Oral History Seminars – Fourth Meeting

On April 26th, the fourth Oral History Seminar took place at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN). The event was co-organized by the QDA, the Polish Oral History Association and the Faculty of Culture and Arts of the University of Warsaw. This time, the focus of the analysis was a narrative from a collection of interviews with the oldest doctors in Warmia and Masuria (Mazury) (regions in northeastern Poland), recorded by Ms. Ewelina Gołębiowska from the State Archives in Olsztyn (SAO) and Mr. Zygmunt Trusewicz, a medical doctor from Olsztyn. The collection was created between 2019 and 2021 as part of a joint project between SAO and the Center for the History of Warmian-Masurian Medicine (Ośrodek Historii Warmińsko-Mazurskiej Medycyny), with the support of the Warmia and Mazury Medical Chamber in Olsztyn. In total, there are twenty recordings (audios and videos) with doctors from various specializations. All the narratives have been archived in SAO, and information about them is available on the website of the Audiovisual History Archive of Warmia and Masuria.

New Dataset: ‘Narratives of Political and Economic Transition, 1995’

A collection titled ‘Narratives of Political and Economic Transition, 1995’ has been published in the QDA. The collection includes 73 transcripts of qualitative interviews conducted in 1995 with selected respondents from the ongoing study which is known as the Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN (as well as two pilot interview transcripts). The interviews were conducted by Dr. Denise Powers, who was a doctoral student at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at that time. Based on those interviews, she defended her doctoral thesis titled ‘The Psychological Basis of Democratic Transitions: Self and Politics in Poland.’ The interviews were conducted in Polish and anonymized before being included in the QDA’s resources.