Biographical learning of ethnic and cultural diversity as political processes in the post-war society of Kosovo

 Rudolf Egger, Prof. Dr. Univ. of Graz (Austria, Europe)

Biographical Learning of ethnic and cultural diversity as political processes in the post war society of Kosovo

 In my presentation I want to show some results of an ongoing university project with students from 8 different countries in Kosovo. It is an attempt to attach the approaches of biographical research to the processes of social transformation and human rights. We try to connect theoretical, social and cultural learning processes with the students. The analysis of self collected empirical data helps on the one hand to learn the principles of qualitative research methods and this work brings the processes and the results on the other hand close to their own life-worlds. In reconstructing the dominant patterns in (auto-)biographical narratives we can see the different historical periods and different stages of societal and individual development. In that sense, these seminars have a huge impact on the democratization process and the transformation of this post war society. The goal is to find out something about the many small daily steps which must be done, to create a kind of “normality” after the terrible massacres of an ethnical-territorially defined nationalism in former Yugoslavia. These steps can be very well reconstructed by narrations, by life stories, because personal experiences are naturally linked with social orders.