The Oral History Seminars, which commenced as a pilot series this spring at IFIS PAN, are set to continue. On October 25, 2023, the inaugural meeting for the new academic year occurred. During this session, participants analyzed an interview from the project titled ‘Memory and Oblivion: Sociocultural Post-War Changes in Hausdorf/Jugów in the Owl Mountains.’ This project was conducted collaboratively by the Women’s Foundation from Krakow, Integrationswerk RESPEKT e.V. from Berlin, and the Hendernyj Informacijno-Anality Center KRONA from Kharkiv. Alina Doboszewska, the project coordinator, provided the introduction to the narrative. The interview under scrutiny was recorded in 2010 and featured two female narrators, one born in 1925 and the other in 1930.

The Oral History Seminars are organized by the QDA, the Polish Oral History Association and the Faculty of Culture and Arts of the University of Warsaw. They are held under the patronage of the ‘Wroclaw Oral History Yearbook.’

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The new academic year will see the continuation of the Oral History Seminars – workshop meetings dedicated to the analysis of oral history interviews. The first meeting will take place on 25th October from 13.30 to 17.30 in room 154 of the Staszic Palace. Subsequent meetings will take place on the fourth Wednesday of the month (except December). At the beginning of October, the organisers of the cycle – Dr. Piotr Filipkowski from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN) and Dr. Jakub Gałęziowski from the University of Warsaw – will send out materials for the first meeting and a tentative plan for the next ones. Persons who have not participated in the Seminars before and would like to receive information on it are requested to write to: seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

The National Science Centre is running a series of webinars on the topic of opening up research data across scientific disciplines. On 13 September this year. Maciej Melon hosted a meeting in this series on managing qualitative research data in sociological sciences. It was attended by 130 people.

Thematic scope of the training.

The Czarne publishing house has published Agata Szydłowska’s book entitled. “Encasement. On furnishing flats in the People’s Republic of Poland“. The book uses photographs from the dataset “Lifestyles in Polish Cities” – a collection containing materials from Prof. Andrzej Sicinski’s research, available at QDA.

A new collection entitled ‘Precarious Careers and Turning Points in Life’ has been published in the QDA. It is authored by Stefan Bieńkowski and Danuta Życzyńska-Ciołek.
The collection contains materials from a small pilot study on the occupational (and biographical) trajectories of female retirees receiving low pension benefits.

On May 24th, the fifth Oral History Seminar took place at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN). It was the last meeting in the pilot cycle. The subject of analysis was one of the interviews conducted in 2021-2023 by Dr. Marcin Jarząbek (Jagiellonian University) with individuals who had worked at the Polish State Railways (PKP) or in one of the companies that had emerged after the division and commercialization of PKP.

The interviews gathered by Dr. Jarząbek were autobiographical in nature, but the main area of focus was the professional work of the interviewees. Dr. Jarząbek aims to write a monograph on the socio-cultural history of labor in PKP during the second half of the 20th century and in the beginning of the 21st century. The work will be based on the interviews, archival research, and analysis of other materials from that era. During the seminar, we analyzed an interview with a PKP commercial service employee from southwestern Poland.

Over 20 people from several research centers in Poland participated in the meeting. At the end, the organizers encouraged participants to complete an evaluation survey, which will help in deciding whether to continue the project in the upcoming academic year. The pilot cycle of the Oral History Seminars was organized by the QDA, the Polish Oral History Association and the Faculty of Culture and Arts of the University of Warsaw.

A book based on interviews archived in the QDA has just been published. Ryszard Jamka’s monograph titled “Panów piłą. Trzy legendy o Jakubie Szeli [Sawing the Nobility. Three Legends of Jakub Szela]” utilizes materials from research organized in 1950 by the Department of Sociology at the University of Warsaw, under the leadership of Stanisław Ossowski. That research focused on the memory of the Galician Slaughter in the Podkarpacie region (in Jakub Szela’s hometown) and near Tarnów (Małopolska region). Shortly after the completion of the research, the Polish authorities began to eliminate sociology as a separate academic field in Poland. The sociological departments at the University of Warsaw were dissolved, and Stanisław Ossowski was removed from teaching. Consequently, the research materials were not processed at that time. Currently, they are made available for scientific purposes in the QDA (dataset titled “Jasło Research by Stanisław Ossowski’s Team on Jakub Szela”).

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.

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.