Professor Graham Smith posts here about his recent visit to India to promote collaborative partnerships in environmental oral history.
Continue readingPartnership research: Environmental Oral History in India
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Author Archives: Graham
Individual and family experiences of augmentative and alternative communication
In this Lug post, Ally Keane writes about her new doctoral research that is funded through the Northern Bridge doctoral training partnership. Ally will be using oral history to work with users of augmentative voice technologies and their families.
Continue readingAuthenticity and authority? Changing memories of Holocaust resistance
How Oral History helped to disrupt the appropriation of the ‘White Rose’ resistance
This year’s [2022] Brundibár Arts Festival was opened by Silvie Fisch of the Oral History Collective. The annual festival is dedicated to the music and arts of the Holocaust. This year’s festival theme is inspirational women and Silvie spoke about the changing public history of Sophie Scholl. Here is an edited version of Silvie’s talk.
Continue readingDefend Memorial International
Graham Smith writes (31 December 2021), “Three days ago, the Russian courts ordered the liquidation of Memorial International. He argues “that banning Memorial should be condemned by all oral historians“.
Continue readingAnimals in store: the Book Trade and Animal Histories
Here, Sue Bradley finds some half-forgotten animals and resolves to listen out for more. Sue is a member of the Newcastle University Oral History Unit and Collective and a Research Associate on FIELD (Farm-level Interdisciplinary Approaches to Endemic Livestock Disease) in Newcastle University’s Centre for Rural Economy. Her article, ‘Hobday’s hands: recollections of touch in veterinary practice’ appeared in Oral History, vol 49, no 1, 2021.
Continue reading“The timing has gone wrong”: Environmental history
Re-visiting environmental oral histories recorded over 20 years ago
As COP26 gets underway Siobhan Warrington who currently is working on the Living Deltas Hub, revisits a collection of oral histories recorded over 20 years ago with women and men living in mountain and highland regions around the world.
“The timing has gone wrong,” stated Yagjung, a 59-year-old female weaver from Uttarkhand, India, interviewed in December 1996. She was referring to the weather, to the timing of the rain and the harvests, but the idea that ‘the timing has gone wrong’ has wider relevance. Campaigners and journalists talk about climate change ‘happening now’ but for Yagjung and other mountain farmers around the world, the ‘now’ of environmental degradation and climatic changes, was 25 years ago.
Continue readingOral history and the current Covid-19 crisis
In this statement on behalf of the Oral History Collective, Graham Smith, Professor of Oral History at Newcastle outlines some of the challenges and possible responses that oral historians face during the COVID-19 crisis. He argues that oral historians need to go beyond the technical challenges of remote working and think about the political crisis arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, he warns against oral historians supporting stereotypical and dangerous attitudes to older people, and outlines the Collective’s local and international strategy.
Graham would like to thank Oral History Unit colleagues for their early input and Collective members who commented on the draft. Graham notes: ‘Any errors or mistakes are his alone’.
Continue readingFunded PhD opportunity: Oral History’s Design: A creative collaboration.
Sustaining visitor (re)use of oral histories on heritage sites: The National Trust’s Seaton Delaval Hall AS A case study.
Oral history’s popularity as an active collecting method and archiving tool have outstripped the level of reuse of oral histories in historical interpretation. And while oral history’s limited reuse of archived oral histories has attracted some interest, this is based mainly on proposed digital technical fixes. Significantly, there is relatively less research on the dissemination of oral histories and their reception by audiences. Oral history as an emerging discipline has yet to adequately integrate users and audiences into the processes of analysis and reuse.
Continue readingLiving Deltas Hub: UKRI and GCRF
The Oral History Collective is delighted to be associated with the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Living Deltas Hub. As part of a large, multi-disciplinary team, Professor Graham Smith and head of Newcastle University’s School of History, Professor Helen Berry, will lead a team of Research Associates a
nd collaborative partners in history and oral history that will explore popular memories of environmental change across three of the world’s major delta regions. Here Graham reflects on just why the project is so exciting.
In His Own Voice: Dr Julian Tudor Hart (9 March 1927- 1 July 2018)
In this blog post Graham Smith remembers the pioneering general practitioner Dr Julian Tudor Hart who died on the 1st of July. Graham interviewed him in June 1999.
Click HERE for a .mp3 audio extract from the interview and for a .pdf transcript of that extract: Tudor Hart in His Own Voice pt 1 extract 1