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Oral history has a strong tradition as a progressive practice, focused on amplifying marginalized voices not typically given powerful platforms to speak in public. Oral historians have documented the stories of struggles for justice worldwide, and at times have participated in those struggles. At the same time, as a field, oral history has excluded Indigenous peoples and practices from the legitimacy we have so laboriously built. Leadership in our organizations and institutions has been predominantly White, even while Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have played key roles and invested their time and energy in building these institutions.

This series began in the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, and our Summer 2020 workshops focused on acknowledging and combating anti-Blackness and white supremacy in our field. Past instructors then worked with OHMA to continue developing the series. Francine Spang-Willis, Nairy AbdElShafy, Sara Sinclair, Allison Corbett, Fernanda Espinosa, and Crystal Mun-Hye Baik collaborated to curate this third round of workshops.

Grounded in the work of challenging white supremacy, we have continued to develop decolonial visions for oral history in which people who have historically been harmed — their knowledge, skills, practices, and voices — are at the center of our practice. This is not a diversity approach, in which our field remains White-led but invites some people of color in. It is an anti-oppression approach, in which we reorient our work to challenge all forms of structural oppression actively, expecting that that will change our work and our field in deep ways. It is a decolonial approach, in which we support both the literal decolonization of land and the centering of Indigenous peoples and practices.

As part of this work, we are excited to offer this round of workshops fully bilingually, in English and Spanish. We will also be providing ASL interpretation on demand, and offering live captioning on all sessions. We are hopeful that this will broaden access, allow for conversations that would not otherwise be possible, and deepen all of our learning.

We are committed to making these workshops as broadly accessible as possible, so we are offering an option of free registration for those who could not otherwise attend, with a sliding-scale-suggested donation of $20-$100 per workshop. We encourage you to pay what you can to support fair pay for our instructors as well as free registration for those who need it.

These events are open to all. You can use this quick survey to let us know how we could make these events more accessible for you. Note that we are able to provide ASL interpretation for any event, but need two weeks notice. Please contact Rebecca McGilveray at rlm2203@columbia.edu with specific access requests or questions.

WORKSHOPS

Saturday, February 5, 2022, 1:00pm – 2:30pm
Restoring or Harmful?: Navigating Storytelling Practices at Cultural Institutions (Workshop #1)
Nancy Bercaw, Patty Arteaga, and José Centeno-Meléndez

Saturday, February 12, 2022, 1:00PM – 3:30PM
“What hurts is that people consume my story and are not driven to action”: Navigating Storytelling Practices at Cultural Institutions
(Workshop #2: Application Forthcoming)
Nancy Bercaw, Patty Arteaga, and José Centeno-Meléndez

Wednesday, February 23, 2022, 2:00PM – 5:00PM
The Alchemy Between Oral History and Art (Workshop #1)
Antígona González and Melina Alzogaray

Wednesday, March 2, 2022, 2:00PM – 5:00PM
The Alchemy Between Oral History and Art (Workshop #2)
Antígona González and Melina Alzogaray

Wednesday, March 9, 2021, 5:00PM – 8:00PM
Oral History as Decolonial Pedagogy
Zaira Arvelo Alicea, Ricia Anne Chansky, Marci Denesiuk, and Bryan Ramos Romero

Friday, April 8, 2022, 2:00PM – 4:00PM
Media, Dialogue, & Liberatory Imagination
Damon A. Williams and Daniel Kisslinger

*All times are listed in Eastern Standard Time

The post Anti-Oppression and Decolonial Oral History | OHMA Spring 2022 Bilingual Workshop Series appeared first on International Oral History Association.

The Winter School is the seventh edition of the two-week advanced workshop that CPH has been organising since 2013, with each edition being on a different theme relevant to Oral History or Public History. This year, our theme is “Memory and Materiality”. It will focus on the ways in which memory and materiality work together within public history, particularly within a participatory engagement with the past.

Do people make their own pasts? What role do objects play in people’s remembrance of the past? Does the experience of the past differ from its historical reconstruction? If so, in what ways? Scholarship on memory, heritage, and oral history has enabled public historians to explore how communities remember and engage with the past as well as the ways in which that understanding interrelates with objects from the past. The task of the public historian is to engage in different ways with a broad range of publics and historical practices. Public historians have to necessarily engage with social memory, community identities, collective experiences and individual identities alongside the awareness that all these factors are in a state of constant flux. The complex field of public history, therefore, presents many challenges to its practitioners. The Winter School attempts to unravel some of these themes that have emerged in the field through readings, dialogues and discussions with scholars, archivists, museum curators and other practitioners who have worked in this area.

The Winter School will be facilitated by Dr. Indira Chowdhury, Dr. Siddhi Bhandari, and Dr. Srijan Sandip Mandal from CPH@SMI, who will be joined by:

Professor Graham Smith, Newcastle University, UK

Professor Kavita Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India

Professor Luisa Passerini, European University Institute, Italy

Dr. Faye Sayer, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Dr. Nadeem Omar Tarar, Centre for Culture and Development, Pakistan

The Winter School will also introduce participants to a number of public history initiatives in South Asia through interactive showcase sessions. These sessions will feature representatives of institutional and corporate archives, photo and object collections as well as online oral history archives. They are:

Avehi Menon, Sarmaya Arts Foundation, India

Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, Nepal Picture Library

Mofidul Hoque, Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh

Nandini Oza, Oral History Narmada, India

Radhika Hettiarachchi, Herstories, Sri Lanka

Venkat Srinivasan, Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, India

Vrunda Pathare, Godrej Archives, India

To register for the Winter School, please fill in this form: https://forms.office.com/r/2kuYhyNjri

If you have any questions about the Winter School, please do not hesitate to write to Dr. Siddhi Bhandari at siddhi.bhandari@manipal.edu or to Dr. Srijan Sandip Mandal at srijan.mandal@manipal.edu. And please do forward this invitation to anyone who might be interested in participating in the Winter School.

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Delayed by Covid-19 for two years, this long-awaited for conference will finally take place live in Rethymon, Crete, from 13-15 May 2022. Co-hosted by the Sociology Department of the University of Crete and the Greek Oral History Association, we will explore how oral history can help us document and understand the deep transformations of working lives over the last fifty years.

Deadline for submissions: 28 February 2022.

For details and the Call for Papers, go to http://epi.uth.gr/sinedria/

The post Call for Papers – Oral History Conference on Crete – May 2022 appeared first on International Oral History Association.

David Beorlegui (Spain) – President

Mark Wong (Singapore) – Vice-President

Martha Norkunas (USA) – Vice President

Almut Leh (Germany) – Treasurer

Regional Representatives

Lorina Barker (Oceania)

Bernardo Buarque (South America)

Anne Heimo (Europe)

Lauren Kata (North America)

Saeideh Mahrami (Asia)

Nēpia Mahuika (Oceania)

Leslie McCartney (North America)

Tian Miao (Asia)

Nompilo Nddllovu (Africa)

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Registration is now open for the 2021 IOHA virtual conference. For more information on keynotes, workshops, special panels, screenings and more, click here.

The post 2021 Conference Highlights appeared first on International Oral History Association.

Dear colleagues,

Warm greetings from the National Archives of Singapore, an institution of the National Library Board. We are pleased to announce that registration for the XXI International Oral History Association (IOHA) Virtual Conference, 23–27 August 2021, has begun. Details of the conference can be found here.

Originally scheduled to take place in 2020, the IOHA Conference was unfortunately postponed due to the ongoing pandemic. While we still cannot meet up physically, we look forward to your enthusiastic participation and insightful contributions to the exciting programme line-up that has been planned for you.

Oral history has grown tremendously around the world in recent times, aided by the availability of recording technologies, gaining institutional legitimacy and popular appeal. Our conference theme, Harmony & Disharmony: Bringing Together Many Voices, explores the diverse ways oral history is practiced, applied, and used. We hope the wide-ranging discussions on oral history will help us see the connections and disjunctions within the field, sparking new insights and connections.

Some of our programme highlights are keynote speeches from former head of the Oral History Centre, Singapore, Kwa Chong Guan, former president of the IOHA and Oral History Association of India, Indira Chowdhury and director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, Douglas Boyd; a film screening by the Asian Film Archive; and a panel exploring COVID-19 as a catalyst for change in oral history. There will be workshops and paper, audiovisual and poster presentations from the international oral history community and much more.

We know our audience is spread across the world’s time zones, so we have scheduled three sessions across the day so everyone can tune in to at least one or two sessions comfortably and recorded sessions will be available to registered participants for a month after the conference.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support over the years and hope that the conference will provide valuable resources for you to learn and grow in your own line of work.

Thank you.

Warm regards,

IOHA Conference 2021 Organising Committee

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