Description

• Title:
  Narrative Agency and Structural Chaos. A Biographical-Narrative Case Study
• Creator:
  Filipkowski, Piotr
• Contributor:
  Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland;
  Piotr Filipkowski, a sociologist, oral historian, and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Center for Historical Research in Berlin. Engaged in various historical and sociological research projects devoted to biographical experiences and memories of the war, socialist modernization, and capitalist transformation in Poland and Eastern Europe. The author of a monograph Oral History and the War. Concentration Camp Experience in Biographical-Narrative Perspective (Wroclaw 2010, Berlin 2019), where he analyzes interviews with Polish survivors of the Nazi camps during World War II.;
  pfilipkowski@ifispan.waw.pl
• Description:
  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.
• Object availability:
  free access
• Rights:
  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.;
  http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
• Date:
  2019.11.22;
  2019
• Type:
  Article
• Language:
  English
• Format:
  application/pdf
• Publisher:
  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Relation:
  Qualitative Sociology Review; 4;
  15
• Subject:
  Systemic Transformation;
  Biographical Narrative;
  Subjectivity;
  Agency;
  Reflexivity;
  Chaos;
  Complexity
• Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/11089/30875 ;
  1733-8077;
  10.18778/1733-8077.15.4.12
• Data provider:
  Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Can I use it?:
  check license
• Type:
  image