OHAA Biennial National Conference
                    

The Oral History Association of Australia, History SA and the University of South Australia will jointly host this conference, which will bring together professional, academic, community and oral historians. The conference will feature a range of themes relating to contested histories; memory, technology and new developments in oral history; urban history, and Indigenous history.

The conference will be held at the University of South Australia, City West Campus, Adelaide, South Australia. 

The call for papers has closed and the program will be available in early May. Themes for the conference include:

  • Memory, history and the role of the senses
  • Recording the history of disasters – and when is the right time to interview survivors
  • History as therapy, including reminiscence and narrative therapy
  • The uses of history, including oral history, in performance, plays, theatre, radio and film
  • Technology and oral history, including websites, the ethical dimensions of accessibility, intellectual property and plagiarism
  • Both sides of the microphone – understanding the experiences of oral history interviewers (including the issue of vicarious trauma), and interviewees (including creatingpositive experiences for interviewees)
  • First and second generation accounts of migration and refugee experience
  • Public policy and private pain – recording and writing histories of past practices including the Stolen Generations, the Forgotten Australians, Former Child Migrants and people affected by forced adoption
  • History-writing and social change
  • Activating cities and communities – making links between urban history and urban renewal
  • The history of urban renewal
  • New work in town and city histories
  • Digital history in the age of web 3.0 and smartphones
  • Digital sources as data and the place of interpretation
  • Citizen history? Making user-contributed content more meaningful
  • Writing history for the web
  • New work in Indigenous history: in education and in the courtroom
  • Indigenous perspectives on South Australian history
  • Contested histories in the public realm
  • Which history? History in public events: commemorations, festivals and re-enactments 
  • Memoir and history – what’s the difference?
  • Speculative histories - and looking to the past to predict the future
  • Involving Indigenous communities in local history
  • What happens to local history when history takes a transnational turn?
  • Accessible local history in and out of the museum
  • Community museums and education – from school age to the third age
  • Material history: the materiality of everyday life and the interpretation of historical objects
  • Historical images and their interpretation 

 

Further details and enquiries:

June Edwards, co-convenor OHAA (SA Branch) contact@ohaa-sa.com.au (08) 8293 1314

Mandy Paul, Senior Curator, History SA, mpaul@history.sa.gov.au (08) 8203 9808 

The last biennial conference Communities of Memory was held in Melbourne in October 2011

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

The 17th International Oral History Association Conference was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina from 4-17 September 2012.

See http://www.iohanet.org/index.php/en/conferences/forthcoming-conferences

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