Together or apart? Doing biographical research and oral history in an interdisciplinary context

Introductory remarks

The use of biographical materials, which are broadly defined, has become quite common in the social sciences over the past few decades. The enormous popularity of biographical accounts in research inevitably raises questions about methodological issues, the epistemological or theoretical status of the materials, and the analyses based on them. If proponents of various disciplines in social sciences and humanities use similar research tools, does it mean that they use and analyse them in a similar way? Recently, the issue of interdisciplinarity has also arisen, which brings up another question: Is it possible to make smooth transitions between different perspectives and create interdisciplinary spaces, so popular nowadays and, one might say, expected in the scientific discourse, without considering what connects us and what constitutes the specifics of a given discipline?

Although our article cannot unambiguously answer these questions, we believe that posing such questions at a time of fluid boundaries between disciplines and merging perspectives is important. The point is not to invalidate these influences and reinforce boundaries, but to approach them thoughtfully with theoretical responsibility and methodological awareness. The aim of this article, therefore, is to provoke reflection on the possibilities and limits of interdisciplinary discourses in the field of biographical approaches. We do this by referring to a particular case, sharing our common experiences as representatives of two disciplines: sociology (biographical method) and history (oral history), both of which use the biographical approach in our work.

This intention must be preceded by two explanations. First, considering the multiplicity of biographical data, we focus on life stories obtained through interviews – the most widely used technique for collecting biographical material (as both audio and video recordings). Within the framework of oral history and biographical research, various techniques of conducting interviews are practised. The starting point for the considerations presented here is that we both use autobiographical narrative interviews (Schütze, 2008a, 2008b) in our research, and we often meet at multidisciplinary seminars, analysing this kind of data. Therefore, the following reflections should be read within such a frame of reference.

Second, our observations are rooted primarily in the context of biographical research and oral history practised by Polish scholars. Relationships between historians and sociologists, including sociologists who use the biographical method and historians who use oral history, are different in various scientific settings, but those relationships were more intense in the past. In some cases, such interconnections were strong, and communities of biographical and oral history worked together, exchanging their research perspectives (Rosenthal, 2004). Today such links are less clear, partly because of the blending of research fields, when scholars of various origins meet in the frame of memory studies.

There are two explanations for the good cooperation between sociologists and historians when using the biographical approach in Poland. The first is related to the sociological intellectual reflection on culture, identity and collective memory. Theoretical inspirations from the Polish tradition of biographical research are linked to the cultural studies of Florian Znaniecki, Józef Chałasiński and Antonina Kłoskowska, and they are also framed by the historical perspective. However, some Polish historians appreciated the importance of personal accounts (today, we would call them ego documents), as well as the use of a methodology that combines historical, psychological and sociological methods. ¹ Additionally, specifically Polish sources, such as ‘inspired memoirs’, ² initiated before the Second World War and continued successfully during the communist period, are still a valuable source for historians and research material for sociologists. Thus, it is not difficult to find a common frame for discussion, especially regarding issues related to the biographical experience inscribed in important historical events.

The second explanation can be found in the generational shift Dobrochna Kałwa noted that the proposals of previous generations of historians were not realised until the 1990s, when a group of young social history scholars appeared who consciously and competently drew on the theoretical achievements of sociology and oral history (Kałwa, 2017: 172). They were perhaps more open to this type of experimentation and collaboration. Also significant was the popularity of Fritz Schütze’s method of autobiographical narrative interviewing among Polish sociologists, which influenced the way oral historians collect their interviews in Poland. ³ The vast majority of material is gathered using this technique, and among Polish oral historians, the German sociologist is often perceived as an oral historian (Gałęziowski, 2021). Our collaboration also has an institutional dimension, as sociologists are members of the Polish Oral History Association (POHA), established mainly by historians, while oral historians are members of the Biographical Research Section of the Polish Sociological Association. This cooperation has resulted not only in deeper theoretical and methodological reflection, but also in many joint events (seminars, conferences, publications) in which we have always acted as representatives of separate disciplines.

However, we are aware that neither the framework for cooperation developed in this environment nor the methodologies used are universal. Nevertheless, having seen the fruitfulness of this cooperation, with respect for the distinctiveness of each discipline, we hope that the reflections presented in the article will broaden the field of discourse on the boundaries of interdisciplinarity and the possibilities of crossing them.

Therefore, the main objective of this article is to share perspectives and highlight the similarities and differences. Thus, we first focus on the specifics of each approach. Then we describe the different results of the common research practice and their consequences for anonymising, archiving, and reanalysing obtained data. There is no separate section focused on ethical issues. Due to their importance, they are embedded in the whole course of our argument.

The characteristics of oral history and the biographical method

If we compare the status of biographical research and oral history within their respective disciplines, the former’s position in sociology is much better grounded. Biographical research (although it does not belong to the sociological mainstream) was immediately recognised as a valid method of researching social reality and a theoretical perspective (interpretative sociology) that offers a specific analytical approach. The idea of using personal documents first appeared more than 100 years ago in William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s five-volume work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920), which was based on biographical documents. After the Chicago School’s research from the 1930s and 1940s, world sociology, beginning from the 1950s, was overwhelmed by structural-functionalism, and quantitative methods were considered much more scientific. However, the turn of the 1970s/1980s saw a renaissance of the biographical method. With the development of the interpretive paradigm (symbolic interactionism, discourse analysis, ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics), new analytical and theoretical approaches also emerged.

From the very beginning, biographical research has aimed to analyse the experience of an individual who is both the biography carrier and its interpreter. It was related to Znaniecki’s concept of the ‘humanistic coefficient’ – a sociologist should focus on the meaning assigned by individuals to their experience of things and situations (Szczepański, 1982). There are different perspectives within the biographical approach, but this short article does not allow us to elaborate on them. However, it is necessary to note the basic difference contained in the decision of whether biographical data is an informative document or an interpretative account (Apitzsch and Inowlocki, 2000). According to Labov and Waletzky (1967), a narrative has two functions: referential and evaluative. The former describes past events in chronological order. The latter relates these events to the present, that is, it explains what they mean at the moment they occur in the narrative (Schütze, 1984). In their (narrower) linguistic definition of narrative, the authors only point to a referential function; however, such a narrative remains socially insignificant until it is evaluated by the narrator (Kohli, 1981: 67).

Following Schütze’s assumptions, an individual in the narrative created during an interview presents life experiences in a way that is consistent with how he or she experienced them then while simultaneously interpreting them from the perspective of the current phase of his or her biography (Schütze, 1984: 78–79). A person talking about his or her life in the form of a spontaneous story, that is, not shaped by the researcher’s questions, undertakes a narrative in which the processes of retrospection, reconstruction, and a holistic view of his or her own biographical experiences are triggered (Schütze, 2008a: 160). This results not only in what we could define as an individual’s internal need to look at his or her own life holistically, but also in specific linguistic rules triggered in social communication and, more precisely, in a spontaneous narrative.

Thus, an important advantage of an autobiographical narrative interview is the possibility of combining three time perspectives in a biographical story: the past, the present and, to some extent, the future. The sociologist is primarily interested in analysing the process of interpreting biographical experiences in the context of specific social processes and phenomena, which may lead to a substantial or even a formal theory (Glaser and Strauss, 1967).

Compared with sociology, the oral history tradition is shorter. Although it is conventionally located in the project of Alan Nevins from the early postwar period (1948), oral history as we understand it today is only from the 1970s, with particularly intense development from the end of the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s. In sociology, there is no dispute that biographical research is a methodologically and theoretically distinct sub-discipline (of course, this does not invalidate the discussion about its theoretical potential and validity in the field of sociology). However, in history, and in the humanities in a broader sense, it is still not entirely clear what the status of oral history is. It has to be kept in mind that oral history relates not only to the discipline of history but it may be linked with many other disciplines, and in some academic environments, it constitutes a separate discipline (e.g. in the United States); it is also practised beyond academia, which differentiates it from the biographical method. ⁴

Lynn Abrams compares oral history with a ‘broad church’ whose members are practitioners of great diversity, sharing only very general assumptions (Abrams, 2016: 8). She also writes about the enormous popularity that oral history has gained in recent years and its versatile applications, not only in academia, but in community and educational projects, as well as in legal, medical and social works environments. She sees this as a great success of this method, but at the same time, she notices that it has consequences. ‘The meaning of the term “oral history” has been diluted so that almost any interview conducted with an individual may be labelled “oral history”’. Admiring this ‘beneficial effect of bringing together practitioners and theorists from a variety of perspectives’, which results in a ‘vibrant and constantly evolving research practice’, Abrams (2016) admits that it is also necessary ‘to make a distinction between oral history and other forms of data collection using the interview process’ (p. 2, 3). However, it is difficult to ‘have your cake and eat it too’. ⁵

Furthermore, many distinguished theorists who, based on their own practice, tried to determine the most characteristic features of oral history show that it is more appropriate to describe oral history as a research practice. This approach is supported by oral history authors who mainly rely on their own experience of conducting interviews (including Passerini, 1987, 1996; Portelli, 1991, 1997, 2003, 2011, 2017; Thompson, 1978; Thomson, 2011).

To sum up these characteristics – one of the key issues in oral history is the tension between theory and practice that is revealed in the fluid boundary between oral history as a historical source and a narrative about the past collected in the frame of other lay activities As a result, for oral historians, the emphasis is on research practice – obtaining a source, which is a recorded life story. Meanwhile, for sociologists, research practice is somehow ‘authenticated’ when analysing the material, that is, the transcription of a narrative. Thus, although they use the same technique, sociologists and oral historians pursue slightly different goals, and they are inclined to apply analytical procedures to varying degrees. Such an observation may seem obvious. However, it becomes important when, in the course of joint meetings and research seminars, we try to learn from each other by exchanging analytical perspectives that are shaped by the theoretical approaches and goals that different researchers set for themselves.

In the following sections, we look at the common points, differences and dilemmas involved. We begin with a common starting point, which is research practice. As we will show, this leads to different analytical goals.

From research practice to defining the story and its author

Oral history is a research practice that should be understood as a dialogical discourse created by interviewees and interviewers in a specific space ‘both social and geographic: the distance, the difference, the otherness between the two partners involved’ (Portelli, 2018: 242). However, it reveals itself not only in the presence of an oral historian during an interview situation, but also in how the researcher presents this material later. Portelli (1997) writes that oral history is a genre itself (pp. 3–4), a ‘narrative possibility’, but it is also much more; it is a relationship:

The heart of the oral history interview, then, is the relationship. The interview is about the past – like all other historical sources, it provides us with factual information that can be verified and critically scrutinised – but is of the present. These are living voices, voices that speak with us now. (Portelli, 2018: 245)

This encounter is also an exchange of expectations and promises made to one another. Out of such a meeting of expectations, a dialogue is born, which, on the one hand, is a relationship, and a life story, on the other hand. It assumes equality of both sides, despite all differences that are between them, and it manifests itself in shared authority and collaboration (Gałęziowski, 2019: 91). It is precisely the ‘shared authority’, that is, sharing power at various levels, which constitutes one of the main features of oral history. This sharing of power is not something given once and for all, something permanent. It is in constant motion and manifests itself in varying intensity (Frisch, 1990). As Portelli (1991) wrote, it is an ‘experiment in equality’ (pp. 29–44), the result of which is an interview that is fairly a product of both the interviewee and interviewer. ‘In the interview, we are the co-authors, the cocreators of a document that, to some extent, is about us as well as about the persons we interview’ (Portelli, 2018: 247).

In sociology, however, reflections related to the relationship between researcher and interviewee depend on the type of research tool. The more standardised the interview, the more often the power relationship is unequal between the researchers and the interviewees. Currently, it is one of the important threads in the discussion in the field of ethics (Mauthner, 2019; Kaźmierska, 2020), especially regarding posthuman ethics, where it is suggested that the role difference between the researcher and the research subject should be completely abolished (Denzin and Giardina, 2007: 20). We are not in favour of such a radical solution. In research practice, it is difficult to talk about the total symmetry of the relationship – after all, the researcher remains the researcher and the interviewee the research participant. However, the decisive advantage of biographical interviewing in building the researcher–interviewee relationship is not treating the interviewee as a respondent, a machine for answering, but as a narrator to whom the researcher hands over the initiative. One of the most important conditions for a good narrative interview is to build a trusting relationship based on the narrator’s belief that his or her life story is important and unique for the researcher (Schütze, 2008b: 7–8).

Thus, the researcher’s meeting with the narrator is always defined in social and, above all, ethical categories. In this sense, it goes beyond the ‘methodological’ description of the researcher–interviewee situation. This relationship is particularly significant in the last phase of the interview when the interactive situation becomes ‘normalised’. When ending a meeting with the person who gave up their time, placed their trust in the researcher, and who made an effort to talk about their entire life (physical, mental and often emotional effort), the researcher should give something in return. For example, he or she could try to define the entire interaction not only as a relationship between the researcher/member of an academic institution and the interviewee, but also the meeting itself.

Although research in the field of oral history and biographical research may be quite similar, they are not identical. There are also no major differences considering the ethical approach to the meeting with the human research subject or the power relationship, whether assumed or not. While the research practice is similar, the main difference lies in the definition of the recorded material – a story about life and what is associated with it, assigning a particular identity to the research participant. Subsequent ‘shifts’ in oral history were largely manifested in the positions of the interviewee and the interviewer in their relationship (Thomson, 2006). They can be characterised through the prism of the different names given to an interviewee’s status in oral history. The storyteller will be a narrator for some, a witness of history for others, and simply an informant for the rest (Kurkowska-Budzan, 2011). Assigning a particular identity depends on the purpose of the conducted research.

In biographical research, the human research subject is colloquially called the narrator. However, to capture the essence of the analytical work carried out by the researcher, there are three epistemic positions to which the storyteller refers when telling his or her story about biographical experiences and events. The position of the narrator refers to an individual who, here and now, tells his or her life story; at the same time, he or she is the communication partner to the listener. The position of the story carrier is the centre and the subject of the activities. Finally, there is the position of the biography incumbent. He or she is simultaneously the carrier and the biographical worker of the life history, trying to interpret his or her life experiences from both past and present perspectives (Schütze, 2008a). Thus, the analysis must consider not only the existence of these three epistemic positions but their ongoing reciprocal interaction during the storytelling process.

The differences between the methodological and theoretical definition of the biographical story and the definition of interviewee identity have many consequences. The most important of these is the distinct research path. The sociologist focuses on interpreting the text of the story, including the interactional factors that accompanied its creation. At the researcher’s disposal are complex analytical tools based on theoretical principles (e.g. sociolinguistic, discourse analysis), whereas oral history usually treats an account as a historical source, which the researcher regards as legitimate testimony of a witness, it is a domain for more than just historians. This distinction is also important because sociologists today are also expected to preserve their biographical data in a form that allows them to be used later. This observation lets us then to turn to the issues of anonymisation and archiving.

Anonymisation

One of the primary goals of oral history is to preserve testimonies for future generations. Recording someone’s life history is not intended to serve only short-term research purposes; it is a documentary and may constitute a historical source, ready for use by other researchers if the research subject wishes so. Hence, what is vital – and inseparable in the entire procedure of obtaining the source – is the interviewee’s consent to have his or her oral account archived and stored under certain conditions to be re-used in the future by third parties. ⁶ This bureaucratic procedure (obtaining informed consent) shows a particular type of shared authority, that is, giving the research participants the decision (power) regarding their story and its further use (Gałęziowski, 2019: 94). In this way, it can give them a sense of security (a feeling that they will not be mistreated) and agency (it is they who ultimately decide whether and for what their account will be used). This practice shows the professionalism of the researcher, who is taking his or her work seriously, and it is an expression of respect for the research subjects, not a manifestation of authority over them. However, in the end, it is the researcher’s obligation to assume ethical responsibility for the final product, and above all, for those who provided him or her with knowledge. ⁷

This responsibility carries a different weight for biographical researchers than for oral historians. For the former, it ends with the writing of an anonymised text that starts living its own life ⁸ from that moment. For the latter, however, it never ends. This co-creation of the historical source by the oral historian and his or her interview partner also triggers many more ethical dilemmas related to the fact that, unlike for sociologists who use the biographical method, a life story – first heard and then transcribed – does not depart from its carrier and create a separate text of culture; it is intrinsically and inseparably connected to the interviewee.

Therefore, one of the major differences between the two research perspectives is the final product and its use. In the biographical method, the interview primarily has research applications. For this reason, it is necessary that it be abstracted from the person who gave it because only in this way can it be subjected to a detailed critical analysis. This facilitates the procedure of transcribing and anonymising the text. In oral history, the product is a historical source of a quite distinct character, and it is often a reason for many historians discrediting it as unreliable. And although, like any other historical source, it should be subject to criticism, the fact that it is often also a testimony sets the limits of this analytical procedure – which will not harm the good name of the witness of history. For this reason, the final result of the researcher’s work constitutes a kind of compromise, which means presenting a version that is acceptable to both parties.

By contrast, in sociological research, an issue that is increasingly raised is securing the privacy of the interviewees. One of the basic steps here is data anonymisation. And although the procedures for archiving qualitative data usually provide strict recommendations, simply indicating and respecting the need for anonymisation does not end the problematic nature of these procedures. First of all, it is not always possible to conceal someone’s identity in the age of digital (and thus widely accessible) information. Often, an inconspicuous detail in the interviewee’s biography allows anyone to search for that person on the Internet (Bishop, 2009). However, completely changing details deprives the material of the necessary semantic context and empties it empirically (Mauthner and Parry, 2004). It is also possible to imagine a researcher changing details, adjusting them to the current cultural knowledge and social context. However, these perspectives may change over time and become indecipherable for subsequent researchers who undertake reanalysis. Thus, the parallel between the real detail and the anonymisation will be lost.

In sociological research, the idea of anonymisation also has a methodological and analytical dimension. In the analysis of an autobiographical narrative interview, the text of an anonymised transcription becomes the basic research material. ⁹ Anonymising the narrative by changing the name, but also other details that allow the narrator of the story to be identified, we separate, in a methodological sense, from a particular person. The transcription becomes a text of culture, an analytical case that shows a typical connection between particular biographical processes and the researched social phenomenon or the entanglement of an individual’s biography in a particular social process. Thus, references to fiction are not accidental, although a spontaneous narrative of an individual as a participant in social life remains the basis of sociological analyses. A good example is the case of Franz Kafka’s Josef K., which Schütze (1995) used to describe the sense of the experience of the trajectory of suffering. The narratives collected by the researcher are sometimes treated as ‘portrait interviews’. Like Josef K., they become multi-faceted and multi-dimensional case studies. ¹⁰

However, an analytical dimension plays a role when working with recorded interviews in the frame of oral history. Portelli drew attention to one more aspect that distinguishes oral history from other methods – the orality of the collected material (Portelli, 1981: 97–98). The basis for oral historians’ analysis should not be the transcription (which, in Portelli’s opinion, is a preliminary interpretation), but the recording itself, the sound, and thus the tempo and rhythm of the telling, the suspensions of the voice, the various types of silences, and the emotions hidden in them. This feature also undoubtedly makes the anonymisation of analytical materials more difficult. While this is feasible for transcription, in the case of sound, it poses considerable obstacles and is very time-consuming. The essence of oral history as testimony is also lost in this process.

For this reason, it should be acknowledged that a story constructed within oral history and an autobiographical narrative are, in fact, two different types of biographical document. The former is a form of testimony, a recorded memory, or as Assmann (2008) calls it, communicative memory. The latter is conditioned by dynamics based on particular rules of narrative, an interpretation of biographical experiences inscribed in social processes (Kaźmierska, 2014: 343).

However, a question may be raised if any commonalities can be defined, taking into account these key differences. Two issues can be identified here. First, an important feature of oral history is the ‘history from below’ approach and ‘giving voice to the voiceless’, phenomena that have constituted oral history since the 1970s. ¹¹ These aspects of oral history appear primarily in the form of projects that concern local communities, especially run-down and forgotten ones (community projects, Shopes, 2002), as well as marginalised or discriminated groups. In such cases, they may even take the form of a ‘campaign for social change’ (Thomson, 2006: 68). ¹²

In Central and Eastern Europe, this dimension of oral history has a regional specificity, demonstrated in some politicisation of the issue of marginalised people, among whom the first to be seen were people (and topics) silenced by the communist regimes (Kałwa, 2010). ¹³ It is precisely towards these voiceless or silenced ones that the researcher’s promise-response is given – that the witness’s voice has the right to be expressed and to be heard. Speaking under one’s own name and surname not only legitimises but also strengthens this message, sometimes taking the form of testimony. Hence, there are societies where the interviewee is most often referred to as a witness of history (apart from Poland, it is commonly practised in Germany, where the term Zeitzeugen is used). From this perspective, anonymisation would sometimes mean depriving the witness of that voice again.

At the same time, in sociological research, an autobiographical narrative interview may also be a tool for researching niche or marginalised issues while maintaining the requirement of anonymity. First, a great deal of research, especially relating to specific social processes (e.g. the systemic transformation in the context of the Polish society), ¹⁴ focuses on the ‘bottom-up’ perspective – the experience of the ‘ordinary man’, or ‘man on the street’, to borrow from Alfred Schütz (1970: 240). In this sense, biographical research often ennobles the experience of the ordinary man. Second, the aspects of social research developed using the autobiographical narrative interview often refer to socially complex and biographically difficult situations, requiring attention from the researcher and thorough analysis, which is possible thanks to this type of material. Researchers reach marginalised circles, for example, victims of violence, and their assurance of anonymising the narrative creates a sense of security and makes it easier for these people to tell their story to a stranger.

Another issue is that in sociological research, there are situations where an autobiographical narrative interview incorporates the ‘capacity’ of oral history (and vice versa). It may concern issues of the past, people’s own experiences of events which from the contemporary perspective can be assigned to oral history (e.g. for Polish society, it could refer to the experience of the Second World War or the socialist period). Of course, a different purpose for collecting material is essential. Let us repeat, it is not about someone’s recorded life story and its message, but about the data that is to be a source for generating new hypotheses, decisions and theories (Mauthner and Parry, 2004: 148). Nevertheless, the scientific status of autobiographical narrative interviews may change, from being empirical materials embedded in the research context to the collection of oral history. This is especially true in the case of a generational change. ¹⁵ From this perspective, each recorded story about life may, over time, become an oral history in the communicative memory mode.

The problem of anonymisation relates not only to the analytical use of the data, but also to how they are archived.

Archiving

Archiving is the raison d’être of oral history. Oral testimonies are collected to make them a historical source, and this requires archiving. In this situation, the aforementioned informed consent constitutes, ipso facto, consent to assume the role of a ‘witness of history’ whose story is told to leave a trace. In the case of biographical research, until recently, the collected material belonged to the researcher, and prospective access to the narrative was usually made possible through the scholar. Moreover, the researcher, passing the material on, usually did so in the context of his or her own research interests, the specificity of the interview situation and so on. Such popularisation of material ‘mediated’ by the researcher, or the context introduced by him or her, made it possible to maintain the personal aspect of the researcher–storyteller relationship while simultaneously approaching it as ‘generalised’ (anonymised) research material. Additionally, by being its depositary, the researcher made the material available in specific cognitive contexts that he or she had an influence on. Under such conditions, informed consent could be limited to the narrator’s oral consent.

Currently, archiving data (including qualitative data) has become not only widespread but even a condition for receiving research project grants, which often require open access to the research material (Laudel and Bielick, 2019). Therefore, obtaining informed consent to use the narrative has become the key point in the archiving process. However, a doubt arises whether receiving such consent entitles the researcher(s) to use the narrative in an unlimited form and obligation-free. Considering the above description of the researcher–interviewee relationship, this is a problematic issue. Of course, in legal terms, it all depends on how the document is drafted. But even if the author of the life story agrees to the unlimited use of the account and we meet all formal requirements, it does not give the researcher full ethical legitimacy. There is a subtle difference between the consent of the witness who, within the frame of oral history, donates his or her non-anonymised story as a historical source, and the story of the interviewee, who is guaranteed anonymity but does not fully know how his or her narrative will be used. It is not about deliberately misleading or under-informing the research subject. The problem lies in the interpretative tension between the research idea and its implementation. Even the researcher does not fully know how he or she will use a given narrative, even more so how other researchers will use it when reanalysing it.

Paradoxically, the same applies to interviews stored in oral history archives, when other scholars decide to re-use them in their own research (for different purposes) without having a personal relationship with the person whose story they are listening to and analysing. In such a situation, it is not possible for the interviewer to maintain responsibility for the subsequent use of the interview, which should (and usually is) included in informed consent forms. From the moment an account is submitted in a publicly available archive, it is the institution’s task to verify the people using the resource in such a way as to minimise the risk of unethical use. The problem is certainly weighty, and the process of sharing and disseminating requires a great deal of sensitivity and mindfulness from all parties involved and ethical tension remains (Gałęziowski, 2019; Kaźmierska, 2018, 2020).

With every research project and every life story, the researcher, regardless of whether they are a historian or a sociologist, faces specific ethical dilemmas related to interpreting someone’s experiences – the witness/narrator’s or simply the interviewee’s. These issues are the subject of researchers’ ongoing discussions, and they led to one conclusion – it is impossible to establish one universal algorithm of conduct and research procedures because each meeting with an interviewee is, to some extent, unique. This does not mean, of course, that each is equally ethically complex, but they all require such questions to be posed.

Conclusion

In the article, we tried to show some concerns related to the practice of oral history and biographical research, especially those close to the boundaries between the two perspectives. Therefore, the main objective of this article was to share perspectives and to show the possibilities of joint research practices and activities. In the introductory remarks, we also posed a question about the opportunities and limits of interdisciplinary discourses. As we come from two different disciplines, sociology and history, we have observed a growing tendency to blur discipline boundaries. Both approaches that we practise struggle with their respective problems related to the misleading perception of interdisciplinarity requiring systematic knowledge from other fields. However, these competencies cannot be acquired at an equal level, and the primary approach (the biographical method in sociology/oral history) should be the main frame of reference there. Otherwise, we might deal with the postmodern manner of merging frames and sources. This necessarily condensed analysis of the two perspectives leads us to conclude that it is impossible to conduct research circumspectly without being highly competent and aware of disciplinary specificity. The interconnections paradoxically contribute to deepening this self-awareness and can be a great asset.

Over the past decade or so, a specific and visible overlap of two research perspectives, the biographical method and oral history, has occurred in the Polish community of biographical researchers and oral historians. These mutual relationships and interactions have created a space for fruitful cooperation in the field of the exchange of both experiences and tools, but also for strengthening one’s distinctiveness and disciplinary identity. ¹⁶ As we tried to show, there are many common points as well as fundamental differences. However, they do not prevent a dialogue, an exchange of experiences, or mutual learning from each other to work on the data that is life (hi)story. We have focused mainly on the concrete concerns and their ethical dimensions that appear most often in our seminar discussions (Kaźmierska and Wygnańska, 2019) about how to conduct research and work with biographical data. Their aim was never to strive for a single, common solution, or with the conviction that ‘it is me who is right after all’. Rather, what we aspire to is reciprocity of perspectives (Schütz, 1976) that makes us aware of those aspects of our research practices that are ‘seen but unnoticed’ (Garfinkel, 1967). We believe, however, that such an attitude contributed to both research traditions and enriched thinking on social processes observed in individual biographies as well as reflection on memory. The Polish example may therefore serve as a model for such liaisons among researchers. We are convinced that the chosen direction should be continued and deepened. Hence, when answering the topic question – together or apart? – we can say together and apart.