Authors

Discussion

The presentation will introduce a writing strategy of “imagined conversations” as a method of slow remembering, corresponding to the slow change of the institutional context that was the subject of the research, for which I developed the method. The research concerned academic censorship and publishing in the state-socialist Czech Republic and Hungary. The aim was, first, to capture the gradual transformation of institutions, the people in them and the textual work they produced under politically restrictive conditions. Second, it was to allow the interviewees, researchers active in state academic institutions between 1969 and 1989, maximum space to represent themselves, while at the same time preserve the polyphony and contradictions present in the interviews due to the politically, emotionally and ethically sensitive nature of the topic. The dramatized dialogues, created with the application of constructivist grounded theory and narratology, are „imagined“ in the sense of being constructed from one-to-one interviews and that the resulting collective biography foregrounded the sense of a shared community.