted form, having travelled via the USA. I propose the hypothesis that the transplantation of the concept of power‑knowledge, which was central to the US‑American take on Michel Foucault, led to something that I term “the Foucault Effect.” It became entangled in the processes of democratization and political and economic transformation taking place in the 1990s, meaning that on the one hand it “raised consciousness” of power mechanisms, while on the other hand promoting a sense of subjecthood that was a product of power relations and thus was deprived of agency. I argue that regardless of the critique of anthropocentrism that is prevalent in the contemporary humanities, the socio-‑political situation in the world today demands a return of the strong subject, whose figuration would take into account lessons learned from French Theory.

In the first part of the article, Krzysztof A. Makowski describes how the idea of granting Poland the opportunity to host the 23rd International Congress of Historical Sciences in 2020 in Poznań came about and how Poznań’s application to host the Congress was prepared. Moreover, the author presents the ongoing preparations for the Congress. In the second part of the article, Ewa Domańska discusses the origins and evolution of the idea of “alter-native modernities” and “epi- stemic justice” as leitmotifs of Poznań’s application. She stresses the need and importance of developing an intellectual alliance of East-Central European countries and lists activities that could help raise the region’s status as an important centre of knowledge building.