Angelina Kussy
Originally from Warsaw, based in Barcelona, I joined Opus in the summer of 2023 to support the flourishing of both the Neighborhood Democracy Movement and the Universal Basic Income Lab Network.
I spend my time trying to support movements for the so-needed systems change, organising events, onboarding people, thinking about the strategies, goals, discourse or alliances and enjoying the unique possibility to work on things I believe in.
And I believe that everyone should have the right to exist independently from her relation to work at the free market. Democracy means that we should be able to collectively decide what we should work on, how and when, and that also individuals would have some margin to decide how they can better contribute to their community.
I believe in local, ground-up solutions, politics of proximity, direct people’s interactions, radical & deliberative democracy and bottom-up movements. I also believe in the local public state, in that it can secure the universality of people’s rights, and in the need to overcome the “local trap” by working in an international - or inter-municipal & trans-neighbourhood - network.
When I don't work for Opus, I spend time with my cats and friends, enjoying the beautiful city of Barcelona, playing music and singing as an amateur or conducting research as a PhD in social anthropology.
I have experience working in interdisciplinary and international teams and long-term ethnographic fieldwork. I spent 9 month in an “anti-capitalist” village Marinaleda, almost one year in a Romanian demographic enclave in Castellón in Spain and will soon live in the so-called “sacrificial zones” for the energy transition. I taught medical anthropology and anthropology of public policies and I published in scientific journals on topics such as social care crisis, migrants' domestic work and moderns forms of slavery, people’s bottom-up strategies for social protection, the potential of the commons to tackle the problem with care and sacrificial tropes in our economic system, among many others. Both as a scholar and political activist I have been critical of the centrality of waged work in our societies, productivism and the imperative of growth at the cost of people’s quality of life and life on the planet. Currently I work on the Green Sacrifice in Spain and colonial logics underpinning the so-called ‘just’ Green Transition.
In my already-forgotten previous lives, I was active in political spaces such as the Razem party in Poland and in Barcelona en Comú, the civic platform governing the city from 2015 to 2023 where I co-coordinated the International Committee. I also worked as a journalist, specialised on topics such as social and solidarity economy, cooperative movement and refugee crisis. I reviewed non-fiction books and novels and was the author of literary and socially-engaged reportages.
