News

The Latest News From EMOHA

[EMOHA][Conferences, Roadshows, Seminars][Jobs][Projects, Schemes][Miscellaneous]

EMOHA

• The Migration Stories project now has its own website. Click here for more information.
  
  
• Links to the many interesting things the British Library has online have recently been added to our links page - http://www.le.ac.uk/emoha/links.html
  
  
• Current projects include carrying out interviews to celebrate 90 years of the British Legion. More details about the project here - http://www.leics.gov.uk/britishlegion
  
  
• The 2011 East Midlands Oral History Day was held at EMOHA on Wednesday 6th July. There are top tips for interviewers and a picture of the cake on the webpage- click here for details. The page for the 2010 event, on the subject of work, is still available by clicking here.
  
  
• The oral history audio trail for Leicester is now up and running. Created as part of the Renaissance East Midlands MuBu project you can experience it here: http://www.le.ac.uk/emoha/community/audiotrail.html. More details about other projects in MuBu can be seen here - http://www.mubu.org.uk/
  
  
• As part of the JISC funded 'My Leicestershire' project we have added full length oral history interviews and local radio programmes to a searchable website full of historical material about Leicestershire. Have a look at the project website - http://www.myleicestershire.org.uk/ - and the blog: http://myleicestershire.wordpress.com/.
  
  
• We are gathering information about oral history in the East Midlands and want to share information about all the holdings and projects in the region. Recent additions include information about holdings at Chesterfield library. Look here - East Midlands Oral History Pages - and let us know if anything is missing!
• Cynthia Brown, one of EMOHA's founders, is one of the Oral History Society's Regional Network's representatives for the East Midlands. More information on the OHS website.

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Conferences, Roadshows, Seminars

• ADAPTING HISTORICAL NARRATIVES: A ONE-DAY CONFERENCE De Montfort University, Leicester, Tuesday 28 February 2012 Papers are invited across a wide range of interpretations of the topic, media, genres of 'historical narrative' (fictional, fact-based, hybrid), represented periods, and histories (from royal to political to popular-cultural). Further info - http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/humanities/adaptations/news-events-conferences/adapting-historical-narratives.jsp


• Ambivalent Pasts: Nostalgia and Life Stories Research. Ninth European Social Science History Conference, 11 – 14 April 2012, Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Oral History and Life Stories Network. The Oral History and Life Stories Network 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. The Oral History and Life Stories network has met at each conference since 1998, and interest in it has been steadily rising. In 2004, some seventy participants gathered at the network sessions. In 2006 in Amsterdam, in 2008 in Lisbon, and in 2010 in Ghent the network hosted seventeen sessions, making Oral History and Life Stories one of the largest and most popular networks of the European Social Science Conference.
• Nostalgia: Making sense of the past or obstruction of history?
• Nostalgia and Trauma
• Nostalgia, repressed memories, life history research
• Whose nostalgia?: Encounters between interviewers and interviewees
• Theory and methodology related to the construction of life history interviews and the notion of nostalgia
• Why oral history matters
• Teaching oral history
• Communities and oral history
• Digitalization/archiving oral history; the rights of interviewees
• Contrasting video and audio oral history
• Truth in oral history: whose perspective determines the truth
• Rethinking personal history through narratives, the deliberate construction of the account; the construction of nostalgia
• The influence of cultural constructions of identity on the life story narrative
• Comparing interviews over time; age and nostalgia
• Disseminating and accessing oral history: oral history in archives, schools, museums, films, community centres, and on the internet
• The media’s use of oral sources
• Using and re-using archived oral history data.

Conference website http://www.iisg.nl/esshc where more general conference information is available.

• Mass Observation Anniversaries Conference. Seventy-Five Years of Mass Observation, Thirty Years of the Mass Observation Project. 4-6 July 2012, University of Sussex

Call for Papers: Mass Observation was founded in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson (1911-76), documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings (1907-50) and poet Charles Madge (1912-96) who celebrates the centenary of his birth in 2012. Its unique interdisciplinary people-centred approach to social research has been reflected in the distinctive role it has played in British public life ever since. From its rapid rise to the status of national institution in the Popular-Front culture of the late 1930s, it has passed through a number of incarnations including collecting 'home intelligence' for the Ministry of Information during the early 1940s, working as a commercial market-research company during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming an archive at the University of Sussex in the 1970s and being relaunched in the 1980s as what has become a longitudinal life-writing project.

While the older Mass Observation material has been of key importance to social historians since the publication of Angus Calder's The People's War (1969), the longitudinal qualitative data offered by the new project has more gradually come to prominence following the narrative turn in the social sciences. As scholars in English and Cultural Studies departments have become drawn to Mass Observation's relation to surrealism and poetic aesthetics, the history of Mass Observation, itself, has increasingly become a topic of study in its own right.

This conference seeks to reflect all these aspects of Mass Observation and invites submissions from across the fields of the humanities and the social sciences (and beyond) in a spirit of interdisciplinarity. It is expected that papers will cover topics ranging from the early history of the organisation to contemporary social research drawing on the current Mass Observation Project. Implicit to this all-encompassing approach is the idea that the foundation of Mass Observation was conceptually innovative, differing in kind rather than degree from the cultural assumptions surrounding it and that in order to work most effectively on Mass Observation material it helps to understand it in the round as a field of study in its own right.

We welcome proposals for individual 20 minute papers, as well as submissions of panels.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

  *   Mass Observation and everyday life
  *   Mass Observation and life writing
  *   Mass Observation and the Second World War
  *   Anthropology and Mass Observation
  *   Representation of identity in Mass Observation
  *   Surrealism
  *   Documentary movement
  *   The Mass Observation founders: Tom Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge
  *   Methodology
  *   Community history through Mass Observation
  *   The Mass Observation Project
  *   We would also welcome submissions on how MO has been used in research projects in all disciplines

Proposals (300 words max) and brief biographies should be submitted to moa@sussex.ac.uk<mailto:moa@sussex.ac.uk by Monday 16th January 2012.

Website: http://www.massobs.org.uk/conference

• "DISPLACED CHILDHOODS: Oral history and traumatic experience". Oral History Society Annual Conference: 2012 held in association with the Research Centre for Evacuee and War Child Studies, University of Reading. Venue: University of Reading Date: July 13-14, 2012
  
  CALL FOR PAPERS. Deadline for submission of proposals: 31 December 2011 (Details for submission below) The next Oral History Society annual conference, "Displaced Childhoods: Oral history and traumatic experience",  will take place in the United Kingdom in Reading, Berkshire, on 13-14 July 2012. The conference aims to bring together oral history practitioners with others who explore the topic of disturbed, disrupted and traumatic childhoods within academic, community and therapeutic settings.
  
  Oral history has been increasingly utilised as a way of exploring and understanding the effects of war, evacuation and conflict on children, as well as former children; the treatment and welfare of children living in war zones and the wider disruption to family life. This conference aims to address both internal migration and the global movement of children from countries such as Spain, Germany, the former Yugoslavia and Iraq throughout the course of the Twentieth Century, and in particular the long-term psychological and emotional impact. Other themes the conference aims to address include the 'Forgotten Children', forcibly migrated to Australia/USA/Canada; childhood experience of natural and civil disasters; disrupted childhoods; long-term separation and segregation, including children's homes, hospitalisation, and the development of therapeutic environments for children and young people with emotional, social and behavioural difficulties. We would like to hear from people who have used oral history in working with fostering, crime and juvenile delinquency, children of alcoholic or mentally disturbed parents, young people in mental institutions, or those who have grown up in violent households.
  
  Papers are invited which draw on current projects or recently completed work using oral history and related methods which address these topics.
  
  We would particularly welcome papers on the methodological and ethical issues surrounding working with traumatic or potentially traumatic narratives of childhood - how to deal with sensitive issues, the question of interviewing adults recalling their childhood selves, reflection on the interview process and the experience of recording with children, and the use of oral history within therapeutic contexts. The conference will be of interest to all those working in the field of oral history, as well as a wide range of child care and other professionals. Please send an abstract of no more than 400 words by 31 December 2011 to Belinda Waterman: Department of History, University of Essex Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ Belinda@essex.ac.uk +44 (0)1206 872313


• The International Conference of the International Oral History Association takes place every two years, on a different continent where oral history and IOHA have regional and local presence: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, and South America.  The International Conference offers local, national and regional practitioners in different parts of the world the opportunity to participate in an international exchange, and it helps strengthen the development of oral history across the globe.  Each conference is organized by a local/national organizing committee, with oversight from the IOHA Council.  Previous conferences have been held in England, Spain, the United States, Sweden, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa, Italy, Australia, Mexico, and the Czech Republic.

The 17th International Oral History Association Conference will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in September 2012 . Entitled The Challenges of Oral History in the 21st Century: Diversity, Inequality and Identity Construction, the conference will take place between  4-7 September 2012, and applications are open for proposals for papers. The sub-themes are wide in range.

For more information, see the conference webiste at http://www.baires2012.org/

 

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Jobs

• The Oral History Society now has a jobs page which can be found at http://www.ohs.org.uk/vacancies/index.php
  

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Projects, Schemes

• The St Anns Allotments, Nottingham, is a very special and unique allotment site. It is the oldest and largest area of Victorian detached town gardens in the world and has recently been listed with a Grade 2* by English Heritage. The site covers 75 acres and sits in the heart of the one of the most deprived inner-city communities in the country. They have recently (autumn 2008) secured funds from the Heritage Lottery Fund to help preserve the heritage of the site and this will include the creation of an oral history archive. The project is looking for volunteers to help with the oral history and a variety of other works. Tel: 0115 9110207 Email: mo_heritage@staa-allotments.org.uk Website: http://www.staa-allotments.org.uk/index.htm
• Following a study carried out last year, the Executive Board of UNESCO have endorsed the adoption of a World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, to be held on 27th October each year. For those of you wanting to know more, the document submittedto the Exec Board is here:
  http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001469/146936e.pdf

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Miscellaneous

• Mark Vernon is a radio producer who has produced programmes about tape clubs in Derby and Nottingham and has now turned his attention to the Leicester Tape Club, a gathering of tape recorder enthusiasts who started recording in the 1950s. For more information and snippets from the programmes have a look here: http://www.meagreresource.com/archive/tape.html
• Retired policeman Kip Phillips has published a book about his time as a bobby working from Asfordby Street police station and then Spinney Hills Park police station in the Highfields district of Leicester. More details here.
• BRITISH AND IRISH SOUND ARCHIVES (BISA) – DISCUSSION LIST. This list has been formed following a meeting in Edinburgh in May 2006 to form a network for sound archives. Some of the common areas of concern identified at the meeting included funding, digitization and technical obsolescence, storage, access, legal matters, and pooling good practice. The list can be used to discuss these or other matters of common professional interest. Go to http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/BISA.html to join the list.
• Pam Schweitzer has published a book, 'Reminiscence Theatre. Making Theatre from Memories'. This book is a comprehensive guide to the nature, practice and therapeutic effects of reminiscence theatre. Drawing on examples from a range of real-life case studies, Pam Schweitzer provides practical advice on the process of taking an oral history, creating from it a written script and developing that into a dramatic production, on whatever scale. More details here: http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/book.php/isbn/9781843104308
• AGE EXCHANGE has published a resource book which they believe will be of great interest and use to you. MAPPING MEMORIES - Reminiscence with Ethnic Minority Elders features the lives of 24 elders who originate from the Caribbean, Africa, India and China.
• Barbara Hind has published a book, 'Sheepy Tales'. Click here for more details.

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