Inter-university research network established in May, 2009.
Participating institutions:
- Faculty of Polish Studies, Warsaw University (network center);
- Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków;
- Faculty of Languages and Literature, Gdańsk University;
- Faculty of Polish Studies and Classical Languages, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań;
- Faculty of Languages and Literature, Wrocław University;
- Faculty of Languages and Literature, Szczecin University
- Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences
- Faculty of Languages and Literature, University of Silesia in Katowice

The rationale behind the network is to investigate the condition of post-dependence underlying the contemporary Polish society and culture specifically, and, in a broader perspective, defining the difference of Central-Eastern Europe from its Western counterpart. We understand post-dependence discourse as a comprehensive term for a conglomerate of signifying practices organizing human experience, projects pertaining to identity, social relations, and forms of perceiving reality, all of which have been undertaken after the situation of dependence came to an end.

Our objective is to fill in the gap created by the lack of an adequate theoretical language describing the following:
- complexities of post-socialist transition process, especially social stratification producing a range of marginalized groups;
- revisions of national historiographies;
- minorities, including sexual minorities and other non-normative identities;
- center-periphery relationship as diagnostic of the transforming format and function of the state;
- border state of Europeanness - on the margins of Europe as a project and identity.

Research projects issued by the network will focus on post-dependence discourses attested in literature, and occurring in versatile forms in contemporary society and culture. Historical contexts and how they bear on the present will also constitute an important area of reference. Themselves products of seminal social and cultural processes of change and transformation, these discourses are symptomatic and descriptive of such phenomena as:
- post-partition, post-occupation, post-socialist social mentality;
- migrations and migrant's condition (especially the specifics of emigration, post- and re-emigration);
- sexual minorities and other minoritarian identities as particular sites of social difference;
- new multiculturalism as the result of migration processes and economic transformation;
- reemergence of various forms of nationalism;
- debates around and reformulations of contemporary Polish normativity.

The Center is open to interdisciplinary research and invites co-operation between literary studies scholars and specialists from other fields: cultural theory, history, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychology and others.