Dominik Želinský

Bio: Dominik Želinský is an academic researcher from University of Edinburgh. The author has contributed to research in topics: Czech & Epistemics. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 4 publications receiving 4 citations.

Becoming Socrates: Five elements of the consecration process and the case of Jan Patočka:

Abstract: This article explores the phenomenon of consecration, which, so far, has been neglected by sociologists of intellectuals. Contrary to the common Bourdieusian approach to consecration, which conflat...

From Deduction to Abduction: Constructing a Coding Frame for Communist Secret Police Documents

Abstract: In diesem Erfahrungsbericht beleuchte ich den Prozess der Erstellung und Uberarbeitung eines qualitativ inhaltsanalytischen Kategoriensystems. Vor dem Hintergrund meiner Erfahrungen mit der Untersuchung von Archiven der kommunistischen Geheimpolizei betone ich dabei vor allem die Vorteile des Einsatzes kontrollierter abduktiver Vorgehensweisen bei der Erstellung und Uberarbeitung von Kategoriensystemen. Meine These lautet, dass Forscher_innen ihre Daten mittels abduktiver Vorgehensweisen differenzierter explorieren konnen, was wiederum zu einem besseren Verstandnis historischer Realitat in der Sozialforschung beitragt. Wesentlich ist weiterhin, dass Forscher_innen abduktive Schlusse auch nutzen konnen, um zu theoretischen Innovationen und damit zu einem neuen Verstandnis des Gegenstandes zu gelangen – namlich im Zuge eines Prozesses der "Verfremdung" mit den Daten und des Experimentierens mit verschiedenen epistemologischen Perspektiven.

Book Review: Living in The Merry Ghetto: The Music and Politics of the Czech Underground:

Abstract: Eastern Europe used to be a popular topic in the late 1980s and 1990s when the fall of socialism opened it up to the world as a sociological laboratory for the study of social movements and the transition from party-ruled dictatorships to (more or less) liberal capitalist democracies. Since then, however, it slipped from the mainstream of social research, with the occasional exception such as Glaeser’s excellent study of East Germany’s fall (Glaeser, 2011). In Living in The Merry Ghetto: The Music and Politics of the Czech Underground, Trever Hagen brings this region back with a careful reconstructive ethnography and a neat theoretical model. Hagen focuses on what is likely the most iconic phenomenon of socialist countries, their nonconformist movements, and indeed one of the most iconic cases of nonconformism: that of Czech musical ‘underground’ and the band The Plastic People of the Universe. His goal is to explore the ‘cultural ecology’ of the Czech underground, which ‘can be understood as the various places, venues, props, narratives, people, bodies, and symbols that come to be connected together using music’ (p. 3) in order to ‘create a space from which to understand the world and act upon it’ (p. 3). To reconstruct this cultural ecology, Hagen draws on sources from internal documents of the secret police and writings produced by the ‘Androši’ (Czech term for ‘undergrounders’) to memoirs and his own interviews. In his elegant prose, Hagen tracks the roots of the movement, explores the role of places and spaces, the effects of the regime’s brutal interventions, and the survival of this idiosyncratic counterculture to this day. Through various ‘furnishings’ and musicking, the Androši developed as sense of subjective contrarianism and authenticity, called ‘living in truth’ (p. 80), which enabled them to experience and live out their lives as authentic despite oppression. Ultimately, Hagen offers a familiar Durkheimian argument that the underground created a community, a sense of ‘togetherness’ (p. 102) in the hostile environment of socialism. The argument is persuasive and the theory brings together both human and non-human actors in a complex assemblage of cultural ecology. It opens up a potential new agenda of research that, to my knowledge, has not yet been sufficiently applied in the studies of Eastern European nonconformism. 959309 CUS0010.1177/1749975520959309Cultural SociologyBook Review book-review2020

Qualitative Content Analysis: Conceptualizations and Challenges in Research Practice—Introduction to the FQS Special Issue "Qualitative Content Analysis I"

Abstract: In this contribution we introduce Part I of the special issue on qualitative content analysis (QCA). We start by describing the rationale on which this special issue is based and our considerations in dividing the topic into two separate parts. We then provide an overview of concerns in the current methodological discussion of QCA, identifying four core areas: 1. the conceptualization of QCA as a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative elements or as a genuinely qualitative method; 2. the relationship between the German and the international discourse on QCA; 3. the question of whether theoretical and / or epistemological foundations of QCA can be identified; and 4. the lack of transparency in documenting the application of QCA. Next, we outline the process of putting together this special issue and provide an overview of the structure and how the contributions relate to each other. In this current Part I, we focus on contributions in which authors deal with questions concerning the conceptualization of QCA, and on discussions of challenges that arise during the application of QCA and how these challenges were met. We conclude that there are multiple conceptualizations of QCA in the literature, and that this multiplicity is reflected in the variety of challenges and creative solutions described by the authors in this first part of the special issue.

Qualitative Content Analysis: Disciplinary Perspectives and Relationships between Methods - Introduction to the FQS Special Issue "Qualitative Content Analysis II"

Abstract: In this article, we introduce Part II of the special issue on qualitative content analysis (QCA). To begin with, we provide a short summary of the rationale underlying both parts of the special issue and present some core conclusions based on Part I. Whereas in Part I we combined contributions by authors taking an inside perspective on QCA, focusing on conceptualizations of the method as well as challenges in applying it, in Part II we put together articles by authors who take more of an outside view. Like Part I, Part II is divided into two sections. In the first section, papers are presented in which QCA is employed in different disciplines. It can be seen that methodological requirements vary between disciplines, and that this results in different ways of using and adapting QCA. In the second section are contributions in which the relationship between QCA and other methods / approaches is examined or illustrated. Comparisons are made between QCA and Grounded Theory Methodology only, whereas combinations can be found with a variety of methods / approaches. We end by summarizing our main conclusions concerning the goals we pursued with this special issue, and highlighting some open questions and suggestions for future methodological discussion and development of QCA.

Czech Underground from a Musical Historical Point of View

Abstract: The first part of the article summarises and comments on the literature on the Czech music underground. It proves that professional research of the phenomenon was previously carried out by foreign authors, whose focus was mainly on the social and political contexts in Eastern Europe. Memoirs and published interviews predominated in the domestic reflection of the phenomenon. Theoretical studies, including monographic treatises, appear only on an ongoing basis. However, the underground is still more in the field of view of historians than musicologists. This article also traces the changes in understanding the “underground” category in the Czech environment. It leads to defining it compared to the “alternative scene” and “grey zone” categories, which gradually gained a specific significance in Czech public awareness in the 1970s and 1980s. The second part of the article places the Czech musical underground in the context of the general development of rock and popular music in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s.