Last month, Professor Alaa Alameri from Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad joined Professor Graham Smith in Newcastle to develop a new university module in oral history for Iraq. In this article, Alaa and Graham describe the collaborative process of integrating oral history teaching and resources into Iraqi Higher Education (HE).

We began our joint venture by creating a manual that Iraqi university lecturers could use to teach oral history. Oral History in Iraq: A Methodological and Practical Guide for Academic Research and University Training, is the first of its kind to be produced and published in Arabic. It offers a comprehensive introduction to the practices and theoretical frameworks of oral history, serving as the foundation for accrediting a dedicated module within Iraqi universities.

We approached this work by drawing on the international history of oral history and understanding that we could draw on that rich heritage. We understood that there are many ways of doing oral history, and that the field has developed through diverse trajectories across different regions worldwide. Over more than seventy years of international exchange and experimentation, oral history has evolved into a mature, dynamic intellectual discipline.

Globally, oral historians have assembled publicly accessible collections of millions of testimonies, housed in archives of various sizes and institutional contexts. The field now includes an expanding body of secondary analysis and a widely accepted conceptual framework that aids navigation through its complex landscape. Importantly, oral history remains an active domain of intellectual debate, continually re-evaluating its practices, boundaries, and definitions in ways that promote innovation and transformation.

In February 2024, Mustansiriyah University and Newcastle University signed a memorandum of understanding that included a specific commitment to developing oral history teaching and research in Iraq. The collaboration was conceived as a means of drawing on Newcastle’s experience in the field. The guide described here represents an initial outcome of this collaboration—one that marks the first step in embedding oral history into Iraqi higher education and reflects a shared vision of building capacity through exchange, dialogue, and critical engagement.

Our guide proposes a methodological vision that restores the status of oral history as a rigorous academic practice—one capable of documenting memory and bridging the divide between educational institutions and society. It calls for the integration of oral history into higher education through a structured curriculum, training for researchers in oral methods, and the creation of oral archives that preserve Iraq’s diverse historical experiences before they disappear with the passing of generations. In this way, the guide aims to contribute to the reconstruction of national memory and to the advancement of epistemic justice in narrating Iraq’s recent past.

Beyond foundational theory, we also sought to demonstrate through the guide how memory and history interact in the interview and analytical process, especially in the context of contested histories. Alongside internationally recognised technical and procedural standards, we included reflections tailored to the Iraqi context.

For decades, Iraq has endured war, authoritarian regimes, international sanctions, terrorism, and the erosion of civil and institutional infrastructure. These prolonged crises have created critical gaps in the historical record and a profound void in archival and documentation systems. The absence of a comprehensive national initiative means that the lived experiences of individuals and communities—particularly those on the margins—have largely gone unrecorded.

Oral history projects undertaken by students will help forge strong connections between past and present. These projects are compelling when focused on women in rural areas, ethnic and religious minorities, and veterans of armed conflict.

We are exploring ways in which oral history might help fill the archival gaps left by decades of war and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, including libraries, universities, and public records. However, this approach assumes even greater significance in Iraq and the broader Arab world, where a lack of archival awareness and institutional engagement with individual, social and collective memory remains prevalent.

Many institutions have yet to develop an archival culture, leaving the preservation of history vulnerable even more to erosion and neglect. Additionally, methodological confusion and the uncritical repetition of classical approaches persist, with little genuine effort to contribute to the creation of new historical knowledge. In this context, oral history becomes not merely a research technique but an intellectual and methodological necessity; an urgent call to rebuild historical narratives from within and to meet the challenges of the present with living, dynamic tools that go beyond the set and static documents and printed volumes.

Although our collaboration is still in its early stages, we are already identifying ways in which Iraq can make meaningful contributions to the international development of oral history. Iraq’s multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and culturally rich landscape presents unique opportunities—and ethical responsibilities—for oral historians. An early pilot involving Arab al-Ahwār (Arab Marsh) communities in southern Iraq illustrated how indigenous oral history traditions can inform practice, while also surfacing critical questions of shared authority, ethical care, and community empowerment in contexts historically marked by state violence and exclusion.

This collaborative work is ongoing. But we are confident that it will help solidify oral history as a vital academic field in Iraq and open space for new and critical Iraqi voices to contribute to global conversations about history, memory, and justice.

In March 2025, a group of former Newcastle General Hospital nurses visited the old hospital site, now owned by Newcastle University. Clearance of the empty and derelict buildings began in May 2024, which will be replaced by the Health Innovation Neighbourhood (HIN). This development will bring together education, research, innovation, healthcare, workspace, and a range of residential dwellings. 

This visit was part of the Newcastle General Hospital (NGH) Community History project, delivered by Northern Cultural Projects with support from Newcastle University Engagement & Place.  

The recording includes a brief talk about the hospital’s early years as a workhouse by local historian Mike Greatbatch. Mike covers the origins of the Poor Law System, which centralised welfare provision and established workhouses where the impoverished worked for lodging and sustenance.

Following this was a summary of Newcastle University’s plans by Carrie Rosenthal, Community Engagement Manager for the Health Innovation Neighbourhood. She discusses the site’s redevelopment into a Health Innovation Neighbourhood—a forward-thinking project aimed at fostering sustainable housing, healthcare, research, and green public spaces to enhance community wellbeing.

“…the nurses who worked here were the poor nurses, we were the workhouse nurses, and the proper, proper nurses were at the RVI…”

One nurse reflected playfully, drawing a link between the sites 19th-century roots and the hardworking staff who worked there in recent decades.

Watch the video below:

Dr Wendy Rickard, a member of the Oral History Collective, has secured a prestigious Daphne Jackson Fellowship for her project, ‘Disrupted Narratives, Exposed Voices:  A Global Analysis of HIV Oral History and its Public Dissemination’. This innovative research sets out to uncover HIV stories from all over the world, particularly the Global South, and reveal new information about the way pandemic history is recorded.

The Daphne Jackson Fellowship

The Daphne Jackson Fellowship scheme supports people who have taken a break from their research career for family, caring or health reasons, and combines a research project with retraining and mentoring to help them return into senior academic roles.

“I’m grateful to the Daphne Jackson Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for this opportunity, and am looking forward to seeing what can be found with modern searching capacities and what lessons can be learned about how we remember future pandemics.”

Untold Narratives

Since the start of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, more than 40 million people have died with AIDS and a similar number live with HIV today. Dr Rickard’s research will ask whether we have HIV stories from all over the world or just from its most privileged parts. This will involve counting recordings, identifying gaps – particularly in the Global South – and challenging the imbalance in how the pandemic is historically remembered.

“HIV is still going on, especially in vulnerable countries, so we have a chance to rectify any imbalances where HIV experiences may be missing, hidden or unequally valued. This project will question whether oral history resources are unfairly shared, just like HIV medicines meaning that the history we are recording is unbalanced.”

Building on Ground-breaking Work

The work will build on Dr Rickard’s research since the 1990s that is held at the British Library Sound Archive, some of which formed the basis for the 2022 BBC TV series, ’AIDS: The Unheard Tapes’.

“For the first time in history, oral histories powerfully captured people’s stories of a pandemic as it was happening, providing depth and richness beyond statistics to understand their experiences better.”

Archival Challenges

Due to the period covered, early interviews were recorded before the internet existed, and there may be issues with those which have been digitised and shared on-line. Even where archives can be identified, there may still be significant gaps in terms of material which has the right permissions to be listened to.

The project will look for those interviews that may or may not be on websites and will also explore what AI can do in terms of searching for, collecting and digitising material, and who has access to the technology for recording oral histories, testing issues of accessibility and power.

Dr Rickard will also seek to find endangered archives where existing stories are under threat and identify how easy it may be for others to find, support and use them.

Children’s social care in the UK has long faced crises of abuse, increasing demand, and declining quality, prompting urgent calls for reform. Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800–present is a seven-year project that seeks to transform our understanding of care by exploring its long history through oral histories, archival research, and creative methods. The project prioritises the voices of Care-Experienced individuals, families, and care workers to ensure more inclusive and meaningful research. Working with partners, the team aims to reshape historical perspectives on care to inform better policies and practices for the future.

The Need For Reform

Recent inquiries into children’s social care across the UK have called for a radically different mindset alongside significant investment to ‘reset’ the care system and ensure it effectively meets children’s needs. One of the key challenges is the enduring lack of attention to, and understanding of, the perspectives of children and families regarding welfare needs and experiences over time.

Meaningful transformations to current care systems cannot happen without an understanding of the complex contexts in which children’s care has developed over modern history. Understanding how children, past and present, have experienced care is essential for driving reform.

Caring Communities: A New Approach to Social Care Research

The new seven-year project, Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800-present, uses oral history alongside archival work and creative and participatory research methods to explore the long history of children’s social care in Britain. Spanning from 1800 to the present day, the project critically explores the nature, function, and value of care – while envisaging what it could become.

Across the first four years, we’re aiming to record the memories of people with knowledge and experience of the care system. While oral history is sometimes framed as a radical and inclusionary research method, particularly when dealing with histories of marginalised or stigmatised groups, the interviews can be fraught with questions of authorship and power.

The current focus of the project is developing the right policies and practices to embed collaboration and shared authorship from the outset and throughout. In this way, the team will ensure that Care-Experienced individuals are offered both a platform and the support needed to make a meaningful and significant contribution to research about the history of care and Care Experience.

Following the development of these policies, we will embark on our first phase of oral history interviews, which will focus on interviewing Care-Experienced people, their relatives, and care workers. This research, which prioritises the memories and perspectives of those with direct care experience, will deepen our understanding of care over time. A second, later phase of the project will explore how we can best enable children and young people to articulate their views and experiences about their care background.

Broadening Research Methods

While oral history interviews will help us capture certain perspectives and voices, we also recognise the need to broaden our range of methods to ensure that other individuals have the opportunity to share their experiences via different means and formats. The project will therefore develop a creative and participatory research programme, providing alternative ways for individuals to share their experiences of care.

Collaboration

We will also be working with our project partners (Barnardo’s, Coram, The Children’s Society, and Who Cares? Scotland) to explore how historical understandings about the world of care might best inform new ideas and understandings about care practices in the past, present and future.

The Research Team

The project team is led by UKRI Future Leaders Fellow Dr Claudia Soares. Claudia is a Modern British and Imperial Historian whose research interests include histories of care, family and childhood, the emotions, migration, and material culture, environment and landscape. Her first book A Home from Home? Children and Social Care in Victorian and Edwardian Britain was published with OUP 2023.

Joining her are:

• Dr. Jim Hinks, whose work spans a range of interlinked themes, including histories of gender, class, families, crime, and deviance. Prior to joining Newcastle, Dr Hinks worked for the Scottish Government as a Response Officer to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. He has previously held teaching and research posts at the Universities of East Anglia, Edinburgh and Oxford.
• Dr. Jade Shepherd, a historian specialising in the histories of medicine, crime and family. Before joining the project, Dr Shepherd was Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Lincoln (2016-2024).
• Dr. Kate Wilson, who joined the project in October 2024. Kate will lead on the oral history strand of the project, and specialises in 20^th century histories of care, class and culture. Prior to joining the team, she held posts at the Universities of Manchester, Glasgow and Stirling, and held an AHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde, where she remains a Research Affiliate.