The Social Construction of the Realm of the Discipline: Polish Sinology

This work enters into the long-standing debate on the meaning of "sinology". It takes as a springboard theoretical assumptions regarding the term's floating meaning, which, due to the shifting nature of disciplinary boundaries in which all knowledge is relative, can never be fixed. It looks at the University of Warsaw's (UW) Sinology Department and asks what Polish academia counts as discipline-specific knowledge. In order to answer this question, it analyses the rhetorical work involved in defining and defending the discipline in selected works by and interviews with Polish scholars who study China. It comments on the phenomenon of creating disciplinary labels, the role of external pressures on knowledge production, and the ways in which the UW Sinology Department's faculty mediates and assimilates those pressure.