Our team was born out of the need for sociology to become more open to the perspectives and research practices characteristic of the related humanities, in particular social anthropology and social history. These disciplines are characterised by a bottom-up view of the socio-cultural world, primarily from the point of view of an individual and the various ways in which they make sense of the world around them. The cultural and historical variability of these meanings allows for the deconstruction of the orders and social arrangements that shape human experience. Bringing together the practices and optics of different disciplines prompts us to be more methodologically attentive and to reflect more deeply on the circumstances and ways in which the academic knowledge is produced. Therefore, we devote a lot of attention to developing qualitative research methodologies with a particular focus on their ethical dimension. In our analytical strategies, we favor theories that are closely linked to research practice, mainly micro-oriented and sensitive to detail. The research techniques and methods we use are mainly ethnography, narrative interviewing, critical discourse analysis and in-depth analysis of historical sources.

Team members:

Justyna Straczuk, PhD, Associate Professor
Research interests: Critical border studies, ecological humanities, anthropology of emotions, food studies
Research project in progress: “Humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border – social and ecological dimensions”.

Anna Wylegała, PhD, Associate Professor
Research interests: Methodology of qualitative research in an interdisciplinary approach, oral history, social history of World War II, collective and individual memory
Research project in progress: “Researching the collecting, preserving, analysing and disclosing of Ukrainian testimonies of the 2022 war” (U-CORE), project funded by NCN within the OPUS-LAP competition, contract number UMO-2022/47/I/HS6/03071

Olha Krasko, PhD, post-doc researcher in the U-CORE project
Research interests: Oral history, social history, memory studies, history of education and higher education, history and contemporaneity of war migration

Faculty members willing to serve as PhD supervisors:

Justyna Straczuk, justyna.straczuk@ifispan.edu.pl
Anna Wylegała, anna.wylegala@ifispan.edu.pl