The article presents “imagined conversations” as a method of narrative research presentation of a slow change in an institutional context, developed while researching 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 (cf. Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”).
Libora Oates-Indruchová (Wed,) studied this question.