TCDS & NSSR Alumna, Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer, defends her habilitation at the Polish Academy of Sciences!
Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer earned her Ph.D. in 2014 under the supervision of Professor Elżbieta Matynia. While at NSSR she worked closely with the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. Her dissertation, titled Ordinary Celebrations: New Sites and New Visibility of Cultural Practices in Post-1989 Poland, received the Albert Salomon Memorial Award in Sociology. Palgrave later published it in 2019 as Reshaping Poland’s Community after Communism: Ordinary Celebrations.
Her second book, (Not) Kidding: Politics in Online Tabloids, was published by Brill in 2024. That same year, she gained significant recognition for her article, “Why Online Tabloids Are Better at Predicting the Public’s Political Mood than Broadsheets.“
Currently, Dr. Chmielewska-Szlajfer is an Assistant Professor at Kozminski Academy in Warsaw and will be appointed Associate Professor starting October. She has recently completed her habilitation (equivalent to tenure) at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences.
For more on her recent work, see: LSE Research for the World – Politicians: are they (not) kidding?
From Helena:
My most recent book, (Not) Kidding: Politics in Online Tabloids published in 2024 by Brill (paperback: 2025 Haymarket), is the result of sociological investigations at the intersection of the sociology of culture, civil society, the public sphere, the political role of media—especially online media—and grassroots activity in democracies undergoing fundamental transformation. I have focused on these topics since my doctoral work at The New School for Social Research (2014), which formed the basis of my first book, Reshaping Poland’s Community After Communism: Ordinary Celebrations (Palgrave 2019).
Over time, my research turned toward questions of social change in the context of media and cultural globalization, as well as shifting forms of civic activism and political discourse. This trajectory led me to (Not) Kidding, where I expanded my exploration through a comparative study of the 2015–2016 election campaigns in Poland, the UK, and the US. I examine how popular online tabloids—Pudelek (Poland), Mail Online (UK), and Gawker (US)—covered the Polish presidential election, the Brexit referendum, and the US presidential election. All three votes defied opinion poll predictions and marked a broader shift toward right-wing populism.
To understand this shift, I focused on online tabloids, which, despite their massive audiences, are largely overlooked in politics-centered sociological research. This omission, I argue, is a critical blind spot: my research shows that online tabloids are highly attuned to public emotions—more so than so-called hard-news outlets. Studying their content reveals underlying voter attitudes that influence electoral outcomes.
I conducted a content analysis of nearly 200 deeply examined articles, selected from a corpus of more than 2,700 published in the two months leading up to each vote. For each article, I also analyzed the top five anonymous reader comments, resulting in a close reading of around 1,000 comments. To understand editorial practices, I interviewed 20 journalists and editors from Pudelek, Mail Online, and Gawker.
Through the lens of online tabloid journalism, the research reveals profound transformations in political journalism, taking place as public distrust in traditional news grows and social media increasingly threaten both as competitors and sources of disinformation. Unlike social media, online tabloids are subject to press regulations and may thus represent the last credible sources before information slips into unregulated spaces.
From this analysis, I develop the interpretive concept of “(not) kidding”—a mode of communication that is neither wholly serious nor entirely ridiculous, yet always value-laden. This strategic ambiguity characterizes a distinct emotional public sphere, located at the intersection of Jürgen Habermas’s plebeian public and Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic sphere. It emerges through the merging of journalistic content and user comments, as one scrolls into the other, shaping a dynamic feedback loop. Editors adapt tone and visual presentation in real time, responding to audience emotions by portraying politicians as celebrities and celebrities as politicians, shifting between praise and ridicule as needed.
Though often dismissed as trivial, online tabloids command far greater readership than traditional news outlets. People are more likely to encounter political news through these “soft” media. Tabloids have long mastered the art of capturing attention—and ultimately, at the ballot box, what you see is what you know, even if it’s the (not) kidding coverage that shapes your vote.
