Oral History and Life Stories Network: Graham Smith, Andrea Strutz and Timothy Ashplant/ European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) (Web)
Time: 23-26 April 2014
Venue: Vienna
The Oral History and Life Stories Network brings together oral historians and life story practitioners who use oral histories to explore memory, narrative and history. It has become the major regular international forum for European oral history and life story researchers.
The European Social Science History Conference has been held biannually since 1996 and the Oral History and Life Stories network has met at each conference since 1998. Oral History and Life Stories is currently one of the largest, friendliest and most popular networks of the European Social Science Conference.
Contributions will discuss conceptual and methodological issues related to the representation of crises and ruptures (private, public, personal and/or political) in oral history with specific reference to memory and narrative. Contributions come from both oral historians and life story practitioners but with the focus on oral testimonies.
The organizers are especially encouraging contributions addressing disrupted memories and silences. This might be with reference to place or to the relationship between the local and global and/or between individual and social memory; analyses of positive as well as negative impacts of crises and ruptures.
Proposals are addressing the following issues:
- Ruptures and Crises: Making sense of the past or rewriting history?
- Rupture, repressed memories and trauma
- Crises and positive changes in re/constructing identities
- Breaking with the past and reshaping memory
- Narratives and memories of globalization and resistance
- Transnational and national narratives of Europe
- (Re)presenting selves and others: multiculturalism, crises and memory
- ‘Composure’ and ‘discomposure’ in the construction of narratives
In addition:
- Explore methodological changes and challenges for working and researching with oral history in different disciplinary fields
- Address challenges facing the oral history method; including how attitudes to interviewing and being interviewed have changed; new ways of analyzing interviews; as well as approaches to archiving
- Compare written texts with oral sources in relation to the themes listed above
- Discuss the social function of oral history archives in relation to crises and historical disruption (including re-use of interviews produced by earlier projects)
- Explore emotions, sensory and embodied memories in relation to the themes above.
- Specific panels on oral history and its use in education, and on research combining oral history and audio-visual research (with reference to this year’s theme of rupture and crises).
Upon submission you must also pre-register on the conference website where more general conference information is available.