This talk will describe the process of creation and implementation of the methodological and ethical rules in the 24.02.2022 5 am: Testimonies from the War project in Poland, which aims to collect accounts of war refugees from Ukraine who came to Poland. How different is oral history of the ongoing conflict from any other oral history? What are the responsibilities of the researcher and the challenges of the research? I will present the planning phase of the project, cooperation with various institutions, and the formation and management of the research team, as well as the participants’ recruitment and our research tool. I will also explore the notion of ethics in the making or ethics in action, which is an inevitable approach when researching the ongoing conflict. Finally I will talk about the way we take care of our interviewees, ourselves as researchers and the data we gather to enable the responsible use of the collection in the future.
Anna Wylegała is a sociologist and Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Her work focuses on the social history of the II World War and the immediate postwar period. She is also interested in the qualitative methodology of social research, oral history and memory studies. She is an author of “Displaced Memories: Remembering and Forgetting in Post-War Poland and Ukraine” (2019) and “Był dwór, nie ma dworu. Reforma rolna w Polsce” [There was an estate, there is no estate any more. Agricultural reform in Poland] (2021). She also co-edited two other volumes: “The Burden of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine” (2020), and “No Neighbors’ Lands: Vanishing Others in Postwar Europe”. Currently she is a leader of the Polish part of the "Testimonies from the War" project. In April 2024 she is a Leibniz Association Visiting Fellow at ZZF Potsdam.
The presentation language is English; discussion will be multilingual.
Please note that the event will take place on-site at the Forum Transregionale Studien and online via Zoom. We kindly ask for prior registration via prisma(at)trafo-berlin.de.