Rozalia Ligus
Dr Rozalia Ligus – an Associate Professor in Adult Education and Cultural Studies, Institute of Pedagogy, University of Wrocław. Her main interest is focused on socio-cultural aspects of adult learning, biographical (re)construction of identity, collective memory and the development of local community. She is the author of the book Techers’ Biographical identity (2009) and articles published in Polish and English. Since 2004 she is a member of the ESREA European Society for Research on Education of Adults and since 2018 a member of Polish Sociological Association.
Looking for the Biographical Identity – Life Histories of the Descendants of Polish Re-emigrants From Yugoslavia
The aim of the study is to reveal and describe the process of constituting the biographical identity of the 3rd and 4th generation of descendants’ of Polish re-emigrants from
a former Jugoslavia. (The historical context in short: In late 19th century 18.000 Poles from Galicia migrated to Bosnia (both, Galicia and Bosnia were at that time under the rule of Austro-Hungarian Empire) and after fifty years, in 1946, 15.000 Poles were resettled to Lower Silesia, the territory that was incorporated to Poland after World War II). In this context, it seems surprising that currently (interviews collected in 2018 in Bolesławiec, Lower Silesia, Poland) in the narratives of four generations (narrators aged 20-80) one often can hear “We, Poles from Yugoslavia.” That kind of individual and collective self-identification encourages to ask questions about the roots of identification of the youngest generations (3rd and 4th) as well as their interpretation of the fact that former Yugoslavia has stopped to exist in 1995, which the interlocutors seem to disregard in their narratives. The empirical material consists of 25 narrative interviews collected from March to November 2018 and based on Fritz Schütze’s method of autobiographical narrative interview that is theoretically and methodologically coherent. The conceptual and interpretive grid can be used in a double way as a technique and as a method itself. Key words: self-identity under construction, intergenerational transfer of non-formal knowledge, ”migrating biographies”
