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Within sociology, there are many different research styles, and a multiplicity of methods. Opinions are divided on feasibility, sensibility, and the appropriate ways of combining them, especially at the level of data rather than conclusions. As for contemporary biographical methods, some of exponents (e.g., ROSENTHAL, 1995) have postulated that an interviewee's life story should be compared to the actual course of the life in question (i.e., the life history). Researchers, however, rarely have access to data beyond narratives. In this article, we look to outline intra-sociological splits in order to provide background and context for two biographical narrative interviews which have been conducted with long-standing respondents to the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN). These interviews, in turn, will be juxtaposed with the data derived from survey interviews, a valuable source of additional information about the interviewees, at least in some areas. Finally, we reflect on the potential benefits of such comparisons not only for proponents of the biographical methods but also for survey researchers. We draw on some of our methodological and theoretical considerations previously published in Polish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is inspired by a close reading of the recently published volume Żołnierze ludowego Wojska Polskiego. Historie mówione (Soldiers of the Polish people's Army. Oral histories) by Jarosław Pałka and Kaja Kaźmierska (Łódź, 2018) and continuously refers to it. Rather than a standard book review, it is a critical essay which positions this publication, and the documentation project standing behind it, in the context of Polish oral history research field. The latter has been expanding dynamically in recent years, gaining more and more recognition also among academic historians. One of its essential characteristics, to which this volume attests, is its methodological anchoring in biographical sociology. This field of research has a long academic tradition in Poland (though its current versions tend to adopt 'Western' ideas and research patterns) and offers scientific credibility to, still often insecure, oral history research. The text claims that scientific legitimisation of this kind does not necessarily lead to a convincing interpretation. The method, no matter how neutrally it may be presented, is not free from the authors' value judgements and non-source-based historical knowledge (and imagination). The text, therefore, suggests a reading of the book - which is vastly a selection of edited, historically footnoted and narratively ordered oral history sources (biographical narrative interviews with the title soldiers) - that partly goes against the authors' interpretations. Altogether, it makes up an exercise in (oral) historical hermeneutics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Polish historiography, communism over there and civilizational change.

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Information is provided on a conference on the collective memory of Central and Eastern Europe in Warsaw, Poland organised by several institutions, including the Institute of Sociology of the University of Warsaw, the Osteuropa Institut of the Free University of Berlin and the Institute of Sociology of the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities, in Warsaw, Poland from November 23-25, 2011. Topics include the genealogy of memory, memory studies and Polish collective memory.

The article discusses recent collective memory research in Poland as of 2012, including from the perspectives of the sociological and cultural studies fields. Various aspects of memory studies, including that of individual, cultural, social, biographical and autobiographical memory, are discussed. The article discusses the work of collective memory researchers, including Kornelia Kończal, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Aleida Assmann and Maurice Halbwach. Studies on the Polish collective memory of World War II and the Jewish Holocaust of 1939-1949 are also discussed.

The article discusses an oral history project undertaken among the citizenry of Krzyż Wielkopolski, Poland, formerly called Kreuz Ostbahn, Germany. Founded by Germans in the mid-19th century as what became a major railroad crossroads, the town's German residents were expelled in 1945, and Poles, who knew the town only from their forced labor there during World War II, took their place. The study examined the attitudes of the Slavic resettlers toward their displacement of the German residents, as well as the remembrances of those expelled Germans. Selections from those interviews are presented.