Post-memory and Institutions
Time: 2025-09-17 09:00 - 11:00
Location: Medium Hall A at Auditorium Maximum
Chairman: Martha Norkunas
Events within this Session
The University That Belongs to Everyone: Building an Oral History Project to Challenge and Celebrate CUNY’s Role as a Public Good
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
The City University of New York (CUNY) has a current enrollment of 250,000 students in a city of 9 million residents. 82% of those students graduated from New York City high schools and the same percentage remain in New York City after graduation. CUNY is the “People’s University,” and its history reflects the city’s development and struggles. With this background, CUNY is an ideal setting for an oral history program with an explicit mission to eliminate the distinctions between neighborhood and campus – between subject and researcher – and between academia and the public. Millions of New Yorkers have a personal relationship with CUNY, whether they are students, employees, or “outside agitator” neighbors who have a stake in the university’s role as a public good. An oral history project documenting their lives and the unvarnished history of the university, can serve to strengthen a shared, public set of expectations for educational excellence and access that define CUNY. The project is designed to address tensions that exist between universities in the United States and communities often studied by their faculty and students and then shut out from decision-making and collection access once their history is “captured.” In this talk, University Archivist, Natalie Milbrodt will discuss the project scoping, licensing considerations, research ethics, and outreach strategies her team developed with a coalition of stakeholders to establish a solid foundation for an ethical, scalable, and administratively streamlined oral history program across the university.
Speakers
Protecting the Hands that Built ‘Australia’s Own Car’: Health and Safety at General Motors-Holden
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
General Motors-Holden (GMH) frequently asserted that workplace safety was the company’s foremost priority. Nevertheless, in its factories throughout Australia major accidents did occur and many workers were also exposed to the risk of hearing loss and repetitive strain and posture-related injuries. Drawing upon oral history interviews with almost 100 former employees who worked at GMH factories between 1945 and 2017, this paper examines the evolution of the company’s approach to occupational health and safety, and its workers’ memories of safety culture and the injuries they sustained or witnessed occurring whilst at work. Company-produced literature primarily focuses on metrics such as ‘time lost’ due to accidents and injuries, as well as worker compensation cases, obscuring the individual experiences of workplace safety. While workers’ narratives are inherently subjective, a careful analysis of their accounts, considering both what is said and unsaid, reveals nuanced details about workplace culture not captured in official statistics.
Speakers
Present Threats, Past Protest: Re-Thinking Anti-Nuclear Marches in 1980s Finland
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
The early 1980s witnessed the Euromissile Crisis, or the NATO Dual-Track threat to deploy over 500 nuclear missiles to Western Europe if the Soviet Union refused to limit its build-up of nuclear weapons in Warsaw Pact countries. This led to mass protest across Europe, with the threat of nuclear annihilation bringing a cross-section of society into the streets. In Finland, the small Northern European country which during the Cold War sat both geographically and symbolically between East and West, from 1981 to 1984 over 200,000 people participated in anti-nuclear marches critical of especially NATO’s nuclear arsenal. Following recent Russian aggression in Ukraine, memories of anti-nuclear marches in 1980s Finland have become intertwined with self-critical questions regarding the country’s apparent Cold War neutrality. For example, in early 2023 an article published in the country’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat bluntly stated that: ‘Nowadays we know that the [1980s] peace marches were largely maneuvered by the Soviet Union’s propaganda machinery.’(Katri Kallionpää, Ihana, Kamala 80-luku, Helsingin Sanomat, 7.1.2023.) In the proposed paper I will investigate how and why oral histories with individuals who partook in Finnish anti-nuclear protest 40 years ago are framed by the contemporary political landscape. To what extent does the present make our interviewees re-think their pasts? And as historians, how should we approach this temporal plasticity? The paper is based on 15 original oral history interviews conducted in 2024–2025.
Speakers
Decolonising the Nuclear Physics: a Potential of Oral History (Case of Kharkiv Physics and Technic Institute)
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
The postsoviet situation in physical sciences left a challenge for its decolonisation, which was sharpened by full-scale invasion by Russian Federation. The nuclear project and nuclear physics in general is associated with Russian researchers, firstly, the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, although Kharkiv Physics and Technics Institute (later - KIPT) was an important centre for physical research. On the one hand, we see a necessity to deal with the uncomfortable past and the heritage of the Cold War, on the other hand, it is an issue about reappropriation of Ukrainian participation in nuclear project. In my presentation, I would like to reflect, if oral history as a methodology and a way of presentation could offer a reflection on this problem. As well, through the oral history, we could discuss the anthropology of the laboratory research and the network connections in natural science.
Speakers
Margins in Context: Interviews with the Nominated Members of Parliament of Singapore
Type: session | Language: English
Time: 09:00 - 11:00
Abstract
Conversations in oral history circles frequently pose a binary between ‘top-down’ approaches with a ‘central’ ‘elite’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches with a ‘marginalized’ ‘non-elite,’ even amongst practitioners who seek to re-balance what they see as a preference for one approach over another. This paper wishes to re-think this binary by asking again the question that Alice Hoffman posed in her 1976 paper, ‘Who are the Elite, and What is a Non-Elitist?’ Using oral history interview material collected with Nominated Members of Parliament in Singapore, that is, appointed parliamentarians with limited voting powers, this paper posits that the same voices that are privileged in one context may be silenced and marginalized to some degree in another, and vice versa. Power is circumstantial, and the ability of oral history to draw out the nuances of these circumstances as experienced is something that could be celebrated more.