One Hundred Student Evolutions

A three-part publication One Hundred Student Evolutions. University Students of 1989. Biographic time-collecting narratives follow up on the late 1990s project “Students during the Fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia – Biographic Interviews”. Like twenty years ago, the publication focuses on student activists of 1989 and, utilising the newly applied time-collecting, oral history method, captures the impact of the Velvet Revolution (1989) – understood as a formative experience – on the professional and political careers and personal lives of the former students. The first volume introduces the results of the time-collecting project. The introductory part explains the methodological and technical approaches while the following three interpretative chapters map different types of relationships of the former student protesters, e.g. if they, looking back after 20 or 30 years, see themselves as a homogeneous as a homogeneous “student generation of 1989”, how they perceive the “nineties”, what are their own experiences from the nineties, and/or how they see current social and political development. The second and third volume contain a set of 91 edited interviews (out of 100 recorded) which represent a valuable resource for researching the revolutionary November 1989 as well as the period which followed it. Although the life-stories of individual students differ, the interviews clearly show that almost all of them perceive their “Velvet Revolution experience” as significant and formative.