School of Social and Political Science

Description

Slow memory is a new emerging concept in memory studies and refers to “thinking through which ‘pasts’ have a meaningful impact on our present(s)” in order to shift research attention from events to slow-moving processes (Wüstenberg, forthcoming). The presentation will discuss a method of narrative research presentation developed as a part of a project on academic censorship, self-censorship and publishing in the Czech Republic during state socialism. The objective of the method was to allow the interviewees to represent themselves to the greatest possible extent, while at the same time preserving the multiple voices and contradictions present in the interviews due to the politically sensitive nature of the topic. The research and its method bring together multiple actors and levels at which censorship was deployed, striving for a nuanced account of repression, resistance, negotiation, and complicity. All those interviewed were academics in senior positions at the time of the interview and they were also active within official academic structures during state socialism. The method of treating the interview material in the written output combines the approaches of grounded theory and narratology in the production of dramatised “imagined conversations”. These are structured loosely as a quest narrative that tells the story of a research “quest” to understand the intricacies and dilemmas of individual academic lives under state socialism through the haze of memory, pain and vested interests. The conversations are “imagined” in the sense that they never happened in a real research situation, because the interviews were conducted one-to-one, but also because the bringing together of the individual biographical narratives created a sense of a shared community around an issue (in the sense of Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities”).

About the speaker:

Libora Oates-Indruchová is Professor of Sociology of Gender at the University of Graz (A) and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh.Her research interests include cultural representations of gender, gender and social change, censorship, everyday creativity and narrative research, with a focus on state-socialist and post state-socialist Czech Republic. Her publications include Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969-89: Snakes and Ladders (Bloomsbury 2020); “Blind Spots in Post-1989 Czech Historiography of State Socialism: Gender as a Category of Analysis” (East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 2022) and “Self-Censorship and Aesopian Language of Scholarly Texts of Late State Socialism” (The Slavonic and East European Review 96 [2018], 4: 614-641). From the project on censorship she published earlier “The Limits of Thought?: The Regulatory Framework of Social Sciences and Humanities in Czechoslovakia (1968-1989)” (Europe-Asia Studies, 2008). She also co-edited The Politics of Gender Culture under State Socialism: An Expropriated Voice (with Hana Havelková; Routledge 2014, paperback 2015; expanded Czech edition 2015) that won the 2016 BASEES Women’s Forum Book Prize.

About the series:

The Sociology Speaker Series presents the latest research by academic staff members and distinguished guests from across the United Kingdom and beyond. We normally meet on Wednesdays during the semester. Registration is free and open to all University of Edinburgh students and staff.