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What does it mean to grow up in the digital age? What can individual lives reveal about the forces reshaping an entire society?
Drawing on over 80 biographical narrative interviews across three post-transition generations, this book offers a richly grounded account of contemporary Polish society. Through close analysis of personal stories, it traces how transformations in technology, work, family structures, religion and civil society are lived, negotiated and made meaningful at the individual level.
Covering the autobiographies of online content creators, the role of therapeutic discourse in everyday life, paradoxes of digital work, new patterns of family-making and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the book illuminates the tensions and convergences between biographical experience and public discourse. It demonstrates social trends on national, European and global scales and establishes a compelling methodological framework for understanding identity formation in post-transformative societies worldwide.
Kaja Kaźmierska is Full Professor at the Institute of Sociology, Head of the Department of the Sociology of Culture and Head of the Centre for Biographical Research and Oral History at the University of Łódź.
Aleksandra Drążczyk is a PhD candidate in the Doctoral School of Social Sciences at the University of Łódź and a member of the research team in the Centre of Biographical Research and Oral History at the University of Łódź.
Kamil Łuczaj is Associate Professor in the Department of the Sociology of Culture at the University of Łódź and a member of the Committee for Migration Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Katarzyna Waniek is Associate Professor in the Department of the Sociology of Culture at the University of Łódź and a member of the research team in the Centre of Biographical Research and Oral History at the University of Łódź.
Joanna Wygnańska is Assistant Professor in the Department of the Sociology of Culture and a member of the research team in the Centre of Biographical Research and Oral History at the University of Łódź.
Preface
Part 1: Bottom-Up Theorizing of Lived Experiences: Biographical Case Studies in the Context of Singularization
1.Methodological note
2. The Case of Anatazja (born in the 1980s)
3. The Case of Wiktoria (born in the 1990s)
4. The Case of Mateusz (born in the 2000s)
Part 2: Work, Family and Civil Society in the Digital Era
5. Internet as a Workplace – paid work, emotional work, identity work
6. Large Families & DINKS – old and new patterns of family-making
7. Civil Society of Individuals – between singularisation and community engagement
Part 3: The Interplay Between Biographical Experiences and Contemporary Discourses: Convergences, Tensions and Paradoxes
8. In Psychology We Trust? Therapeutic Discourse and the Psychologisation of Everyday Life
9. Spatial Imaginaries: Self-Orientalisation, Cultural Mimicry, and Othering
10. New Spirituality: Between Religious Individualisation and Individualism
11. Dealing with Unsettling Events – COVID-19 & the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine
12. Conclusions