Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Making and Unmaking Polish Persons: Aging and Memory in Postsocialist Poland

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Under the supervision of Dr. Gillian Feeley-Harnik, graduate student Jessica C. Robbins will conduct research on aging and memory in Poland. Robbins will investigate processes of aging in the context of the large-scale transformations in Polish society that have occurred during the lifetimes of the oldest generations. She will study practices of memory in personal, medical, social, political, and national contexts in order to address these key research questions: 1) How does the past involvement of elderly Poles in the project of state socialism correspond to their contemporary personal, social, and political legitimacy, and how do both of these correspond to their self-identification with the Polish nation? 2) How does identification with larger political forms relate to practices of memory by elderly Poles and their kin, and how do these practices of memory connect to the making, transforming, and decline of elderly Poles? Robbins will conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Wroclaw and Poznan, two cities where the socialist past is remembered in different ways. Contemporary commemorations of the 1956 labor uprising in Poznan have entailed controversy over the relationship between the socialist past, the historical Polish nation, and the contemporary Polish nation-state in a way that has not occurred in Wroclaw. Methods will include semi-structured and unstructured interviews, life histories, case studies, and extensive participant-observation, in a variety of institutional and non-institutional settings. This research will contribute an ethnographic perspective to popular and scholarly debates on nationalism that often omit the relationship between popular discourse and actual lives. This research will contribute to substantive and theoretical debates in kinship studies, medical anthropology, and postsocialist studies. This research will be of use to policy-makers who are considering the best way to care for the increasing number of elderly in Poland and worldwide. This research will also contribute to the training of a social scientist.