In this Lug piece, PhD student Hannah James Louwerse offers some insights on her time researching in the Archives at the National Centre of Biological Sciences in Bangalore, and reflects on the workflows and processes which go into keeping an archive running smoothly.
Continue readingIn this blog post Graham Smith, Professor of Oral History at Newcastle, reviews the position of the University’s Oral History Collective in relation to ageing, ageism and intergenerational research.
Continue readingIn 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 readingIn this Lug post, Dr Liz O’Donnell reflects on interviews that she conducted being reused and repurposed for a radio drama, considering the attachments that we as oral historians have to the data we collect.
Continue readingHow 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 readingGraham 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 readingHere, 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 readingRe-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 readingIn this Lug piece, Siobhan Warrington (NUOHUC) and her colleagues Hue Nguyen (An Giang University) and Laura Beckwith (Northumbria University) provide an update on the participatory oral history, mapping and photography work with two rural communities in the Mekong Delta as part of the Living Deltas Hub. Siobhan, Laura and Hue are working with a student-staff research team at An Giang University: Mai Thị Minh Thuy and Nguyễn Xuân Lan (research coordinators); and Hoang Uyen Cao, Huynh Linh, Lam Duy and Phan Cuong (student researchers). This is a follow-up to the post which introduced this project.
Note: Due to increasing Covid-19 infection rates in Vietnam, it has not been possible for the team to visit the communities since early July; this post is based on their visits between May and July 2021.
Continue readingIn this Lug piece, Siobhan Warrington introduces the Living Deltas Hub and provides an update on how the Newcastle Oral History Unit & Collective is contributing to this large, five-year (2019-2024) international and interdisciplinary project.
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