Oral history

IRBs and oral history

by Rena Lederman

Body, Nature, Ancestors by Carol P. Christ

by Feminism and Religion

Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project.

Some years ago, womanist theologian Karen Baker–Fletcher asked about ancestors following a lecture I gave on the body... more Some years ago, womanist theologian Karen Baker–Fletcher asked about ancestors following a lecture I gave on the body and nature.  I have since come to realize that ancestors are a missing link between the two:  we cannot speak adequately of embodiment and interdependence in the web of life without recognizing the ancestors whose lives made ours possible.  Our mothers quite literally gave us our bodies.  All of our ancestors gave us their genes.  Care and callousness with origins going back longer than conscious memory was imprinted on the psyches of our parents and grandparents and transmitted to us.  All of our ancestors give us connections to place.  While many black people in America can recite oral histories that begin with slavery in the United States, I come from a family where stories of origin for the most part were not valued or told.

‘„Řekla jsem si, že se prostě musím nějak přizpůsobit:” Mladé české ženy v ghettu Terezín,’ [“I Said to Myself I Simply Have to Adapt One Way Or Another:” Young Czech Women in Terezín Ghetto]

by Anna Hajkova

Soudobé Dějiny 4, 18 (2011): 603-628

Women’s memories tell different stories about Terezín ghetto than men: but which, and what are the mechanisms behind... more Women’s memories tell different stories about Terezín ghetto than men: but which, and what are the mechanisms behind it?
In the center of my research stands the adaptation and coping mechanisms of women in Terezín: How did their everyday life look like? Which roles did they take in? I analyze the gender specific aspects of Czech Jewish women’s lives in Terezín; moreover, I focus on how does it influence their narratives as we know them today. The core of my researched is based on a sample of thirty biographic interviews from the 1990s, combined with various contemporaneous sources. Having experienced the deportation chiefly in their twenties, they represent middle-class, assimilated, emancipated, mostly Czech speaking women.
The young Czech women inmates usually abandoned their pre-deportation individual course of life as a modern, independent woman and shifted towards a strongly gendered, supportive role, focusing on the family and collective. I examine the relationship between the shift in the social role of women, formation of networks and groups and their survival chances. Thus analyzing the position of women in particular and gender in general helps us recognize the power relationships within the enforced community.

Charlatans Chicanery

by Mohamed Eno

Thr poem is an excerpt from my forthcoming volume Guilt of Otherness

The volume is under review with a subject area expert and a literary critic. The volume is under review with a subject area expert and a literary critic.

Opening the Black Box: Oral Histories of How Soldiers and Civilians Learned to Translate and Interpret During Peace Support Operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina

by Catherine Baker

This paper uses 51 oral history interviews with former military personnel, language trainers and locally-recruited... more This paper uses 51 oral history interviews with former military personnel, language trainers and locally-recruited interpreters to explore how soldiers and civilians were educated into becoming translators and interpreters who worked in support of the multi-national military force that first deployed into Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. The peace operations took various forms as the nature of the Bosnia-Herzegovina mission changed but had a constant need for language support, which it met by combining a small number of soldiers trained in the local language(s) and a much larger number of local people with formal or informal education in English. The paper shows how different groups of people on whom the need for translation and interpreting had an impact (military linguists; military non-linguists; professional translators and interpreters; local interpreters who began work without professional training in interpreting) formed norms about the role of translators/interpreters through their education. Though each milieu led to a different translating and/or interpreting subjectivity, all language intermediaries recognised their work as a contingent and difficult activity while non-linguists were less able to conceive of language learning and translation/interpreting as more than a “black box” activity of finding equivalence. Using these findings as an illustration, the paper argues for the greater use of oral history in researching adult education and training on the grounds that an interview-based biographical approach provides insights into the long-term impact of learning.

Choreographing Intertextual Stories: Qualitative Inquiry Meets Oral History

by Thalia Mulvihill

co-authored with Dr. Amanda Latz

Constancy in Continuity: Native Oral history, Iconography and the Earthworks of the Upper Purus.

by pirjo kristiina virtanen

In Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia: Reconstructing past identities from archaeology, linguistics, and ethnohistory. Alf Hornborg & Jonathan D. Hill (eds.). Pp. 279-298. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2011.

Initial Work on the Malta Music Memory Project - and its connections with Oral History

by Toni Sant

Published in Journal of Maltese History Volume 2, Number 2 (2011). pp. 42-50.

Two years after the publication of the author's preliminary plans to build a collaborative multimedia database of... more Two years after the publication of the author's preliminary plans to build a collaborative multimedia database of Maltese music and associated arts, this paper provides an assessment of what happened in the initial attempts to implement the plans in the original outline. The focus is primarily on the inaugural reach out activities around the Malta Music Memory Project (M3P), including an evolving series of oral history interviews. A number of significant research areas have became evidently the core points of interest, stemming from the broad critical issues identified in the original proposal for the project. These areas of research are gathered under two main keywords – memory and collaboration – each with its own related keywords. The paper indicates that M3P needs to develop a more systematic set of policies related to the recovery, preservation and dissemination of mediated memories.

Settling Descent. Place-making and Genealogy in Talas

by Judith Beyer

In: Central Asian Survey 30, 3-4. pp. 455-46

Illegal evictions? Overwriting possession and orality with law’s violence in Cambodia

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. Forthcoming. Illegal evictions? Overwriting possession and orality with law’s violence in Cambodia. Journal of Agrarian Change.

The unfolding of a juridico-cadastral system in present-day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of... more The unfolding of a juridico-cadastral system in present-day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of landholding, which are entrenched in notions of community consensus and existing occupation. The discrepancy between such orally recognized antecedents and the written word of law have been at the heart of the recent wave of dispossessions that have swept across the country. Contra the standard critique that corruption has set the tone, this paper argues that evictions in Cambodia are often literally underwritten by the articles of law. Whereas ‘possession’ is a well-understood and accepted concept in Cambodia, a cultural basis rooted in what James C. Scott refers to as ‘orality’, coupled with a long history of subsistence agriculture, semi-nomadic lifestyles, barter economies, and–until recently–widespread land availability have all ensured that notions of ‘property’ are vague among the country’s majority rural poor. In drawing a firm distinction between possessions and property, where the former is premised upon actual use and the latter is embedded in exploitation, this article examines how proprietorship is inextricably bound to the violence of law.

THROUGH INGVE'S WORDS: THE LIFE-STORY OF MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER

by Laura Sikstrom

Il était une fois... la grande nuit du conte

by Yan Hamel

Revue jeu, no 142, 2012.1, p. 158-161.

History and Memory: Czechs in the Danube Gorge (Istorie şi memorie în comunităţile cehilor din Clisura Dunării), Sînziana Preda,Universitatea Babeş-Bolyai Cluj-Napoca, Institutul de istorie orală, Cluj-Napoca: Argonaut, 2010.

by Aleksandra Djurić-Milovanović

Book review in Balcanica XLII (2012), 236-238

The Bridge: Toward Relational Aesthetic Inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories Project

by Alan Wong

Sajnani, Nisha, Warren Linds, Lisa Ndejuru, Alan Wong, and members of the Living Histories Theatre Ensemble. “The Bridge: Towards Relational Aesthetic Inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories Project” in Canadian Theatre Review. 148.18 (2011): 18-24. Print.

This is the story of the Bridge, an original interactive theatre form that brings audiences and actors into a... more This is the story of the Bridge, an original interactive theatre form that brings audiences and actors into a dialogical relationship marked by the principle of ‘‘shared authority’’ (Frisch xx) and relational aesthetic inquiry (Springgay, Irwin, and Kind). This form emerged from the reflective practice of our troupe, the Living Histories Ensemble (LHE), a socially-engaged improvisational theatre collective exploring the intersections of oral history, performance, trauma, and emergent inquiry within a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded project titled Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Human Rights Violations.

Conversations for the Real World: Shared Authority, Self-Reflexivity, and Process in the Oral History Interview

by Alan Wong

Wong, Alan. “Conversations for the Real World: Shared Authority, Reflexivity, and Process in the Oral History Interview.” Journal of Canadian Studies. 43.1 (2009): 239-258. Print.

This essay explores the notion of self-reflexivity in the oral history interview process. Referring to oral historian... more This essay explores the notion of self-reflexivity in the oral history interview process. Referring to oral historian Michael Riordan's attempt to assume the role of the interviewee as a failed experiment, the author tackles the challenge himself. Using this experience as a launching point for his analysis, the author argues that oral historians would benefit from allowing themselves to undergo a life story interview as storytellers. Such an experience can help oral historians improve their ability to be self-reflexive and relate better to their interviewees, thereby enhancing their capacity to achieve what Michael Frisch calls a "shared authority."

Women’s liberation, relationships and the ‘vicinity of trauma’

by Deborah M. Withers

This article enacts a compassionate historiography of the UK Women’s Liberation
Movement (UK WLM). It uses oral... more This article enacts a compassionate historiography of the UK Women’s Liberation
Movement (UK WLM). It uses oral history as a methodology to record and create insights
about the emotion work of history. It argues that historical accounts of the UK WLM need to
incorporate understandings of the emotional intensity of feminist activism, and understand it
in relation to the vicinity of trauma, experimental female homosocial bonds and the difficulty
of finding language and a feminist voice that can articulate political and personal claims.

Review of Helga Amesberger, Katrin Auer, Brigitte Halbmayr, Sexualisierte Gewalt: Weibliche Erfahrungen in Konzentrationslagern (Wien: Mandelbaum, 2004) Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus 22 (2006): 130-132

by Anna Hajkova

Review of '1968 and the value of oral history' (conference report)

by Simone Varriale

2013. Memory Studies, Volume 6/1, January (forthcoming).

Reflections on gender and memory- personal experiences of women of the WAAAF during the Second World War

by Bronwyn Lowe

Published in the Melbourne Historical Journal, 2011

OZONE THERAPY IN DENTAL CARIES TREATMENT & DENTISTRY

by DR.ABHITOSH DEBATA