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.

On March 22nd, the third 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. The focus of the analysis were interview transcripts from Professor Antonina Kłoskowska’s collection titled ‘National Cultures at the Grass-root Level,’ deposited in the Qualitative Data Archive at IFiS PAN (this study served as the basis for a book with the same title, published in Polish in 1996 and in English in 2001). Two accounts analyzed during the meeting were conducted in 1992 in villages located in eastern Poland, near the Belarusian border. Prof. Izabella Bukraba-Rylska, who conducted the interviews, agreed to revisit her materials after 30 years and participated in the seminar. The discussion during the meeting covered the factual layer of the interviews, methodological issues (related to the applied tool, as well as the transition from empirical material to scientific text), and changes occurring over time in the approach to archiving research materials.

A new dataset titled ‘Resolutions of Tripartite Commission for Socio-Economic Affairs in Poland (2001–2015). Classification of resolutions from the social dialogue’s effectiveness point of view,’ authored by Dr. Dariusz Szklarczyk from the AGH University of Krakow, has been published in the QDA. The dataset includes resolutions developed during the activities of the Tripartite Commission for Socio-Economic Affairs in Poland from 2001 to 2015, along with their categorization using the ‘associational participation scale’ (Talos & Kittel 2001). The aim of the study was to define and evaluate the effectiveness of the Tripartite Commission’s actions in the context of assessing the effectiveness of social dialogue at the national level in Poland.

On February 22nd, the meeting of the pilot series titled Oral History Seminars 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 participants analyzed an interview from Dr. Maria Buko’s ongoing project, which focuses on the children of German concentration camp prisoners. The account was filled with difficult emotions, so the discussion dedicated a lot of attention to ethical issues and the necessity of caring not only for the well-being of the interviewees but also for the interviewers themselves.

The Qualitative Data Archive (QDA), together with the Polish Oral History Association and the Faculty of Culture and Arts of the University of Warsaw, is organizing a pilot series of Oral History Seminars. These workshop-style meetings are dedicated to the analysis of interviews conducted within the field of oral history, both those stored in archives and completely new ones recorded as part of ongoing projects. The main initiator is Dr. Jakub Gałęziowski from the University of Warsaw. The meetings are patronized by the journal Wrocławski Rocznik Historii Mówionej (Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History).

On January 25th, the first meeting of the new series took place at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFiS PAN). The first part was devoted to presenting the idea of the seminars and discussing how to implement it. In the second part, the participants jointly analyzed an interview conducted by Dr. Jakub Gałęziowski as part of the currently ongoing project “A Breach in the System: The ‘Polonia Firms’ 1976-1994”. The meeting was attended by 23 participants representing over a dozen institutions, including academic units, archives, and NGOs.

The upcoming meeting dates are February 22nd, March 22nd, April 26th, and May 24th. The seminars will take place at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. To join the mailing list and receive materials for the upcoming meetings, please contact the organizers at seminariumoralhistory@gmail.com.

From the side of the QDA, Dr. Piotr Filipkowski and Dr. Danuta Życzyńska-Ciołek are involved in the project.

On December 7, 2022, Ms. Marianna Czabator started an internship in the QDA. Her task involves preparing one of the qualitative datasets created at IFIS PAN for release at the Archive. We are happy for this collaboration!