Ethics and Methdology
Time: 2025-09-17 12:00 - 14:00
Location: Conference room at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Outi Fingerroos
Events within this Session
The Universality of Civil Rights in Oral History
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
The paper will examine the concept of civil rights as understood through global oral history. Wikipedia defines civil rights as “a class of rights that protect individuals’ freedom from infringement by governments, social organizations, and private individuals.” The paper will utilize the author’s work in oral history of the American Civil Rights Era along with reflections on oral history collected globally. Civil rights provide a strong organizational reference point to help future generations appreciate a large component of oral history collected over the past half-century. The theme also brings together disparate local oral histories into a global framework. The paper may include various sub-themes documented by international oral historians including survival in the absence of civil rights, movements to achieve rights, individual actions, and reflections on past struggles. The paper may also explore a curious aspect of civil rights-themed oral history in which narrators sometimes appear nostalgic for an oppressive past. But are they really? The paper will also comment on the role of emotions in civil rights oral history. Non-verbal cures can be significant to understanding narrators’ experiences regardless of specific context. The civil rights theme can provide a bridge between non-western and western voices for both oral history narrators and oral historians. The pursuit of civil rights, explicitly or not, is international and inherent to the human experience. As oral historians seek to help their audiences, students find meaning in oral history, the centrality of civil rights themes to people without regard to state or region presents a powerful way to link disparate interviews and projects.
Speakers
Oral History and Storytelling – Rethinking the Difference
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
When we started Memoar in Norway, we had to explain again and again that oral history is not the same as storytelling. Oral history is not dealing with fairy tales or legends or urban myths. The domain of oral history is about lived life, about social and cultural and political realities. But: Is it really necessary to antagonize these differences? * Oral history interviewing means to collect primary oral source material for contemporary and future discourse and research. When collecting, the role of the oral historian is to be an “invisible” interviewer, to encourage, inspire, incite the interviewee, to free and to record her or his unique expressions. Thus, oral history collections become valuable sourcebooks. * When disseminating, the role of the oral historian is different: She or he becomes her/himself the narrator: “Here comes my story about what i heard and what I saw and how I thought about it and what I learned.” It may be disseminated in a research report, in a paper or a book or a documentary film. * In my opinion and experience, oral history may also very well be disseminated through the art of storytelling. Oral expressions, traditions and language are main elements of the intangible heritage. Rather than focus differences between the elements, I find it interesting to research characteristics of oral culture in general, and interdisciplinarity between oral history and storytelling in particular. In my presentation, I will share experiences about how to do it, and argue why retelling oral history enhances the principle of shared authority.
Speakers
What Can We Learn from a Historical Miniature
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
In my talk I will focus on two projects dealing, seemingly, with local history. The first involves interviews with second-generation migrants from German-speaking countries, who have immigrated to Palestine after the Nazi rise to power. This project examines traditions in transition: What was left of German-Jewish heritage after their displacement across continents and a generation? Language, customs, ways of living and the family and Israeli histories are at the heart of these dialogues with second generationers. Through these interviews, we chart the influences on and the copings of the second generation with being the descendants of those who have left Germany as refugees – emigrants and/or Zionist enthusiasts after Hitler’s rise to power – and as postwar survivors. What principles and values affect the descendants of German speakers? What have they adopted from German culture and language to pass on to the next generations? How do they feel about their parents’ culture? The second project is about an amateur football team that has been meeting every week for 32 years. It is made up of academics (historians and economists) of different generations, doctoral advisors and their students, and serves as a meeting place for informal conversations between active academics and emeriti. The group deals with questions related to academia and politics, and the way competitiveness is expressed in the academic world outside the game, and in the football court itself. The interviews with group members both past and present address the meaning of the game in the academic world and in general, and the importance of the peer group, mutual consideration and cooperation. These two projects can shed light on broader cases and provide answers to questions that preoccupy many societies. Questions related to second-generation migrants, about group belongings, and on traditions in generational transitions through either customs or joint activities. All these questions are posed in the two case studies to inform several conclusions on the relationship between the local and universal, and even on the mutual influence of these two circles of belonging.
Speakers
Storytelling vs Oral History: Friends or Foes? A Case Study from Greece
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
The proposed paper, based on collaborative research, engages with the core question of this conference: “what kind of histories should we tell and pass on to future generations?” One of the side-effects of oral history’s success over recent decades is an increasing competition with the “story-telling phenomenon”, which through its public visibility and the power of emotional personal stories catches the imagination of broad popular audiences. What is the relation between this phenomenon and oral history practices? And what is the impact of the “digital turn” on both story-telling and oral history testimony? As a follow -up to Alexander Freund’s article “Under Story-telling’s Spell” (OHR, 2015) we intend to return to the important questions raised in that paper, 10 years on, using as our example the “Istorima” initiative launched in Greece in 2020. The “Istorima” project was founded by a Greek journalist and a Greek-American historian and generously funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The initial aim was to produce 50,000 “stories” collected by 1.500 young unemployed in their own localities, after receiving a short crash-course in oral history methodologies. Today a digital archive of about 20,000 “stories” on nearly fifty topics has been deposited at the National Library of Greece and publicized through short and attractively edited pod-casts, on the Istorima website and other popular media. Our presentation will be based on interviews with project participants and on an analysis of the stories published on the internet. In trying to figure out the relationship between this story-telling project and oral history we will raise and discuss crucial aspects relating to the production, editing and selection processes, ethical issues, archiving, the role of funding and the overall content transpiring from the “stories”.
Speakers
Storytelling or Oral History: Reflections on Storytelling Workshops
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 12:00 - 14:00
Abstract
This paper will draw on the author’s experiences working on storytelling projects. It will reflect on its role within oral history methodology, recruitment and collection. Storytelling and oral history are arguably indistinguishable, part of the same oral tradition. Through stories people construct their narratives and recount their own personal history. This paper is based on three very different projects working alongside a professional storyteller: recounting narratives of breast cancer patients, mining communities in Ayrshire and storytelling project from a Scottish town. The objective of each project was different, however, framing the workshops as storytelling rather than oral history resulted in rich materials and reached a wider range of participants than the more straightforward methodology of one-to-one interviewing. This brought benefits and challenges. For example, most of the sessions were not archived and only used for research purposes – arguably more in line with social science methodology. However, some archived interviews were carried out later after the workshops. Performance and revelations were impacted by the group dynamics; in one case the room divided along gender when discussing leisure and sports. The author will present their learning journey working on storytelling projects and how this has changed their practice, asking what -if any -distinction between the two can made.