Globalizing Palestine

The Birzeit University Palestinian Archive was conceived some years ago, and resulted in the creation and rapid development of a generalist, open, online archive of the Palestinian people, which stores and presents textual and audio-visual documents coming from all sectors of the society, official and unofficial, from late Ottoman times to the present (with the legally-based exception of materials produced by the Palestinian Authority). It is located in the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies, and benefits from its multidisciplinary expertise.

Call to Boycott the Oral History Conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Open Letter

Few weeks ago we heard Hebrew University of Jerusalem is going to hold an international conference on oral history. But soon it was banned by oral history activists around the world in an attempt to object Israeli racist policies against Palestinian people. Here we have the open letter of these activists which is signed by more than 280 oral historians. A look at this open letter shows how intellectuals around the world are aware of what is happening in Palestine and also informs us about very exact legal and historical points about Palestinian rights and Israeli racist policies. At the end you can read the call for the so-called conference.

5th Global Conference: STORYTELLING

Human life is conducted through story, because the telling of stories comes naturally to us. Almost every time we speak we engage in storytelling, and sharing stories is arguably the most important way we have of communicating with others about who we are and what we believe; about what we are doing and have done; about our hopes and fears; about what we value and what we don’t. We make sense of our lives by telling the stories that we live; and we learn about other lives by listening to the stories told by others. Sometimes, under the influence of the culture in which we are immersed, we live our lives in ways that try to create the stories we want to be able to tell about them.

2014 Annual Meeting Call for Papers

Motion suggests many things: action and transformation; dynamism and fluidity; migration and the power to move. By its very nature, oral history is constantly in motion – in the evolving relationship between the two parties in an interview; in the interplay between the past and the present; in conjunction with emergent technologies and diverse applications. Oral history also has played a crucial role in documenting and understanding the central movements of our time, from a broad array of social movements to transnational migrations.

The first OHAI conference, 18th-19th November 2013, Bangalore, India

There has been a widespread recognition of the fact that that the field of ‏ oral history has contributed widely to the inclusion of people who have ‏ been left out of official histories. Oral history is now seen both as a ‏ method and as a field that records memories and experiences of individuals ‏and communities whose voices would remain unheard otherwise.

IOHA CONFERENCE/MASTERCLASS

For each international conference the IOHA is able to provide small grants for a limited number of participants. The IOHA Conference/Master Class Scholarship Fund aims to bring together international oral history scholars from inside and outside the academic realm, to continue building a unique global platform for professional exchange and comparative oral history inquiry.

Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory

This conference will set out to explore how concepts of family have been acted out, reinvented, or deconstructed, through various media including the visual arts, literature, and museum exhibitions, across the centuries. The family picture will be considered both in its figurative and art factual forms. We will look at the significance of the family picture in literary works or films (e.g. W.G. Sebald, Georges Perec¹s W, or the Memory of Childhood, or Pedro Almodovar¹s All About my Mother), and we will consider alternative concepts of family and kinship as pictured in paintings, photographs, graphic novels, and other visual media.

War, Memory, and Gender: An Interdisciplinary Conference

The past several decades have seen an explosion of scholarly interest in the subject of war and gender. At the same time, the study of collective or cultural memory, especially in connection with armed conflict, has become a veritable cottage industry. This conference seeks to bring these two areas of intensive study into dialogue with each other,exploring the complex ways in which gender shapes war memory and war memory shapes gender.

History Wars, Wars in History & Other Southern African Histories

Abstracts of no more than 300 words in, either English or Afrikaans, should be sent to Johan Wassermann ( wassermannj@ukzn.ac.za) by 30 March 2014. Proposals for individual papers and panels are equally welcome. Please include your full name, title, affiliation, contact number and email address in all correspondence. Panel proposals should include abstracts and contact details for all participants.

"Deindustrialization and Its Aftermath: Class, Culture and Resistance" International Conference

The Deindustrialization and Its Aftermath: Class, Culture and Resistance international conference is being organized jointly by Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and the Scottish Oral History Centre at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. May 1-4, 2014 - Montréal, Québec