Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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esearch, but also the experience of its process; the before and after of the<br />
interviews, from the students interactions with institutions and associations<br />
to their relationships with friends and colleagues, and everything that<br />
occupied, at the time, the public and private realms of their daily lives.<br />
Beyond the war, across the community<br />
The interviews proceeded along the lines of a framework, but these guidelines<br />
were designed to be a trail of subjects that would ideally be explored<br />
in conversation, not a rigid list of questions that had to be asked directly.<br />
This framework reflected the extent of our research beyond the specific<br />
event of the war, into both the chronology of what had happened, and the<br />
topics of our analysis. On one level the periods before the outbreak of war<br />
were considered for study, along with the subjects’ perspectives on the<br />
present and future, while on another level, we attempted to draw forth the<br />
complexity of the Kosovar experience. Our guidelines for the interviews<br />
thus included different issues such as the role of the individual within a<br />
family context; the gap between the normalizing public discourse and the<br />
intensity of the popular experience of war, displacement and return; coping<br />
strategies and the emergence of suffering in the individual; the familiar,<br />
generational, gender-related and community-oriented dimensions of<br />
life; the narratives and discourse of suffering and healing; the interrelation<br />
of coping strategies past and current with discourses of identity; the people’s<br />
own accounts of the Kosovars’ current situation, and their perspectives,<br />
dreams, desires and projects for a future Kosovar society.<br />
In the following analysis of the collected materials, the term “conflict<br />
experiences” refer not only to the event of the war, but also to the social,<br />
economic and political context created in its aftermath. The processes by<br />
which memory is constructed, though read in relation to specific experiences<br />
and the cultural backgrounds in which these have occurred, will be<br />
analysed across the boundaries of different communities.<br />
Forgetting as healing<br />
Tales of present and past suffering<br />
<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
As has already been discussed, the interviews collected by the students<br />
focused on the experience of war, while specific research was aimed at<br />
extending the conversation to include a wider range of topics. In most of<br />
the interviews held within the Kosovar-Albanian community, however, the<br />
interviewees made the war the centre of their conversation, and in some<br />
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