This paper is based on the first analysis of the 25 narrative interviews collected from March to November 2018 in small local communities in the Lower Silesia Region. All narrators belong to the families that were transferred from the former Yugoslavia in 1946 to the western lands which were incorporated to Poland. The socio-cultural conditions are significant for local development, so I present some features of localism after 1989 when the state transformation processes started. Next, I discuss the narrators’ self-identity dilemmas and make an attempt to conceptualize “migrating biography” as one of the features of living in a postmodern world. The aim of the whole project, but not described in this article, is to reveal the intergenerational adult learning processes seen from the insider’s perspective, as well as to describe such lives in a psychosocial and cultural context.

This paper was inspired by the debate between Hammersley (1999), Atkinson and Delamont (2009) and Denzin and Lincoln (2009 [2008]) on the dynamics of qualitative methods development and by the unsettling reductionism and fragmentation of analyses within qualitative research revealed by Atkinson. Similar critique of superficiality in biographical methods has also been formulated by scholars from the interpretative sociology tradition in

The results presented in the paper comprise the outcome of five projects carried out in the years 2000-2012. The inspiration for the preparation of a comparative analysis and 'going across' the acquired data was the similarity between the semantic categories 'extracted' from each subsequent portion of the material collected in the selected projects. This led to the formation of a collective, qualitative case study in the sense coined by Robert Stake (2005), in which I set the goal of monitoring the process of redefining the meaning that the narrators (affected indirectly or directly by contemporary migration processes) attribute to identity and dignity. Both these categories are the result of the analyses and interpretation of the gathered empirical material, and not concepts imposed a priori. They are also hulled from the entire collection of meanings assigned by the interlocutors to the experiences of their life and their selected "biographical episodes." 1 1 'Biographical episode' is a term used by modern methodologists (N. Denzin, I. Helling, K. Konecki, F. Schütze and others). I use the definition of Piotr Jaksa Bykowski who applied this term in his Dwór Królewski w Grodnie: Epizod biograficzny 1795-1797 (The Royal Court in Grodno: Biographical episode 1795-1797), published in 1884, considering that it describes best the work that is an analysis and interpretation of the selected set of documents on the last visit of King Stanislaus Augustus and his court in Grodno. In the opinion of Bykowski, the term 'biographical episode' determines the publication content more accurately than usurping the right to call it 'history,' since the knowledge of the author was fragmentary

is notable among methodological publications for its scientific openness and permission to experimentation in the research process. The book's target audience is postgraduate HDRs, emerging scholars and higher-degree supervisors, lecturers in methodology seeking to enhance their reflexivity. According to the authors, it is the reflexive approach that differentiates this book from other methodological books, especially those intended for researchers who are in the process of development regardless of their academic status. Among Polish methodological books there is no publication which as clearly as the book Research Paradigm Considerations… encourages the development of cognitive research curiosity by applying and developing already known paradigms but also by modifying them depending on the socio-cultural context of the research. I recommend this book to anyone who is looking for practical applications of paradigms, but the subject of their research cannot be clearly categorized.

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