Доклад или разказ?: Качествено изследване на цензурата в социалните науки в Чехия, 1968–1989 г.
Reporting or Story-Telling? Qualitative Research on Censorship in Czech Social Sciences, 1968–1989

Summary/Abstract: The article is concerned with the interviewing and writing up processes for a research project, conducted between 2001 and 2004, concerning academic publishing in the Czech Republic during the so-called „Normalization“ (i.e. 1968-1989). The important aspect of this period was that, unlike the previous one, there was no official body of censorship, yet censoring practices were multilayered and all-pervasive. This problem makes any research of the phenomenon complicated in that there is no written record of censoring interventions. Moreover, hardly anything has been written on the issue after 1989. I approached the problem through interviews with academics who published at the time and to this day are respected by their peers as authorities in their fields. Inevitably, numerous ethical and emotional issues came to play a part in the interviewing process. My concerns in this article are, first, issues of interdisciplinarity and, second, of the suitable form of presentation of this kind of qualitative research. Concerning the former, I discuss the overlaps between research and fiction writing; concerning the latter the benefits of feminist principles (abolishing the hierarchy between the researcher and the informants, and legitimization of the personal and emotional) in the presentation of the research results, as well as of the use of story structures instead of conventional academic writing mode. Interdisciplinarity came into focus in approaching the subject matter: it is essentially a piece of sociological research, but on more or less literary material (i.e written texts, the process of writing). Being trained in literary theory and methods of textual analysis, but working with sociologists, I combined sociological and literary approaches in writing up the research. I tried as much as possible to preserve the relations and contradictions that were part of the interviewing, by exploring the use of forms of literary narrative and by drawing attention to the research process. The former resulted in a text that uses the motifs of quest narratives and employs dialogue and story-telling where conventional academic narrative would use carefully edited quotations from the interviews.

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