Analysis and writing up

The epistemological underpinning of the current research project, as already indicated in the choice of the research design, is rooted in social constructionism. In order to make sense of the data, I engaged in an inductive process of thematic analysis that finally led to the elaboration of theory on processes of remembrance. Instead of using grounded theory, as prescribed by Glaser and Strauss (1967),

which would have involved an analytical approach purely based on empirical data and not taking into account any pre-existing theories, which could have led to ‘an obvious risk of knowledge isolation’ (Goldkuhl and Cronholm, 2010: 188), I chose a more flexible approach. Since fieldwork had been constructed with knowledge of existing academic debates on memory construction and transmission, in contrast to the premise of grounded theory (Goldkuhl and Cronholm, 2010), research practices and interpretations, as well as coding, have all been somewhat informed by the chosen theoretical framework. However, coding was done bottom up and then exposed to existing theories, which acted ‘as a building block that supports the empirical data forming the new emergent theory’ (ibid.: 191). My approach would be best described by Goldkuhl and Cronholm’s reworking of grounded theory that they call ‘multi-grounded theory’ and which includes, apart from a grounding in empirical data, theoretical and internal grounding. In this way, the production of theories still emerges from the empirical data that is produced – together with participants – ‘inductively with an open mind and […] as free as possible from precategorizations’ (Goldkuhl and Cronholm, 2010: 194)’, but it also enters into a dialogue with current academic debates.

Analysis has been a continuous process throughout all stages of the research, first through reflexivity, and secondly through the analysis of the data as it was gradually gathered. All initial interviews, adding to approximately 100 hours of recordings, were transcribed by myself in the periods between fieldwork and also over seven months after I left the research site. Engaging myself in this process helped me to produce an initial coding frame consisting of categories and concepts that covered most of what was discussed during the interviews. The next

step was axial coding, a process that sometimes follows open coding in order ‘to begin the process of reassembling data’ (Strauss and Corbin, 1998: 124), but it can be undertaken on its own. Axial coding was the process through which I made sense of the data, since ‘[i]t looks at how categories crosscut and link’ (ibid.). At this stage, by thoroughly going through each transcript, changes were introduced to the coding tree – not only the expansion of it, but also the merging of nodes or sub- nodes. Coding was undertaken using software for qualitative analysis, namely Nvivo10, and had as its starting point the list of themes produced during and immediately after transcription. The coding tree that resulted was then scrutinised once again in order to link current theory on mnemonic practices with the categories and concepts which were produced thus far. This final process led to the identification of themes and the creation of original theoretical understandings that are grounded in ethnographic data.

All interviews were analysed in Romanian and only in the last stages of analysis, once included in a draft of a chapter, were excerpts translated. As Temple and Young argue, the decision to leave the translation of interviews to the end of the analysis process was ‘based on a political recognition of the ontological importance for people of their first language’ (2004: 174). Ultimately, through translation, ‘the ties between language and identity/culture are cut to the disadvantage of non-English speaker’ (ibid.). The translation process proved to

pose many more problems than expected. Despite living in the UK since 2008 and undertaking my UG and PG studies in English, I had no prior experience of translating in such a way as to remain close to the original articulations in Romanian. First of all, once translated, the answers of participants started to seem

less coherent, because of hesitations, breaks in speech and reformulations. For clarity purposes, I decided to delete such utterances that would only distract readers and to signal them through ellipses surrounded by brackets, the graphic signs that also indicate the omission of more significant passages of interviews. There were several instances when I could not think of a suitable English word equivalent to the Romanian word and eventually settled on a word that would preserve the meaning that the Romanian word had for me. At this point, it should be highlighted once more that as the whole research represents a co-production of knowledge between participants and researcher, the translated excerpts bear my mark even more; they represent the linguistic choices that I made, altering the meaning of the original choices of words made by participants in Romanian (see: Temple, 1997).

A similar point has to be made regarding the photographs included in the analysis. They were all taken by me rather than by participants. As co-producer of knowledge, I took upon myself the task of illustrating what participants were showing me in vivo. Despite being aware of ethnographic approaches in visual

sociology that are centred around the empowering of participants by giving them cameras to shoot whatever they find relevant (Chalfen, 2008; Mizen and Ofosu- Kusi, 2007, 2008), for practical purposes I chose not to follow their prescribed research practices. First of all, handing out cameras to participants would have shifted the focus from experiencing the urban environment, and from furnishing me with the chance to experience the field site in an ethnographic way, to the artificial process of taking pictures as part of a commitment. No doubt the pictures I took were, once again, my constructions, since I ultimately decided what to

photograph, from what angle, what to include in the final draft of the thesis and what to write in the captions. It is my hope that these pictures, taken with the incipient forms of the broad picture of the ways in which young people engage with the past through the built environment in mind, integrate in the analysis and trigger a dialogue between written text and images. The images ultimately represent my own contribution, as a privileged potential participant in the research, to the articulation of how young people engage with the past.