ABSTRACT
In 2018, the ‘Talking Borders. From Local Expertise to Global Exchange – Citizen Science Experiment’ was conducted as part of the Second World Conference of the Association of Borderland Studies in Vienna and Budapest. The project brought together citizen scientists from borderlands in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and international border scholars to elaborate on the question ‘What does a border mean to you?’ As a result, 43 conversations were recorded, transcribed, and categorised according to their content. This chapter presents a case study on the ‘Soviet’ category, which focuses on dialogues between two citizen scientists and their use of post-Soviet narratives – so-called master narratives – that evolved or re-emerged in public discourse in the aftermath of Soviet hegemony in CEE. The analysis uncovers the intentions behind the utterances referencing post-Soviet narratives and identifies the dynamic structure of the dialogues. We argue that the project facilitated unique dynamics, where interlocutors strive for agreement with their interlocutors, confirming that post-Soviet narratives are deeply embedded in the social identities of CEE societies. Moreover, we demonstrated that as part of a citizen science approach, the dialogic encounter can potentially enrich border studies methodology when two interlocutors with conflicting narratives of the same topic meet.
