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The article presents the analysis of two cases of women reconstructed based on autobiographical narrative interviews. They are mothers of many children and are active online, having accounts on Instagram and creating content. Most research focused on the activities of online creators is based on an analysis of their web content. Due to the type of research data, autobiographical narratives and the interpretations of one’s biographical experiences and actions are the main frame of this analysis. Both narrators represent contemporary modern women, combining opposing patterns of tradition and modernity, which are often presented in public discourses as contradictory or mutually excluding. Internet activity seems to remedy the accompanying experience of tension and supports women’s biographical work. What stands out is the identity work undertaken by the two narrators, whose frame of reference is the tension between the planned and voluntary entry into traditionally understood motherhood and the plan for one’s development inscribed in the identity of an educated modern woman socialized in a culture of individualism. In this respect, their online activity appears to have a compensatory function in their biographies.

The paper deals with the ethical aspects of the research process and contemporary changes in this field, which make the discussion on ethical dilemmas and concerns more dynamic and varied. Although in natural science and social sciences one can find a common ground related to the most general ethical principles. In the article I refer primarily to the social sciences. The article discusses three aspects affecting the dynamics of ethical discussions: the development of research in the field of natural sciences leading to many ethical dilemmas and forcing ethical codification of research proceedings also in the area of social sciences; the increase in sensitivity and social consciousness and not only awareness of research as such (processes of democratization, emphasizing human and animal rights, protection of minority rights, the process of individualization); the dynamics of contemporary social changes resulting from the development of technology, especially the Internet, which has become a global resource of data and their exchange. This forces qualitative researchers to consider the issue of data archiving, their reanalysis, and determining the boundary for creating Big Qualidata from them. The article discusses these three dimensions, with particular emphasis on the last of them, which will be commented on in relation to the specific methodological approach, which is biographical research.

This year (2019) we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the great systemic change. The year 1989 has been symbolically set and accepted in the public discourse as the turning point for the political, social, economic transition. It is associated with two events—the Round Table in February 1989 and the partly democratic elections held on June 04. Poland became the first Eastern Bloc country where the representatives of the democratic opposition gained real influence over the government. This gave rise to political changes, which included “[t]hree components of the social system, that is, politics, economy, and social culture. And these components are known to be interconnected by a network of relations transmitting both the factor stimulating the development of the whole system, as well as the limitations determining the acceptable solutions. Attempts to evaluate the course of these transformations have been made many times. There is an almost continuous discussion and disputes over the results obtained, the costs incurred, and the need for further reforms” (Pisz 2000:101- 102). Although 19 years have passed since the quoted statements, the discussion has been continued up to now and, of course, from the very beginning, the Polish transformation has been carefully studied by sociologists. Until the mid-1990s, researchers dealt with change as such, describing the essence of crucial institutional reforms and only then dealing with the social consequences of systemic change (Kolasa-Nowak 2010:52). Even then most of the researchers concentrated primarily on changes perceived from the macro-social level. For instance, Juliusz Gardawski (2001; 2009) analyzed changes from the perspective of economy and sociology of work. Henryk Domański (1996; 2000; 2002; 2005; 2008) (relying on long-term quantitative research) pondered changes in the social structure, creation of the middle-class, or changes in the hierarchy of prestige. Andrzej Rychard (1996), Mirosława Marody and Anna Giza-Poleszczuk (2004), as well as Giza-Poleszczuk, Marody, and Rychard (2000) focused on the process of institutionalization, changing of social capitals, cultural dimension of the social transition, and the way social bonds were shaping after 1989. Sociologists, using profoundly quantitative research, began to describe individual ways of coping with systemic change and developing adaptation strategies (e.g., Marody 1997; 2002; Rychard 2005). Certainly, these are only some examples of sociological works—although deliberately enumerated here—that offered (macro)syntheses of the Polish transformation.

One of the common and schematic descriptions in the perspective of the 1989 breakthrough are two ways of dealing with it by people who are respectively called winners or losers of transformation. These stereotypical characteristics are not only the tool to draw the general image of effects of the transition, but are also based on the specific way of interpretation deeply rooted, for example, in neoliberal thinking. Yet, from the perspective of an individual—so-called Schütz’s man on the street—the categorization of winners and losers not only simplifies the description of social reality, but also it cannot be easily biographically justified because the etic categorization is not always relevant to the emic perspective. In other words, the life history of an individual, showing the main phases and events of biography, and life story—the way that one interprets his/her biographical experiences— may not correspond to each other. The analysis of these two aspects of biography (what is lived through and how it is interpreted) shows how people have dealt with the process of transformation. In the paper, it is presented on the basis of one case study.

W artykule przedstawiono wyniki przeprowadzanych w ostatnich latach badań sondażowych nad religijnością Polaków w obrębie Kościoła katolickiego, ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem ludzi młodych, gdyż obecnie ta grupa społeczna ogniskuje uwagę zarówno dyskursów medialnych, naukowych, jak i wewnątrz Kościoła, ze względu na bardzo zauważalny proces porzucania deklaracji wiary oraz praktyk religijnych. Dane te zostały następnie umieszczone w kontekście współczesnych zmian społeczno-kulturowych, których cechami są indywidualizacja życia, odejście od kolektywnych identyfikacji oraz dynamiczny proces sekularyzacji. Zarysowany za pomocą danych ilościowych obraz uzupełniony został przykładami narracji autobiograficznych młodych osób odnoszących się do kwestii współczesnego przeżywania własnej wiary, a zwłaszcza duchowości. Końcowa część artykułu zawiera komentarz dotyczący źródeł aktualnych zmian religijności oraz zarysowuje możliwe scenariusze ich rozwoju.

Zapis panelu dyskusyjnego otwierającego międzynarodową konferencję naukową Biografie historyków i historyczek we współczesnej nauce polskiej i ukraińskiej, Łódź, 10–11 października 2024 r.

The article is a review of Marcin Starnawski’s Socjalizacja i tożsamość żydowska w Polsce powojennej: Narracje emigrantów z pokolenia Marca ’68 [Jewish Socialization and Identity in Postwar Poland: Narratives of Émigrés from the March 1968 Generation], Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Dolnośląskiej Szkoły Wyższej 2016.

The aim of the paper is to share our reflections on the meaning, goals, and course of analytical workshops, which are treated by the authors not only in terms of methodological procedures, but also as a process of grounded theory building, where the phase of collective work is pivotal. We present the idea of workshops worked out within interpretative sociology and qualitative analysis and developed in different fields, yet we mainly focus on biographical research analysis. The knowledge and practice transfer between scholars in this respect is also one of the frames of our reasoning. The paper consists of several sections: firstly, we present a short overview of workshop practices in the field of biographical research referring mainly to students' workshops; in the second part, we describe advantages of workshop practices for researchers and their possible outcomes; the third section describes examples of research and analysis of the same empirical material done by researchers representing different methodological approaches; finally, we finish with concluding remarks.

The subject of this article is the anonymisation of data, which, alongside informed consent, isconsidered a fundamental requirement in terms of ethical standards in contemporary sociologicalresearch and, because of this, is often treated as a technical activity in the process of preparingresearch material for analysis. The aim of this article is to highlight selected dilemmas related toanonymisation and to invite discussion of issues that are sometimes unreflectively accepted asprocedures formulated by ethics committees.Following the literature of the subject, I show that framing anonymisation solely in terms ofan element of research practice ignores its impact on the research process and its consequencesin ontological, methodological and analytical terms. In the second part of the article, I engage ina discussion of the issue of the real possibility of protecting the identity of participants through thepractice of anonymisation, especially nowadays, when the Internet has become an aggregate ofinformation left online intentionally or accidentally by its users. I relate the considerations presentedin the article primarily to qualitative sociological research, and biographical research in particular.

Biography and Memory discusses the return of Jews to their places of birth in Poland. A biographical urge to come full circle often leads to symbolic journeys to one’s roots, but in the case of Shoah survivors, such journeys are unexpected, defying the generational definition of their biography, which mostly draws a demarcation line between wartime trauma and a new post- Holocaust life. Analyzed biographical stories collected from Israeli survivors indicate that such returns may be considered the last chapters of their wartime experiences. Survivors’ biographies are examined in the context of both Jewish and Polish memory. This book will be of interest to sociologists, historians, and to general readers.