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The Experience of Systemic Transformation in Contemporary Biographical Narratives of Older Poles

100%

Życzyńska-Ciołek D.

Qualitative Sociology Review

2019

vol. 15

issue 4

20-45

The aim of this article is to explore whether-from the subjective perspective of people born before the end of WWII-systemic transformation brought about significant changes in their individual lives, and if yes-what was the meaning of those changes for them. In particular, I examine how experiences related to the events that preceded systemic transformation in Poland or took place during its most intensive stage are reflected in contemporary biographical narratives of 49 persons aged 72 or more, for whom the period of professional activity, in whole or in major part, occurred in the times of the Polish People’s Republic. I perform the analysis in three steps. First, I investigate the place of systemic transformation in the narratives, and consider the reasons why it is relatively often absent or poorly reflected there. Second, I present thematic motifs prevailing in those interviews where references to the systemic change appear. In the third step, I investigate the meaning of experiences connected with transformation for the narrators, the accompanying emotions-some of them still persisting-and ways in which the narrators incorporated those experiences into their biographies. The underlying narratives come from people who were drawn for a nationwide quantitative panel survey many years ago, in 1987, and participated in it for the next 25-30 years.

Narrative Agency and Structural Chaos. A Biographical-Narrative Case Study

75%

Filipkowski P.

Qualitative Sociology Review

2019

vol. 15

issue 4

268-290

The article is an analysis of a single case-a biographical narrative of a Tri-City resident who enters adulthood at the beginning of political transformation in 1989, and whose life path turns out to be an unintentional, dynamic journey between various professions, social worlds and structural positions. This creates a complicated and ambiguous biographical pattern which does not fall into either the socio-economic promotion of the “winner” or into the degradation of the transformation “loser.” The reconstruction of this pattern reveals the hero’s great resourcefulness and entrepreneurship, but also the fragility of the structures stabilizing his life and the volatility of life orientation points. The binder of this biography turns out to be, above all, reflexivity and, what I suggest calling, the narrative agency of the narrator, who can transform his structurally dispersed and chaotic life experiences of the time of transformation into a very original story, making him a strong subject of his own fate. This, however, creates the inevitable tension between the experienced or lived life, life history and the narrated life, life story, prompting us to again pose the question about the commonly assumed, although differently defined, correspondence between the level of reality and the level of its linguistic (in this case-autobiographical) representation.

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2 Qualitative Sociology Review

1 Filipkowski P.

1 Życzyńska-Ciołek D.

2 2019

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The Experience of Systemic Transformation in Contemporary Biographical Narratives of Older Poles

Narrative Agency and Structural Chaos. A Biographical-Narrative Case Study