OHAA Biennial National Conference
The next biennial conference will be held in Adelaide, South Australia over the weekend of the 21 September 2013. It will be a joint conference between the OHAA and History SA . The theme will be: ‘She said, he said’ – contested histories and the evolving role of oral history.
The last biennial conference Communities of Memory was held in Melbourne in October 2011
Website http://sites.google.com/site/communitiesofmemory/home
Emphasis was placed on memory as an increasingly significant resource for many different types of communities: for survivors of natural catastrophe and human-made disaster; in country towns dealing with demographic and environmental change; for cities and suburbs in constant transformation; in the preservation of special places or the restitution of human rights; for the ‘Forgotten Australians’ and ‘Stolen Generations’; for migrants and refugees creating new lives; among virtual communities sharing life stories online. Memories are used to foster common identity and purpose, to recover hidden histories and silenced stories, to recall change in the past and advocate change in the present, to challenge stereotypes and speak truth to power. The concept of ‘community’ can be enlisted for change or conservatism; ‘communities of memory’ can be inclusive and empowering, or exclusive and silencing.
The conference sub-themes included:
- Memory and Catastrophe
- Memory Work for Human Rights
- Indigenous Memory
- Place, Community, Memory
- Communities of Identity
- Contested Communities
- Communities of Gender and Sexuality
- Migrants and Refugees
- Communities of Work or Leisure
- Activist Communities
- War Memories
- Generational Communities
- Theories of Collective and Community Memory
- New Approaches to Recording Lives
- New Technologies for Documenting Memory and History
- Memory Work in Creative and Fictional Writing
- Ethical Issues in Memory Work
- Training Community Oral Historians
The keynote speakers were:
Stephen High
Chair in Public History and co-director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, Montreal; publications include Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (2007).
See http://storytelling.concordia.ca/oralhistory/index.html
Nathalie Nguyen
Australian Research Fellow, University of Melbourne; publications include Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (2009) and Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives (2005).
See http://www.australian.unimelb.edu.au/aboutus/people/nguyen.html
Peter Read
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow, University of Sydney; publications include Tripping Over Feathers. Scenes in the Life of Joy Janaka Wiradjuri Williams. A Stolen Generations Narrative (2009) and Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (1996)
See http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/history/staff/profiles/read.shtml
International oral history conferences
Ninth European Social Science History Conference
Oral History and Life Stories Network
Ambivalent Pasts: Nostalgia and Life Stories Research
11–14 April 2012
Glasgow, Scotland, UK
www.iisg.nl/esshc
Matchpoints Seminar – an interdisciplinary conference, Denmark
Conflict in Memory: Interpersonal and Intergenerational Remembering of War, Conflict and Transition
10–12 May 2012
Aarhus University, Denmark
Call for papers deadline: 15 January 2012
http://memory.au.dk/conflict-in-memory/
XVII International Oral History Association
The Challenges of Oral History in the 21st Century: Diversity, Inequality and Identity Construction
4–7 September 2012
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Call for papers deadline: 30 March 2012
http://www.baires2012.org
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