From an Obituary to Four Sheets of Stories:

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From an Obituary to Four Sheets of Stories

• Doing Research on Self-Censorship among
  Academics
• Libora Oates-Indruchová
• Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Rep.
• The Researchers Kitchen

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Contents

• Introduction to the project
• Issues during the research
• Methodology of writing up
• Visualization of a project on writing

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The project topic

• Academic research in the Czech Republic, 1968-89
• Publishing
• Censorship

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Why this topic?

• Normalization little published work
• Neglected area in the research on state socialism
• No official censorship in academia
• Personal quest

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Questions

• Did coded communication exist and how did it
  work?
• How did academics survive professionally?
• What was the institutional structure of academic
  publishing and how did it effect the professional
  lives of people working within it?

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Methodology of the research

• Semi-structured interviews
• Archival research

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Issues during the research

• Hierarchy
• Gender
• Professional concern
• Self-fashioning
• Self-romantization
• Intimacy and emotion

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Methodology of writing up

• (Detached academic account
• Only part of the story
• Obscures the research process)
• Instead
• Working from feminist principles
• Incorporation of methods of literary research

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Feminist principles

• Abolition of hierarchy
• Legitimization of the personal

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Literary research

• Structure of narrative fiction a quest narrative
• Advantage Drawing attention to the research
  process
• Means of expression of narrative fiction
  dialogue
• Advantages Allows for co-existence of the
  various facets of the personal narrative
• Enables the preservation of intimacy and the
  personal

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• Example of the written outcome
• The quest narrative
• The dialogue
• (See a separate file for the whole text.)

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Visualization of the research process
Origin growing intimate with the stories
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Four Sheets of Stories

• Design
• Libora Oates-Indruchová
• Photography
• Jeannette Goehring
• The Gates of Knowledge

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Themes

• Genesis of stories
• Intimacy
• Overlap of the academic and the fictional we can
  only make sense of the world through stories
  fiction is not entirely made-up and research is
  not entirely factual

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The Prologue The Beginning
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The Prologue The End
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The Inspiration The Beginning
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The Inspiration The End
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The Action The Beginning
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The Action The End
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Anticipation
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Anticlimax
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Conclusion?