Month: March 2024

On March 27, an Oral History Seminar was held at IFiS PAN. Participants analyzed an interview conducted in 2013 by Ms. Wioletta Wejman with a Jewish woman, Ms. Anna Mass, born in 1921 in Lublin. The interview is part of the “Oral History” program implemented by the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theater” Center in Lublin. This program aims to document the personal histories of Lublin residents and those from the surrounding areas.

The Oral History Seminars are co-organized by the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the University of Warsaw, the Qualitative Data Archive at IFiS PAN, and the Polish Oral History Association. The initiative is under the patronage of the “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej” („Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History)”. If you would like to participate in future meetings or receive more information, please contact us at: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

A new dataset titled ‘The Young and the Pandemic’ has been published in the QDA. Its author is Professor Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz (University of Warsaw).

The dataset contains materials collected by the Childhood Studies Interdisciplinary Research Team (University of Warsaw) as part of three research projects: two already completed (‘Children’s pandemic archive’ and ‘Change. Children’s pandemic experience’) and one ongoing (‘Pandemic and post-pandemic children’s worlds’). The projects aim to explore children’s experiences and opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic from a childhood studies perspective. The dataset contains diverse materials, including children’s drawings and letters, transcriptions of their statements, interviews with adult experts, information leaflets on one of the studies, and a calendar of the pandemic.

The second, extended version of the dataset ‘Resettlement in the Revitalization of Polish Cities: Individual In-depth Interviews with Tenants from Łódź, Warsaw, and Wałbrzych’ has been published in ADJ. The dataset was supplemented with 26 transcriptions of interviews conducted in 2023 in Walbrzych, and 14 transcriptions of interviews conducted in 2022 in Warsaw.

A new dataset titled ‘Following the Smartphone: Ethnography of the Emergent Urban Cultures of Networked Individuals’ has been published in the QDA. Its author is Dr. Mirosław Filiciak, Assistant Professor at the SWPS University. The project from which the data came was devoted to the use of smartphones in the big city. The researchers explored how individuals representing diverse social groups (with different social status, levels of education, income, and age) use new personalized, portable technologies, understood as carriers of networked individualism. The study was conducted in 2021-2023 in Warsaw. The researchers conducted nearly 120 interviews (including expert interviews) and observations. Due to the lack of respondents’ consents, only 15 interview transcriptions are available in the QDA.

The study was funded by the National Science Centre under grant no. 2019/33/B/HS2/02856.

On February 28, an Oral History Seminar was held at IFiS PAN. Participants analyzed an interview with a man born in 1934, who spent his childhood, including the World War II period, in Białowieża. The interview was conducted by Ms. Katarzyna Winiarska, a cultural animator and educator associated with the Białowieża Forest, the creator of the Virtual Museum of Jewish History in Białowieża, and a doctoral student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. The recording is part of a collection of interviews she gathered to document the history of Białowieża’s Jewish community.

The Oral History Seminars are co-organized by the Faculty of Culture and Arts at the University of Warsaw, the Qualitative Data Archive at IFiS PAN, and the Polish Oral History Association. The initiative is under the patronage of the “Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej” („Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History)”.