Pandemic as a Biographical Turning Point? The Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Biographies of “Essential Workers”

Adam Mrozowicki; Jacek Burski

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.20.2.04

Authors

Adam Mrozowicki University of Wrocław, Poland
Jacek Burski University of Wrocław, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9987-2420

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.20.2.04

Keywords:

Pandemic, COVID-19, Essential Workers, Biographical Method, Turning Points

Abstract

This article aims to answer the question of the biographical meaning of the pandemic in the experiences of so-called “essential workers” who performed their duties in the first line of struggle with the consequences of the COVID-19 health crisis. The analysis of workers’ experiences helps us contribute to the ongoing debates on the role of macro-level events in autobiographical storytelling and the discussion on biographical turning points in sociology. The empirical analysis is based on a collection of more than 80 biographical narrative interviews in healthcare, social care, education, and logistics, from which we selected two stories of the pivotal significance of the pandemic crisis for biographical change for analysis. Biographical analysis makes it possible to describe which conditions are conducive to the inclusion of the pandemic in the main biographical story as a turning point.

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Author Biographies

Adam Mrozowicki, University of Wrocław, Poland

Adam Mrozowicki is an associate professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wrocław (UWr), Poland, and the head of the Department of the Sociology of Work and Economic Sociology. His academic interests lie in the areas of the sociology of work, comparative employment relations, precarity, workers’ agency and subjectivity, critical social realism, and biographical methods. He is the PI of the NCN-funded project COVWORK on pandemic crisis and labor (www.covwork.uwr.edu.pl).

Jacek Burski, University of Wrocław, Poland

Jacek Burski is an assistant professor at the Department of the Sociology of Work and Economic Sociology at the Institute of Sociology, University of Wrocław. His main interests include the sociology of work and biographical sociology. He is the post-doc in the NCN-funded project COV-WORK on pandemic crisis and labor (www.covwork.uwr.edu.pl) and runs the NCN Miniatura project on the biographical experiences of young doctors in the Polish healthcare system.

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