Individual Biographies Research Articles

Coping with the absence of parents: growing up in military families in Slovenia

ABSTRACT Growing up in a military family with long-term and frequently absent parents presents unique psychosocial challenges to children and families. The purpose of this paper is to examine what growing up in a military family with absent parents looks like from a child’s perspective, what the biggest challenges are, and how children cope with them. We took a life course approach and conducted retrospective, semi-structured in-depth interviews with 13 adult children from 11 military families in Slovenia, which revealed that prolonged parental absences leave a strong impression on children’s individual biographies and everyday life. This influence is evident in their present and past everyday life throughout their life trajectories. It particularly affects relationships with parents and relationships between parents, leads to frequent changes in daily routines and disrupts the family balance as well as causes anxiety and fear for the parent. From the children’s perspective, it also affects their parents’ parenting practices (how their parents raised them) and how they manage their lives.

‘Shall I compare thee?’ Evaluating Finance Ministers

Abstract Over the past century, the methods used to evaluate Finance Ministers have evolved from the close scrutiny of individual biographies to the statistical analysis of aggregated data. This paper explores this evolution within the framework of economic theory and applies the results in an Irish context. It concludes that while statistical methods can provide some support for certain hypotheses, they are not yet advanced enough to entirely replace the traditional political economy approach.

Yu Shuxi’s Biography and Transmission of Pingdiao Sanxianshu Chinese Folk Singing in the Context of Literacy

This study investigates the role of Yu Shuxi in the transmission and preservation of Pingdiao Sanxianshu, an intangible cultural heritage, within the context of literacy and education. By analyzing the cultural significance and pedagogical practices of Yu Shuxi’s artistry, the research explores the impact of traditional folk arts on literacy development and cultural identity formation. Utilizing qualitative methods, including interviews with key informants and field observations in Baofeng County, Henan Province, the study captures the intricate relationship between individual biographies and broader educational practices. Data analysis reveals how Yu Shuxi’s life story and teachings in Pingdiao Sanxianshu contribute to cultural preservation and literacy skills among learners, emphasizing the need for integration of traditional arts in modern education. The results indicate the potential of such arts to enhance critical thinking, linguistic abilities, and cultural literacy. Consequently, the research suggests collaborative measures across educational institutions, governmental policies, and community efforts to ensure the viability and relevance of traditional folk arts like Pingdiao Sanxianshu in contemporary society, maintaining their legacy for future generations.

The Family as a Place of Experiencing Critical Events – Case Study

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The main aim is to show the narrative of a woman who experienced critical events in her personal life. THE RESEARCH PROBLEMS AND METHODS: 1. How does the narrator describe critical events based on her family experience? 2. What meaning does she ascribe to the events experienced in retrospect? The presented research is situated in the interpretative research tradition. A descriptive‑theoretical type of case study was used. Empirical data was collected using Fritz Schütze’s narrative interview technique. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The interview began by presenting the narrator’s life story from her childhood to the present day. Attention was paid to her understanding of herself and her life, her relationship with her parents, and critical events that occurred in her family. The empirical material was then interpreted based on Schütze’s process structures, which revealed her current life course, critical events in the family and landmark events in the narrator’s individual biography. RESEARCH RESULTS: The interpretation of the empirical material showed the narrator in the process of change, internal metamorphoses. It revealed poor intra‑family relations, which became the cause of illness, lack of self‑acceptance, and depressive and anxious states. The therapy that she underwent, satisfying professional work and mutual feelings of love allowed the narrator to overcome her limitations, weaknesses and take a critical look at the family relationships that were the cause of her pain and suffering. CONCLUSIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS AND APPLICABLE VALUE OF RESEARCH: The narrative presented in the paper can become a stimulus for change in people who are currently struggling with family problems, illness or suffering: all those people who experience anxiety and loneliness in the space of family life.

Ethno-Cultural Identity Formation in Mapuche Youth Biographies: A Case Study from the Perspective of Colonial and Transgenerational Historical

In this paper, we present evidence from a case study exploring the intricate relationship between transgenerational historical and colonial trauma and the process of ethno-cultural identity formation among young Mapuche individuals residing in rural communities in Chile. Our analysis centers on two prominent themes derived from their personal narratives, shedding light on the intergenerational dynamics that significantly influence the current development of their ethno-cultural identities. These themes are the communication and transmission of family history and memory, and the valuation of Mapuche culture. Our methodology employs biographical narratives and adopts a grounded theory approach, specifically in its constructivist variant. The findings of this study reveal that the biographies of these young individuals reflect distinct elements of emotional impact and coping strategies linked to historical and colonial trauma, which are transmitted across generations. In one case, there appears to be a tendency to conceal family history, while in the other, active preservation of memory seems to underpin reflections on identity, belonging, and the appropriation of Mapuche culture. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the significance of emotional connections with family, as well as individual expectations and future aspirations, which play pivotal roles in shaping motivations and expressions concerning Mapuche ethno-cultural affiliation or disassociation. We contend that these intricate dynamics mediate the formation of ethno-cultural identity among Mapuche young people.

Introduction

With the establishment of communism in Eastern Europe, the churches found themselves in a precarious situation after the traumatic experiences of the Second World War. The churches were challenged to coexist with autocratic regimes. Institutionally weakened by the attempts of political power to limit their autonomy, the churches were confronted with the overthrow of the socio-political order by the Soviet-backed installation of communist regimes. The Soviet model of the communisation of societies was also adopted by the regimes loyal to Moscow in terms of religious policy, which for most churches, it meant public and political marginalisation in exchange for limited autonomy. Thus, the regimes’ religious policies, which were not aimed at the total elimination of religious life and, implicitly, of the churches, included a range of practices and instruments that involved institutional control, informational surveillance and political repression. A special case was the Greek Catholic Church, which was abolished and its clergy and bishops repressed. These methodological premises served as the basis for organising the international conference “Churches and Political Power During Communism. Individual Biographies and Institutional Mechanisms”, which brought together leading scholars from Poland, Hungary, the Republic of Moldova and Romania in Alba Iulia from 21 to 23 September 2023. This academic meeting resulted in the publication of the present volume, which includes the most representative contributions. This volume is the result of a collaboration between the LIT publishing house and Annales Universitatis Apulensis (Alba Iulia), which publishes the volume as a special issue of this journal.

New behavioural economics and its influence on USA passenger airline management and policies

The essay examines the history of interactions between academic thinkers and the application of their ideas to airline management and policy. Many studies of the history of transport focus on developments in engineering hardware and business models underlying its use, together with historical biographies of the key individuals involved. Here I deviate from this to look at how, over the past half-century or so, ideas emanating from the new behavioural economics have permeated the way air transport markets, and their regulation, have developed. I consider the outcomes on air carriers and their markets of efforts at combining psychology and economics into matters concerning airline management and policy formulation. It looks at the ways in which the traditional economic framework that dominated much of the thinking about commercial air transport from the 1920s has been challenged over the past 50 years and the implications of this for carriers and passengers.

Using Bourdieu's Habitus in International Relations

Abstract The concept of habitus is a centerpiece of Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociology and is among the most popular conceptual imports into the Bourdieu-inspired “practice turn” in International Relations (IR). There have, however, been recurrent questions whether IR work using habitus and Bourdieu mainly “re-describe in different language” what scholars already know about world politics. This article argues that a more traditional use of habitus that pays attention to the production of habitus is key to advancing distinctly Bourdieusian and practice-based accounts of international politics. Drawing on a detailed survey of habitus scholarship in IR, the article shows how the practice turn takes a narrow view of social structure by bracketing social class, race, and gender; is preoccupied with the pedagogical labor of secondary socialization over primary socialization; and neglects the concrete embodied dimension of practice. Looking to Bourdieu's own work, this article calls for theoretically armed empirical attention to social structure, primary socialization, and embodiment. It articulates a specific strategy for this recovery: closer attention to the production of habitus by mapping the biographies of individuals and groups and relating these sedimented histories to agents’ practices and shared structures of experience.

What about my future career after the pandemic? SARS-CoV-2 and distance learning in the evaluation of future professional opportunities

In this article we present the results of a survey among 556 Polish university students, conducted in the summer of 2020 using an online CAWI survey questionnaire method. We investigated whether the students perceived that the transition to distance learning during the pandemic period had changed their future career prospects. The survey shows a distinct influence of the university (and its support) and the course of study on the students’ assessment of their career prospects. In addition, the results of exploratory factor analysis, multiple linear regression, and logistic regression indicate that attractive and engaging distance learning bolsters the students’ belief in their perceived value on the labor market. Notably, the students perceived the pandemic as an important structural factor that went beyond individual biographies. The students’ assessment of how the pandemic is changing the economy was an important predictor of how they perceived their chances on the job market.

On Social Emergence: A Non-Dichotomous Approach to Qualitative Data Analysis

As part of our research project titled The Shaping of Subjectivity and Biographies of Individuals in the Face of the Transformations of a Neo-modern Society, data was collected with a tool of narrative interviewing focusing on the present experience. In this article, we propose a nondichotomous way of analyzing this qualitative material. The inspiration for creating the presented analytics is the epistemological position of the Gestalt psychotherapy as well as phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty and Waldenfels). The narrative interviews were aimed at theorizing (about) subjectivity in the biographies of contemporary Poles, but the analysis focuses not so much on depicting subjectivity as ‘basic agency’ – i.e. that which provides the possibility of action, interaction, self-narrating – but, rather, on seeing subjectivity as a component that emerges only in the long process of narration and interaction.

Analyzing the Theme of Forced Migration in Amit Majmudar’s Partitions through the Lens of Everett Lee’s Pull-Push Theory

Partitions, the novel written by Amit Majmudar, provides a vivid insight into the complex forces behind forced migration that are based on Everett Lee’s Pull-Push Theory. The novel revolves around two main characters – Keshav and Shankar whose lives are destroyed due to India’s partition in 1947. Our qualitative case study investigates numerous “pull” and “push” factors in order to understand what triggers this process of migration. The current study aims to explore by employing textual analysis and utilizing theoretical frameworks to dissect how socio-political, economic, and cultural forces define decisions made by the characters we meet throughout the story. The results illustrate the complexity of migration stories and emphasize the importance of placing individual biographies within a larger context. This effort helps in understanding deeper levels of forced migration studies and how they can influence historical perspectives and contemporary global issues, as described in this research.

Leaky bodies, vaccination and three layers of memory: bio-immune, social-collective and lived experience

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the omnipresent yet analytically almost invisible role of memory and bodily experiences in childhood vaccination. Previous scholarship on the sociocultural aspects of vaccination has primarily focused on the individual and sociodemographic factors underpinning vaccine hesitancy, the role of healthcare professionals and the politicisation or mediatisation of vaccination. Social practices considering vaccination were primarily explored as a matter of the present. Only little consideration was given to the past, individual biographies and sociohistorical temporalities. To complement this body of work, we focus on cognitively-based, embodied and emotionally-experienced memory related to vaccination. Based on a qualitative study of childhood vaccination conducted in Czechia between 2017 and 2019 consisting of ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews and a document review, we identified three interconnected forms of vaccination memory: bio-immune, social-collective and lived experience. Bio-immune memory refers to the body’s physical memory, gained to protect itself from diseases. Social-collective memory focuses on socially shared narratives about diseases and vaccination in the past. The memory of lived experience refers to feelings, embodied knowledge and pain. Our findings may inspire further analysis of childhood vaccination in other geographical contexts and amidst the reconfiguration of attitudes and newly established memories following the COVID-19 pandemic.

ИСТОРИЯ И КУЛЬТУРА ДЖЕГОНАССКИХ ГОРСКИХ ЕВРЕЕВ В СОВРЕМЕННЫХ ЦИФРОВЫХ АРХИВАХ / БАЗАХ ДАННЫХ (ИСТОЧНИКОВЕДЧЕСКИЙ АСПЕКТ)

During two decades, the Databases of digitized historical documents had come into sight, specifi-cally WWI and WWII periods (www.gwar.mil.ru; www.obd-memorial.ru; www.podvignaroda.ru; www.pamyat-naroda.ru). It’s bringing a new momentum in the historical and ethnological studies by updating the focus on individual biographies, family stories and their network, genealogies and onomastics. The author is showcasing the potential of Databases for heuristic search on the local Mountain Jews group in Dzhegonas village, Kuban region. It is noted that there is an interaction process between the researcher and the platform, in which the platform, after providing options for the required data, can change the vector and focus of scientific search, thereby changing the object and subject of research, among other things. It is concluded that the advent of such Internet platforms of digitized documents and Databases affects the complex of sources in history and eth-nology on the one hand, and influences research processes on the other.

Pathways to Homelessness and Social Exclusion: Research with Rough Sleepers in Croatia

This new study explores pathways into homelessness and identifies ‘turning points’ among persons currently experiencing rooflessness. Besides their explanations, this research also holistically examines individual biographies to see how other issues have permeated their lives. Although the reasons people described for becoming homeless were complex and multi-layered, the study identifies six pathways into homelessness, as well as some turning points. This research shows that pathways into homelessness do not develop in isolation from life circumstances, but rather that life pathways and pathways into homelessness were closely interwoven into a web, making sustainable exits from homelessness more difficult.

Антропологический подход к советским философским поколениям (Рецензия на книгу: Философские поколения / Автор идеи, сост. и отв. ред. Ю.В. Синеокая. – М.: Издательский дом ЯСК, 2022. – 1232 с., ил.)

The article analyzes a collective monograph edited by Yu.V. Syneokaya, dedicated to the Soviet and post-Soviet philosophical generations of the 1920s–2010s. Based on this factual and methodological material, the author develops his own interpretation of this process. The author proposes to turn Weber's idea of dissident minorities into the main subject of political and philosophical analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet philosophy. To do this, he conceptualizes the political and philosophical stratum of the Sixties and emphasizes the importance of the idea of the essential controversy of the thesaurus of philosophical and ideological concepts. Based on his own life and research experience, the author expresses and substantiates the hypothesis: the axiological sphere of personality is formed before its logical-epistemological sphere and determines many subsequent choices; conflicts occur within generations, not between them. Therefore, it is much more interesting to study the range of differences between generations and individual biographies, especially the measure of resistance that an individual is able to develop and implement in relation to all supra-individual values, collisions and situations.

OLDER LGBTQ+ PEOPLE’S PERSPECTIVES ON DISCRIMINATION AND AGEING IN THE UK: EMERGING FINDINGS FROM A TIMELINE STUDY

Abstract This paper presents emerging findings from a United Kingdom study of socially inclusive ageing, reporting on timeline interviews with a sample of 25 LGBTQ+ people aged forty years and above, carried out during summer and fall of 2023. The research interrogates older LGBTQ+ people’s understanding of the impact of minority sexuality and gender identity on their lived experience and the ways in which this impacts their approach to challenges and opportunities linked to ageing. We draw on an innovative methodological approach, adapting Adriansen’s (2012) timeline interview method to fit the needs of older participants. Timeline interviews provide an approach to life-story research that structures a conversation around a written timeline, produced on paper during unstructured qualitative interviews. During the paper presentation we share anonymised timeline and narrative data highlighting milestones in individual biographies. We focus on moments and periods where sexuality and gender identity may have been a positive factor in individual life stories (romantic relationships, community membership) or have been seen as more problematic (discrimination, stigma and marginalisation). The timelines and associated interview data also provide opportunities to ground the biographies of older LGBTQ+ people in the context of social, cultural, political and policy contexts. The timelines reveal compelling data about ageing and identity, belonging and exclusion. Our emerging findings reflect C. Wright Mills’s concept of the sociological imagination, placing personal troubles and histories in the context of public issues. We gratefully acknowledge the funding this study has received from the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council.

The Venetian Community in Byzantine Thebes (1072–1204): A Prosopographical Study

Thebes is among the best-documented Venetian colonies in Byzantium, with records dating back to 1072. While it is widely acknowledged that Venetians played a crucial role in the development of Byzantine Thebes, the details about the Venetian community of the city remain largely unexplored, which has hindered a deeper understanding of the true extent of the Venetian impact on Thebes. To address this scholarly gap, the article examines the community using Venetian documentary sources, focusing on the works of R. Morozzo della Rocca and A. Lombardo. The study adopted a prosopography methodology, reconstructing and analysing the biographies of individuals and families in groups. The investigation covers the community’s leading families and individuals, as well as clergy and ecclesiastical establishments of special interest. Following this vein, the author of the article concludes with a more detailed picture of the Venetian community. It seems to have played a notable and persistent role in Thebes. Ecclesiastical establishments and the clergy constituted the basis of Venetian activities. Bolstered by reliable and sustainable sources of income, these institutions fulfilled the basic religious and administrative needs of the Venetian community. Apart from possible industrial and agricultural engagements, the community members predominantly emerge as active participants in commercial ventures, linking in particular to the renowned Theban silk textiles. While Venetians did form matrimonial and commercial alliances amongst themselves, their assimilation with the native Byzantine populace of the city seems to have been minimal.

Pathways to the medieval hospital: collective osteobiographies of poverty and charity

Medieval hospitals were founded to provide charity, but poverty and infirmity were broad and socially determined categories and little is known about the residents of these institutions and the pathways that led them there. Combining skeletal, isotopic and genetic data, the authors weave a collective biography of individuals buried at the Hospital of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge. By starting with the physical remains, rather than historical expectations, they demonstrate the varied life courses of those who were ultimately buried in the hospital's cemetery, illustrating the diverse faces of medieval poverty and institutional notions of charity. The findings highlight the value of collective osteobiography when reconstructing the social landscapes of the past.

Trzysta lat historii Suwałk

In her article, Katarzyna Zimnoch reviews the first volume of a book titled Suwałki Biographical Dictionary. The researcher highlights that this volume contains 459 biographies of individuals connected to Suwałki. The qualifying criteria included being born in Suwałki, playing an important role or holding a significant position, as well as contributing to the town. The chronological scope of the dictionary covers the past three centuries. This publication coincided with the three-hundredth anniversary of Suwałki receiving its city rights. The dictionary’s release marks the culmination of long-standing efforts by individuals dedicated to the history of the city and its residents. This compilation is intended for a wide audience and can serve both scholarly and popularization purposes. It’s worth mentioning that this dictionary was selected for the 29th edition of the Nationwide Review of Travel and Tourist Books, underscoring its potential social function. Every city and region deserves such a work.

Ideology, organisation, and path dependency: The use of violence among Egyptian Islamist movements

Does ideology prevent social movements from resorting to violence? Structuralist, organisational, or political economy theories are widely agnostic on the relationship between ideology and the use of violence. In contrast, this article argues that founding ideologies indirectly shape social movements’ long-run decisions regarding the use violence, primarily by influencing the kind of individuals who join the movement to begin with. A path dependency develops as new members reinforce the initial ideology, as individuals who might tip the ideological-organisational equilibrium towards utilising new tactics join other organisations instead. Over time, ideology morphes from being initially an endogenous factor into an exogenous constraint how the group can behave. The article compares the mainstream Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB), al-Jama‘a al-Islamiyya (IG) and the Jihad Organisation (JO), studying individual biographies, the groups’ recruitment patterns and their corresponding ideologies. The article thereby explains why the MB, with some minor exceptions, remained committed to non-violent activism, in contrast with the JO that resorted to violent means only and the IG that applied both violent and non-violent means. In the conclusion, the article addresses cases in Algeria and Madagascar to indicate the relevance of this argument beyond Egyptian Islamist movements to future comparative work.