2021: MenschenLeben

MenschenLeben is a project that has been documenting the life stories of Austrians since 2009. The format of these interviews is very open - interview partners first tell their life stories freely and without guidelines, and in a second part the interviewer asks more in-depth questions. These interviews are thus not only important contemporary historical documentations, but also represent a diverse and important source for scientific research. In 2020, for the first time, collaborations were established with scientific research institutes, including the IKF. As part of this collaboration, the IKF was given the opportunity to conduct twenty life history interviews and to choose the groups of people for this purpose. Thus, in order to increase the visibility of marginalized groups and to complement or deepen ongoing research projects, ten oral history interviews with lesbian women and ten interviews with homeless and houseless women were conducted.

Access to lesbian women was mainly gained through a call for participation via various feminist mailing lists as well as social media platforms and subsequently via so-called snowball effects. In this way, a diverse sample was obtained, which was widely spread in terms of socio-demographic aspects such as age, education or origin, and which shows the different possible life plans and realities of lesbians.

Access to the group of homeless women, on the other hand, was noticeably more difficult, partly due to COVID-19 measures. Interview partners from this group were mainly recruited by contacting homeless facilities, by writing to the respective managers of the facilities and asking them to forward the interview project to their residents.

By entering into this cooperation and focusing on lesbian and homeless women and recording their life stories, an important contribution was made to the visibility of often overlooked groups of people in our society.