Regaining Lost Community Knowledge

Abstract

AbstractThe aim of the Migrating Biographies project is to analyse and categorise meanings in the autobiographical narratives of the second, third and fourth generations in Poland of ‘re-emigrant families’ from Bosnia, which reveal dynamic transformations of biographical identity. The chapter presents a synthetic summary of selected (re)interpretations, which illustrate changes that take place generationally and are the dynamic and ongoing processes that remake community through intergenerational identity conceptualisation which is a result of bottom up individual and community biographical work. The theoretical framework of the project is based on the interpretative-constructivist and critical humanist paradigm, where qualitative research strategy is meant to reinforce the inductive generation of empirical material. Data were collected through autobiographical narrative interviews and through oral history. Research participants (25 people) were recruited on the basis of their unique biographical characteristics as members of a ‘post-Yugoslavian’ family and their specific situation within their family systems, which made them the medium for intergenerational experience of repeated migration, from Galicia to Bosnia (end of 19th century) and from Bosnia back to Poland (in 1946).