In this blog post, the Lug intern Charlotte Stobart outlines the form and structure of the second year Oral History and Memory module offered at Newcastle University, in conjunction with current module leader Dr Sarah Campbell.
Continue readingIn October 2022, NOHUC Researcher Andy Clark undertook a research and engagement trip to Syracuse University, New York. Along with Colin Atkinson, this was part of their British Academy funded project that conducted oral history interviews with first responders to the Lockerbie Disaster, 1988. In this Lug post, Andy reflects on engaging with victim communities in the United States, and how the materials held in the Pan Am 103 archive aligned with the narratives collected in his research.
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 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.
Continue readingIn 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 readingOral 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 readingIn this post, Andy Clark reflects on discussions originating from the 2019 Oral History Society Conference held in Swansea regarding the current state of oral history. In particular, he reflects on the casualisation* and precarity faced by practitioners of the methodology. How can we develop an approach that is inclusive, democratising, whilst also promoting the skill-set of trained and experienced oral historians? Please feel free to join the discussion by posting in the comments section below.
Deindustrialisation, and the understanding of how it continues to reverberate through working-class communities, is a relatively new but growing interdisciplinary field. Alongside academic interest, community activist groups, heritage organisations, trade unions and artists are engaged in examining the impact of structural economic change. The Deindustrialisation, Heritage and Memory Network came together through three workshops – held in Glasgow, Newcastle and Canterbury – which brought together research from across academia and the heritage sector, offering an important space where significant and lasting connections have been made. In this post, network contributors Paul Barnsley and Emma Copestake reflect on their experiences of the workshops, and consider future directions in the field.