Migrations and Refugees I
Time: 2025-09-17 09:00 - 11:00
Location: Small Hall at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Nompilo Ndlovu
Events within this Session
Recontextualizing Migration Memory: Oral History Research of Post-Ottoman Ethnic and Religious Conflicts
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
The end of Ottoman Empire was marked by a forced displacement of populations at the turn of the 20th century. 1990s witnessed in Turkey, an upsurge of interest in researching the history lost Ottoman non-Muslim communities, mainly Greeks and Armenians. New publishing houses began publishing memoirs and life stories, while new NGOs emerged and engaged in oral history projects on traumatic migration memory. Lozan Mübadilleri Vakfı (2001) explored for instance the massive exchange of population between Greece and Turkey in 1924, while Hrant Dink Vakfı (2009) engaged in oral history research among the surviving Armenians in Anatolia. Beginning by the 2000s, the rise of Islamist movement opened a new gate to the research of Muslim migration from the Caucasus and the Balkans, covering mainly the history of Bosnian and Bulgarian Muslims, along with migrants of Circassian, Abkhazian and Georgian origin. Oral history research of many local towns -like Ordu- also showed how new Muslim settlers could also have conflicts among themselves. This paper focuses on how migrants’ narratives reflect upon the transitions from empire to nation states, looking at the life paths of ethnic and religious groups, their modernization experience and their images of utopia and dystopia. It also explores how oral history research contributes to a growing activism on these issues in Turkey.
Speakers
Narratives of Belonging – Intersections of Place, Space and Time in Archived Migrant Narratives from the Collection MIGTALKs
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
This paper draws on recent work with archived interviews, previously published in the book (Migration and Cultural Heritage [in Swedish] by Thor Tureby & Johansson 2020). In the book, we developed a method for hearing and recognizing voices in archived interviews and analyzed them by using the concept of intersectionality from gender and migration studies. The aim of this paper is to use this oral history inspired method in combination with intersectionality to explore how asylum seekers and family migrants living and residing in Sweden narrated about their feelings of belonging and not belonging in places, spaces and times that they live and previously have lived during their life course. Moreover, therefore, the concept of belonging, which is often used in relation to religious, ethnic, gender or class based groups (cf. Yuval-Davis 2011), is applied to narratives of intersected places, spaces and times of perceived inclusion and/or exclusion. The empirical case study is the collection MIGTALKs digitally archived by Nordiska Museet in Sweden. MIGTalks was launched as a communications project by the Swedish Migration Agency in 2015. The project was executed throughout 2016 and 2017. MIGTalks was implemented through the interviewing of 100 individuals who had immigrated to Sweden between 2010 and 2015. The interviewees were defined and selected in relation to different entry categories (asylum seekers, labour migrants, family migrants, students, EU/ESS migrants, return migrants). In this paper I have selected to explore 40 life story interviews from the collection (consisting of individuals categorized as asylum seekers and family migrants). Further, this paper also draws on a combination of methods and approaches from oral history as well as critical and antiracist social work in exploring how asylum seekers and family migrants’ narrated feelings of belonging (inclusion) and non-belonging (exclusion) are about positionality and interactions between different groups that reside in particular places and communities. Understanding these narratives may help social workers, other welfare state professionals and community activists to engage better in promoting inter-community relationships, exchanges and pro-belong activities
Speakers
Migration and Making Home - Computer-Based Secondary Analyses of Large Interview Collections
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Narrative interviews are a complex source consisting of various narratives and multilayered topics. To exploit the full potential of existing holdings, the call for secondary analyses is getting louder. An interesting subject of investigation for a secondary analysis is the process of arriving and making home of people who migrated to Germany after 1945. How does the brought along idea of Heimat cope to the new home, what helps or restrains that process.
Within the DFG-project Oral-History.Digital (OHD), there is a large number of interviews from a wide variety of holdings that are accessible online. Time-alignment, full-text search, metadata filters and registers can help exploring the collection of 3.000 interviews. Yet, for researching a complex and often implicitly treated subject such as the idea of Heimat these techniques are not sufficient. Otherwise, manually reviewing hundreds of transcripts is hardly manageable and would result in browsing through the online archive. Distant reading approaches, such as topic modeling, are promising when it comes to revealing undiscovered topics or to spot phenomena that are rather paraphrased than explicitly outspoken. Topic modeling is a machine learning method that automatically computes topics occurring in text corpora. Much effort has been spent in the last years to craft an OHD-Topic-Model.
With online-representation of narrative interviews comes the risk of decontextualization and fragmentation of their narrative structure. A chronology visualization based on the computed topics provides an overview of the themes discussed in the interview, their sequential relation (from a horizontal perspective) and their correlations (from a vertical perspective). This allows to contextualize found segments instantly and reconstruct narratives by following their traces visually.
The presentation illustrates the path from the quantitative exploration of an interview corpus to the qualitative examination of the interviews along the afore mentioned research focus. Therefore, the strategy of scalable readings – zooming in and out from distant to close readings – will be made use of
Speakers
Oral Histories of Refugee Returnees in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Archives of Return: Vietnamese Refugee-Returnees in the Mekong Delta is a research and oral history project that documents the experiences, memories, and reflections of reverse migrants in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, providing a lens to nuance research on reverse migration. The year 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Vietnamese diaspora. This project aims to collect, analyze, and preserve the life stories of those who identified as postwar refugees and who have returned to the Mekong Delta after significant time away. My deliberate emphasis on the Mekong Delta region is a consequence of scholarly, political and personal investment. Research on returnees often center those living in Saigon, a site of allegorical and geo-political meaning. Yet, the most impoverished of the South are from the rural areas; such is my family’s origins that trace back for generations to the understudied province of Tra Vinh. I am deeply motivated to honor the tenets of oral history to capture voices “from below.” In 2011, I launched the Vietnamese American Oral History Project (now called Viet Stories), which is currently the largest publicly accessible repository of Vietnamese American life stories. Utilizing my Vietnamese language skills, ability to navigate the complexities of my community’s fraught history of war and displacement, and decades of experience doing oral history work, I hope to gather oral histories that generate new knowledge about a much neglected group of people who face the real challenges of postwar historical erasure
Speakers
Co-Creating Migration Memories. Oral Histories of Arrival and Agency
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Migration has mostly been understood as part of economic-political processes and studied at a structural and national level. Migration historians have for years been calling for the inclusion of migrants’ memories and experiences in the analysis of migratory movements. However, in order to capture the subjective views of migrants, and their agency, there has often been a lack of sources that provide information about them. This is where oral history comes in. The project presented here, in which interviews were conducted jointly by and with migrants, aimed to collect previously unheard (life) stories of migrants living in the German city of Hamburg. Representatives of migrant organizations and individuals with a migration history were invited to be interviewed, to conduct interviews or to suggest interviewees in their communities. In workshops, the necessary knowledge about how to ask and how to listen was provided, shared, and discussed. Rather than focusing on the history of a migrant community - often imagined as a homogeneous group - or a specific migration movement, the paper suggests a micro-historical approach, linking migration to the surrounding urban society. For migrants, the city is their living environment and the place where they encounter state regulations. The project has been very well received. 19 interviews that invite us to question common assumptions about migration are now archived in the oral history archive of the Research Center for Contemporary History, where they are available for academic research. Excerpts from the interviews are presented on a website. (https://zeitgeschichte-hamburg.de/open-city-hamburg.html) The paper focuses on who the interviewees were, how and why they participated and what they had to say. In particular, I would like to discuss the ways in which we need to rethink the practice of oral history when carrying out a co-creative project, especially focusing on ethical and methodological issues.