OHS Conferences and Events of 2007
MAKING COMMUNITY ORAL HISTORIES
Annual Conference of the Oral History Society in association with London Metropolitan University
Friday 6 - Saturday 7 July 2007, London
The 2007 Oral History Society conference re-examined the subject of community oral histories six years after the successful Talking Community Histories conference. Like its predecessor, it brought together an exciting and informal mix of community organisations, museums, libraries and archives, schools and universities to present their work and debate the nature, challenges and achievements of community oral histories.
Abstracts from the conference
VOICES OF NEWPORT
Rachael Anderton, Keeper of Social History, Newport Museum and Art Gallery
Emma Lewis, Community Memories Project Officer, Newport Museum and Art Gallery
This presentation will briefly examine several of the projects that we have worked on which fall under the umbrella of ‘Community Memories’. The projects were designed to not only record the memories of individuals and groups within the community but also to allow the individuals to engage with the Museums and Heritage Service. The groups involved included ‘hard to reach’ groups e.g. BME communities, teenagers, and people not currently in employment. We will describe the innovative methods that we used to engage with these audiences, including graffiti sessions, African drumming, tours and activities designed for ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) students. We will also discuss some of the issues that did arise and the problems that we faced, such as running sessions that only two teenagers attended, and distributing 15 disposal cameras to a youth club for an identity photography project and only having one of those cameras returned.
At Newport Museum and Art Gallery we are also keen to maintain the good relationship that we have with ‘traditional’ users such as older people and school children. This has been achieved through exhibitions involving the community and their oral history over the last few years. The Transporter Bridge Centenary Exhibition combined significant items from the museum collection with contemporary artwork and oral reminiscences of local people and council employees. The ‘About Collecting’ exhibition was a community exhibition focusing on local people’s collections and using their words to interpret their collections. These exhibitions allowed us to incorporate extracts from our oral history archive within the main exhibition space. Oral history really is one of the best methods for engaging with any audience and bringing objects and collections to life.
One of the main aspects of this presentation is to demonstrate to the audience that museum staff must be prepared to alter their approach to engage with different audiences. This can be difficult, especially on a small budget, and demands creativity. We want people to realise that they may put on three or four sessions / workshops that are complete failures before they achieve success with the fifth. Working with hard-to-reach audiences is difficult because they can be unpredictable, but when it all comes together in the end it makes all the struggling seem worthwhile.
TAKING THE PULSE OF BASINGSTOKE
Barbara Applin, Basingstoke Archaeological & Historical Society
Taking the Pulse of Basingstoke, published by the Basingstoke Archaeological & Historical Society in 2005, presents excerpts from interviews recorded since 1992. Surgeons, GPs, nurses, district and community nurses, dentists, opticians, a matron, a practice manager and many patients describe experiences ‘Before the National Health Service’ and ‘On the National Health’, up to the present.
Many of the excerpts are from life story interviews, at first aimed at ‘Basingstokers’ with their own memories of people, places and events. To reach a wider audience, in time and location, master tapes were lodged at the Wessex Sound and Film Archive, with copies at Basingstoke’s Willis Museum.
With the 1998 anniversary of the National Health Service, excerpts were chosen for publication, but they provided an incomplete and unbalanced picture. So specific health workers and patients were interviewed and encouraged to give personal comments. Some experiences were typical of their time and place: the impact of the National Health Service and the town’s 1960s expansion for ‘London overspill. But there were also surprises. A dentist worked on a ‘phantom head’ and a nurse was knocked out by a dead man. A boy selling papers at Park Prewett hospital saw soldiers treated in the burns unit for horrific injuries: ‘And although I was 14, I realised, this was what you called war, what those men had gone through’.
The book has been well received locally, initiating more interviews, articles, displays and talks. As a social / medical case study it has not yet reached the wider audience hoped for, but a review in The Local Historian (February 2007) says it is ‘of far more than local interest. It contains numerous examples of the special strengths of oral history, such as detailed descriptions of obsolete skills’.
A ‘Phantom Head’
by cartoonist Alan Turton
COMING TO COVENTRY : STORIES FROM THE SOUTH ASIAN PIONEERS
Stacey Bains, Cultural Diversity Officer, The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum
Jitey Samra, Community Development Worker B&ME, Mental Health, Coventry & North Warwickshire NHS Partnership Trust
Coming to Coventry was a partnership project between the Asian Mental Health Access Project (AMHAP) and The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It recorded the experiences of South Asian migrants who came to Coventry from the 1940s to the 1960s. Video interviews, photographs and other personal objects were collected to create a book, website (www.coming2coventry.org) and exhibition.
During the course of the project we recorded the memories of over 60 pioneers and collected more than 600 images relating to their migration experience. The book and a temporary exhibition were greeted with enormous pride and interest by the South Asian community. The project successfully met its aims of gaining recognition for the pioneers from younger generations of British Asians and encouraging the wider South Asian community to value its cultural heritage.
The presentation will detail how the project combined mental health objectives with the museum’s agenda of widening participation. It will also examine the benefits that Coming to Coventry offered to newer migrants, the wider community, and professionals working in a variety of areas. The contemporary relevance of an oral history project that ultimately explored issues of identity, immigration and ‘Britishness’ will be opened up for debate.
The presentation will also offer practical and honest advice on our experience of delivering an oral history project with a variety of ambitious outputs. Key to the success of the project was that it was led by people from within the community, enabling us to engage South Asian participants from different faith, geographical and socio-economic backgrounds. Engaging participants, disseminating outputs and even collecting audience responses and evaluation were greatly aided by the ‘insider’ nature of the project team. We will draw on our experience to give practical universal insights for delivering a successful community oral history project.
THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY ORAL HISTORY: EXPLORING LIVING MEMORY 1981-1991
Joanna Bornat, Professor of Oral History, Faculty of Heath and Social Care, The Open University
Exploring Living Memory was a loose association of life history and oral history projects in the Greater London area which began in 1981 as a workshop and exhibition and which developed into a large-scale exhibition, staged twice in the Royal Festival Hall in the mid 1980s. Funding for fortnight long events meant that if could create a shop-window for oral history projects, with groups and individuals representing the remembered history of London's many locality-based as well as cultural and minority ethnic communities. With two-dimensional displays, moving image, theatre and workshop discussions, it drew audiences of thousands, old and young. Closely linked to the politics of the GLC (Greater London Council), it was a willing collaborator and a beneficiary of GLC arts policies, then framed as a 'Campaign for a popular culture'. Amongst other objectives this policy aimed at opening up new venues for the arts and the promotion of history-making as a source of social solidarity amongst and between London’s many communities. This paper will outline Exploring Living Memory’s history and discuss issues raised by the political sponsorship of oral history as well as comparing the impact of different forms of presentation, then and now.
THE PURPOSE OF ORAL HISTORY: WHO SPEAKS? THE CONSTITUTION OF THE SUBJECT IN COMMUNITY ORAL HISTORY PROJECTS.
Verusca Calabria, Oral Historian
If the goal of oral history is to facilitate a shift in power relationships through the inclusion of a multiplicity of standpoints to generate a more democratic reconstruction of the past, how can the process of interviewee selection enable the oral historian to achieve this goal? I will address this question in relation to community histories. When the life histories of people that occupy privileged positions within their communities dominate the collection then existing power structures can be reinforced, important aspects of the history of a group are excluded and the project fails to transform the purpose of oral history. However when the life histories of a variety of members of the community, including those marginalised in the communities themselves, comprise the collection then the oral historian succeeds in allowing a multiplicity of stand points to reconstruct the history of that community from the bottom up. I will highlight the practical issues an oral historian confronts when trying to put theory into practise with reference to my experiences of both coordinating, supporting volunteering in a number of community related oral history projects including Three generations of Bengalis in UK, Kings Cross Voices, Memories from Emilia Romagna and Sicily, Moroccan Memories in Britain.
VOICES ON THE WEB : TUC LIBRARY DIGITISATION PROJECTS
Christine Coates, Librarian TUC Collections, London Metropolitan University
The TUC Library Collections, based at London Metropolitan University, have successfully used audio and video interviews in three digitisation projects organised in partnership with the Trades Union Congress. A small number of audio and film clips were used on the website The Union Makes Us Strong : TUC History Online and 100 audio interviews were collected by their partners, the National Pensioners Convention, for the website The Workers’ War: Home Front Recalled. Both websites are accessible from www.unionhistory.info . The TUC Collections are currently working on a new digitisation and website project to record the struggle for Equal Pay which will include 7 filmed interviews with women involved in major campaigns eg the Ford Sewing Machinists in 1968.
INVENTING A COMMUNITY
Paper to be given by Rib Davis with short introduction by Marilyn Scott
Woking has a short history, the modern town having only come into existence with the arrival of the railways in the 1830s. It has had relatively little opportunity, then, to establish a sense of community. Since its inception its residents have not been predominantly of local stock, and there has been a recent population explosion. At present (as previously) the majority of those living there were born elsewhere, in other parts of the UK (many having been deposited there from London after the Second World War) or in other countries, including Italy, China, and – most significantly – Pakistan. In addition, many who live in Woking work elsewhere, and many who work in Woking commute into the town.
The oral history programme Woking Living Words interviewed a cross-section of over 200 members of the community. The resulting interviews are to be used in permanent exhibitions in the The Lightbox, the new museum and gallery (to open in September 2007), in a book of oral history and photographs (recently published), on The Lightbox’s website and in its educational materials. The intention has been to reflect the community and its recent history, in all its variety, and also to foster a sense of community.
It could be said, though, that in all but the smallest settlements, or perhaps the more remote parts of the UK, community is no longer essentially a matter of geography. It cannot be assumed that because there is a name on the map there is therefore a community. Rather, particularly in our urban areas, it may be that communities exist in other forms: there are communities of sporting and other leisure activities, communities of work, religious communities and ethnic and language-based communities. A feeling of belonging to a place may be less important than feeling part of an organization or other grouping.
This paper examines the intentions behind the Woking Living Words project in this context, and asks the question: to what extent is an oral history project such as this reflecting a real community, and to what extent is it in effect inventing a community where little real sense of community actually exists?
‘THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD’ - KING’S CROSS VOICES: COMMUNITY ORAL HISTORY IN THE HEART OF URBAN TRANSFORMATION
Alan Dein, oral historian and co-ordinator of King’s Cross Voices
Since the arrival of the railways in the mid-nineteenth century, whether you love the place or loathe it, King’s Cross has become one of the most well-known districts of London – and today, King’s Cross is big news. Huge cranes now dominate the skyline, construction workers are everywhere, and over £2 billion worth of facelift is underway.
For decades the area was a neglected wasteland of rusting industrial heritage, and its name became an infamous symbol of sleaze and scandal. Today ‘the Cross’ is in the throes of a massive transformation with the redevelopment of the 67 acres of former railway lands north of King’s Cross and St Pancras stations, the arrival of Eurostar in November 2007, and the completion of Kings Place in 2008 which will house both The Guardian and a new concert hall for London.
King’s Cross Voices (KXV), funded primarily through the Heritage Lottery Fund, was set up in 2004 to explore the living memory of King’s Cross at this time of great change. Over the last three years some 300 interviews have been recorded, capturing the voices of a diverse range of King’s Cross characters past and present, covering long-gone occupations and communities, to a more recent generation talking about their lives in their new patch of King’s Cross.
However, as the title of this presentation suggests, King’s Cross is inevitably a collection of many unique places and identities, some of which have already been lost, some in the process of change, and others confused by the coming regeneration. It’s a district of London that has been carved up in a maze of railway tracks, main roads, one-way systems, the Regent’s Canal, and even dissected by the boundaries of two London Boroughs. For many locals, their personal King’s Cross is in fact a sub-section of our projects broader picture.
In 2006, King’s Cross Voices was commissioned by Camden Council to create a sound trail using the oral history from the collection. Rather than cover the whole of King’s Cross to illustrate all those voices, we honed in on one tiny locality, known as Argyle Square. It was a place that summed up the topsy-turvy history of King’s Cross, it was small enough a terrain to be covered by the feet of our younger and older listeners, and importantly, it also provided a selection of very specific stories and incidents set within its own peculiar boundaries.
The selection of extracts that you will hear from The Argyle Square Sound Trail covers all those universal stories of hardship and tragedy, of comedy and madness that sum up the life and times of King’s Cross. We hope that they will also demonstrate the ethos of a community history project based in the heart of not one community, but in all of them.
Though, of course we have to ask, whose voice are we actually hearing? That of the interviewees, our perceived community, or maybe the voices of the editors themselves…
BLAND COUNTY HISTORY ARCHIVES
John and Bonnie Dodson, Rocky Gap High School, Virginia
Bland County is a rural community of 7000 people located deep in the Appalachian Mountains of southwestern Virginia, and the home of Rocky Gap High School, which for 15 years has developed and managed the Bland County History Archives, an oral history and technology project. Students have conducted over 570 interviews to date, created an award-winning website, and involved the entire community in the project.
Several years ago a Rocky Gap High School student interviewed Darnell Miller, who was asked to recall some of his earliest memories:
My first memory of anything is being in the hospital in Bluefield, when I was about three, or a little better than three years old. I had double pneumonia, and that is actually the first memory that I have of anything, is being in the hospital in Bluefield. It had a nice big blue door. The room had a blue door on it, and I thought that was beautiful. I thought that was the prettiest thing I’d seen. ‘Cause in the old cabin we lived in there was no paint, no nothing like that.
Too often Appalachian youth see their history and culture as the door Miller remembers from his home. It is rough, unpainted, and starkly unhip in the blare of the mall and MTV media blitz that passes for popular culture. They hurriedly cast their heritage aside as they slip into adolescence. Embarrassed by this stereotype of the Appalachian hillbilly redneck, they shed their culture and become part of the homogeneous whole.
A community is defined by its reflection in the eyes of ousiders. Thus, the audiences for an oral history projects like this one are both the outside world and the community itself. This presentation will discuss how a community can preserve its heritage in a way that enhances this reflection and helps create a sustainable community where quality of life and progress are synonymous.
John Dodson is a high school history and technology teacher. Bonnie Dodson is a K-12 school librarian.
ENABLING COMMUNITY VOICES TO BE HEARD: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE TOWN MILL, LYME REGIS
Robert Eliot (Project Manager), Town Mill, Lyme Regis; Bridget Wilkins (Book Editor) and Catherine Dixon (Book Designer), Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London
This presentation will emphasise how volunteers with different skills worked as a team to produce a book with CD to communicate to a broad cross-section of the Lyme Regis community the human history of the Town Mill as a centre of village life and its potential to take that role again.
The focus will be on the task of making the history of the last 100 years of the watermill come alive through the voices of local people and those responsible for its recent reconstruction. The challenge was to make that story aurally and visually engaging, while maintaining the integrity and authenticity of the participants’ voices.
The generation and production of the book to help accomplish this will be explained, alongside the criteria used for the selection of content and the awareness of the requirements of different audiences. The importance of the editor’s role as a facilitator, respecting the voices of the people and making the editorial role transparent will be discussed, as well as the editorial need to embrace the tensions between sound, images and text.
Good design was a major factor in making the CD and book accessible to their audience. The designer brought a set of pragmatic skills to the evolving project rather than just making things look nice. The benefits of engaging with design early on will be outlined along with thoughts on the difficulties of managing the design of visual / audio in combination.
I INTERVIEW, YOU TAKE PART, WE RESEARCH, THEY…EXPLOIT? ORAL HISTORIES OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS AND THE DIPEX PROJECT
Kate Field
If we want people’s stories to be heard and used by others rather than being part of an archive, we have to decide at the start of a project why we want to interview people and what we are going to do with those interviews. That much is a given and should underpin any project that receives funds from the state, charities and/or educational foundations.
DIPEx the research project exists to make the voices of individual people who have experiences illness heard and seen – literally – on the internet. The website (www.dipex.org) which carries video excerpts selected from our collections of recorded interviews (mainly on video, some audio, some written only). The website can be accessed by anyone anytime.
DIPEx the website is one of four outcomes from the project. The others are academic papers (generally aimed at raising the profile of patient perspectives thereby improving clinical practice), presentations (to get our work more widely known and to attract funding), and most recently, teaching packages for medical nursing and social science tutors. It attracts funding from a number of bodies, medical and educational trusts, individual charities and the Dept of Health.
Though we feel we have tight ethical guidelines – which we stick to – we are finding it quite difficult to ring fence our project and protect our interviews. Yet, whose interviews are we protecting and from whom? Are we right to have concerns?
We have chosen to put people’s accounts on the internet and yet each researcher feels s/he has the responsibility for protecting our respondents from journalists who want sob stories, charities who want to copy our winning formula, university tutors who break copyright by copying our video clips to create their own teaching packages, and, more recently, health information companies who like the idea of having a few ‘patient stories’ as an add-on and offer us funding for more projects.
We think of those tapes and transcripts as ‘our interviews’ – but who really owns them? We know the answer legally – they belong to the University of Oxford – but morally where do we stand?
ORAL HISTORY AND ETHNIC COMMUNITIES
Rodger Harris, Oral Historian, Oklahoma Historical Society.
Harris is a graduate of Oklahoma State University and the University of Central Oklahoma.
The prospect of collecting oral history in ethnic communities was mostly unknown to the Oklahoma Historical Society until 1997. Prior to that time some oral histories had been collected with a significant number of American Indians and a few others that might be considered members of an ethnic group. The Oklahoma Historical Society on-going oral history program began in 1980. The program grew out of a local college's program called "The Living Legends Program" which had begun in 1969. In the more than 3,400 interviews collected before 1997 very few had dealt with ethnic groups. Although a few people with ethnic backgrounds were interviewed it was usually to understand another aspect of their lives and rarely about their ethnicity. In 1990 the oral history program began to use topical approaches based on a historic context report on Oklahoma's history. The former approach tended to be more about interviews of opportunity. Studies on broadcasting, transportation, Route 66, reconstitution of Indian nations and tribes, and other topics were highlighted first.
The Tribal Songs Project was the first effort to collect in ethnic communities. This project used Jim Anqoue, a member of the Kiowa Tribe, as a guide. Mr. Anqoue explained how to make a respectful approach to Indian elders, the context of song, the drum, dance, and PowWow traditions. The Tribal Songs Collections now total 45 interviews and approximately 500 hours of donated recordings given to the Society once the various donors began to appreciate the Society as respectful repository. Much of the same approach used in American Indian communities was used with projects targeting African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, eastern Europeans, and other groups common in Oklahoma. The presentation will include what principles have proved successful in each of these community efforts.
WHY ORAL HISTORY PROJECTS ARE CONSTRUCTED IN THE COMMUNITY: A REFLECTION ON WHAT AGENDA DRIVES A PROJECT.
Janette Hilton Project Director, Living History North East; The Regional Oral History Centre
This presentation will explore - What motivates oral history projects within communities? Do some projects have a more organic, evolutionary development that is reflective of the community it aims to represent? Is an oral history project now defined in principle by the limitations of a funding agenda, organisational demands etc? If a project is driven by such ‘impersonal’ agenda can it maintain its integrity to the community it hopes to represent? To illustrate, this presentation will look at three oral history projects from very diverse communities:
The History of Sight Loss - 1945 onwards in the Tees Valley is an ongoing ambitious project by an organisation called Blind Voice UK; to record and document life experiences of those who were partially sighted or completely blind. The management committee of Blind Voice UK, who are predominantly partially sighted or blind, were eager to play an active role as interviewers and lead this project throughout every stage. The presentation will look at how this project set out to conquer any boundaries to training and recording in their community.
Building Bridges of Understanding; an Interfaith Oral History Project was a multi-partner project, with its origins in the concept that funding could be achieved to record and document issues around faith and religion. This was an intergenerational, interfaith oral history project that spanned 10 months, involved 21 young people aged 13-21 years with three permanent community volunteers and 35 participants as interviewees. The presentation will demonstrate what resulted and what community, if any, was reflected in this project.
“Words from the Wall” was a community initiated project at Heddon-on-the Wall in Newcastle, Tyne and Wear. Its foundations were routed in a small village community initiated by the local heritage group and primary school. This year long project worked with 32 six/seven year olds; equipped them with new skills and understanding. The ambition of the project was to reflect local community history through oral history recordings that were then transferred into a brief piece of animation.
RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST THROUGH ORAL HISTORIES: THE CASE OF THE OLD BAZAAR OF TIRANA
Armanda Hysa, Dep. of Ethnology, Institute of Folk Culture, Institute of Folk Culture,
The Old Bazaars in the Balkan cities have been the centers of their economic and social life during ottoman rule and afterwards. In the case of Albania, the bazaars continued to play this role up to the mid of 20th century. The communist regime, which ruled the country since 2WW considered these old constructions as symbols of oriental past, of backwardness and fanatics, also as symbols of private entrepreneurship. This way, the ruining down of these centers of memories was judged as one of the pre-conditions of leaving the “dark” past behind shoulders and of building a “new life from the ruins of the old one”. Among the ruined down bazaars was the old bazaar of Tirana, the capital of Albania. My research focuses exactly in this bazaar. The reason I’ve chosen to study the Old Bazaar is not related simply to the fact that it has been the first urban kernel of the city. It represented also an economic, trading and financial center, a meeting place for people coming from different villages and even towns and cities, a place of recreation and amusement beside the work, a place of exchanging experiences and of life mixtures, a place where people could discuss about politics as well as about arranging marriages.
The effort to understand ever so little what this Bazaar has been and what it meant for the city is also an effort to understand the relations between people, their ideas and mentalities about life, the base of city’s economic development, the various customs and traditions that are not to be found written on any document.
As it does not exist physically, the biggest part of the information comes from oral testimonies and oral stories from people who once worked in this center. In this paper we will see how through these sources I come to delineate not only the map of the old bazaar, but also to reconstruct a community of people, who worked together and formed a specific strata of the city: that of trading craftsmen.
This research will be a contribution for the historical memory and identity of the capital of Albania, harmed by the demolition of this historical centre, and from the lack of studies on it.
TALES OF THREE GENERATIONS OF BENGALIS IN BRITAIN: WHO DID WE INTERVIEW?
Jamil Iqbal, Project Manger, Swadhinata Trust’s Oral History & Scio-Cultural Heritage Project; Ansar Ahmed Ullah, Chairperson, Swadhinata Trust
We have recently completed an oral history project on the Bengali community. Our project consists of a collection of 58 oral history interviews with a focus on three specific themes: ‘roots and memory’ (dialogue between first and third generation on the history of Bangladesh and the 71 war of independence); ‘community creativity’ (dialogue between second and third generation on welfare and community involvement in the UK, from the 70s-80s) and finally ‘popular culture: between tradition and innovation’ (across three generations, mainly focusing on traditional and more recent British Bengali musical heritage, from the 70s-80s).
We had hoped the dialogue between older and younger people would have fostered mutual learning by providing a unique space for an exchange of views and experiences. Young people would have the opportunity to understand the experience of their elders settling in Britain and adjusting to a new social environment through community involvement. Moreover, they would have the opportunity to link Bengali cultural traditions, expressed through music, with contemporary forms of cultural expression.
The project itself is linked to various local heritage organisations and will also develop a learning pack in conjunction with Tower Hamlets School teachers. It will, therefore, encourage non-Bengalis to look at the lives of people with diverse backgrounds, experience, and different values and customs. This Project’s key outputs were a website, a book, an exhibition and educational learning pack designed for use within secondary schools.
We would like to present and share our experience and lessons learnt in carrying out this project. We will introduce the project, talk about key issues, interview relationship in the community context, including issues around ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ interviewers, interviewing in community languages, and inter-generational interviewing difficulties and outcomes of the project and screen a DVD of some of the interviews.
PRAISE SONGS AND THE OVAHERERO COMMUNITY. HOW WE REMEMBER THE COLONIAL WAR AGAINST THE GERMANS
Johanna Kahatjipara, (Independent researcher)
In the Otjiherero language, the term Ejuva r’Otjikesa designates the 26th of August 1923, which was the day when the coffin of Samuel Mahahero returned from exile. The renowned Paramount Chief led the war against Imperial Germany which ended the conflict with an official policy of genocide in 1904. Ever since his burial the Ovaherero people assemble annually in the central Namibian town of Okahandja to praise their leaders, pay homage to their ancestors, foster their kinship and celebrate their people’s oral history of resilience and survival of Germany’s colonialism. A new aspect of this cultural expression was the Oturupa (troops), who gave the yearly gathering its popular name Otjiserandu (Red Flag Day), by mimicking the military parades and titles of the German colonial soldiers. At the same time, Mahahero’s people started in earnest to reorganise themselves politically under the leadership of Hosea Kutako who fought with his fellow Namibians the war of liberation from the South African apartheid administration. Working from this backdrop, my paper presentation will address the contemporary struggle of the Ovaherero people to tell their history from their perspective. The Okahandja commemoration exemplifies that the Ovaherero have created their own sources, methods and theory when it comes to remember the colonial war against the Germans. However, this body of knowledge has been systematically ignored with respect to the question of responsibility for the much debated policy of extermination by Imperial Germany. For instance, there is a rich oral history of the Otjitiro Otjindjandja tj’Ovaherero, as the genocide is known in Otjiherero. As an Omuherero woman, I would like to make available the oral history of the Ovaherero community, especially the praise songs of soldiers, the legacy of rape by German colonial troops as well as general culture such as marriage, birth of children and death rituals.
SHARING STORIES: CREATIVE WAYS OF MAKING COMMUNITY HISTORY RELEVANT TO EVERYONE
Helen Klaebe, Senior Research Fellow, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland Australia
The Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV) is a 16-hectare inner-city redevelopment project of the Queensland Department of Housing and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The Department of Housing sponsored a research project called Sharing Stories that offered the opportunity to tell stories using a variety of mediums. This project aimed to engage a large cross section of the community in ways that were historically appropriate and relevant to each of them. Outcomes included publishing historical books, digital stories, staging public art and photographic exhibitions, storytelling workshops with community members and establishing a website- all developed with the intention of building a sense of place, identity and history that would resonate with individuals from within the Kelvin Grove community, as well as with the general public.
Helen Klaebe is a senior research fellow at QUT. Her PhD examined new approaches to participatory public history using multi art form storytelling strategies. She is the author of: Onward Bound: the first 50 years of Outward Bound Australia (2005); and Sharing Stories: a social history of Kelvin Grove (2006).
INTERACTIVE MEMORIES: SPARKING REMINISCENCE ON THE WEB
Jack Latimer
The award-winning My Brighton and Hove website at www.mybrightonandhove.org.uk is a uniquely active community history site. Its 1000 visitors a day post a steady stream of reminiscences, photographs and information, as well as adding their own comments to the contributions of others. This presentation will explore the different types of memories being uploaded onto the site and examine how these memories spark off other memories. It will also look at similar community heritage sites around the country, which have been set up on the My Brighton and Hove model and make extensive use of oral history. What are the benefits and risks of allowing people to comment on the memories of others? If we want to use oral history interviews to trigger other memories, what is the best way to do this online?
Jack Latimer founded the My Brighton and Hove website in 2000 and specialises in creating oral history and community history websites. He is a member of the Community Archives Development Group and established the national directory of community archives at www.communityarchives.org.uk His company www.communitysites.co.uk sets up easy-to-maintain websites for oral history projects and community heritage groups around the country, based on the My Brighton and Hove model and software.
CREATING COMMUNITY: REFLECTIONS ON THE MAKING OF AN ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE
Dr Bea Lewkowicz, Co-Director Refugee Voices
In this paper I will talk about the making of the Refugee Voices Archive, a filmed oral history archive which set out to record the historical experiences of the German/Austrian Jewish refugees who emigrated to the UK in the thirties. I will explore notions of community found in the narratives of the interviews, investigate notions of community underlying the conceptualisation of this project, and present some of the Refugee Voices interviews in a short film. I will also draw comparisons to my work with other oral histories, namely on Belsize Square Synagogue and on the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki.
ENGAGING COMMUNITIES IN ORAL HISTORY WORK - THE PROCESS
Dien Luu
Academics and professionals have traditionally collected oral history. Recently however, members of diverse communities have begun working together to record their own oral histories. This move provides a more unique flavour to oral history. The following presentation explores areas on how to engage communities in collecting their own oral history.
Luton Voices is an oral history project that aims to engage communities in oral history. A participatory approach is used to encourage communities to take an active role in producing a vision of what they would like to achieve. The members play an integral part in accomplishing these goals. As a result, many communities that previously had no knowledge of oral history are now “recording their own voice”. The process of community outreach, peer education for community members and volunteers, and dissemination in community events are discussed in this presentation. People living in Luton have access to the oral histories being collected through short documentaries made by community members, radio broadcasts, creative educational workshops, and in the long-term through web-sites and availability in public archives.
Luton Voices is supported by the Lottery Heritage Fund, Luton Borough Council, Renaissance in the Region, and Bedfordshire Museums Group.
TAKING COMMUNITIES’ ORAL HISTORIES ONLINE AND THE ISSUE OF SUSTAINABILITY: THE MEMORYNET PROJECT
Ino Maragoudaki, 1st year collaborative PhD student, International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, Newcastle University and Tyne and Wear Museums
More and more museums and other memory institutions decide to collect, manage and present their communities’ oral histories online in an effort to be more relevant to more audiences. At the same time, museum funding-bodies increasingly encourage memory-projects to include an element of ‘skilling-up’ and empowerment of participants by using new technologies, with the objective of extending projects beyond the time limits of funding. This presentation will focus on Memorynet, a Tyne and Wear Museums project that presents local communities’ oral histories on the web. This work will look at the different digital aspects of Memorynet (the website, the digital equipment loans boxes and the workshops) and investigate the response of some of the community groups involved, in terms of the project’s sustainability. In particular, it will examine how these aspects have contributed towards the sustainability of the project as a whole. It will also look at the issues that are important for the community groups and how they relate back to the Museum’s priorities and understandings.
WHAT USE IS A FACILITATOR TO A GRIOT?: A STORYCORPS FACILITATOR’S ACCOUNT OF HELPING BUILD A HISTORICAL COLLECTION OF STORIES AFRICAN AMERICANS SHARE WITH LOVED ONES.
Nadja Middleton, Facilitator, StoryCorps
StoryCorps Griot is a special initiative of the ambitious American oral history project StoryCorps. Aiming to collect nationwide and over a ten year period 250 000 oral histories of ordinary Americans, StoryCorps is following in the footsteps of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writer’s Project. However, in contrast to the 1930s project, storytellers are interviewed by loved ones in the presence of trained facilitators and they take home a broadcast quality CD recording of their conversation. StoryCorps Griot is a one-year initiative to record the stories of over 1700 African Americans, told notably by Second World War veterans and by those involved in the Civil Rights Movement. With the permission of participants, these oral histories will be archived in the Library of Congress and in the Smithsonian Institution.
Nadja Middleton worked as a facilitator on StoryCorps Griot in Atlanta, Newark, and Detroit –the first 3 stops of the initiative’s nine-city tour. Following a presentation of the StoryCorps project and its interview set-up, Nadja will examine how this model is being applied to collect the stories of African Americans. What is the significance of and impact on oral histories being solicited by loved ones rather than ‘outsider’ researchers? In this context, what is the purpose of having a facilitator present during interviews? To what extent do StoryCorps and its facilitators shape the oral history that is being recorded? How aware are facilitators of the affect of their race on interviews and what, if anything, do they do about it? What other factors affect the narrator and the historical record being made?
CORNISH BRAIDS: NARRATIVES OF CORNWALL’S COMMUNITIES
Kayleigh Milden, Research Fellow, Institute of Cornish Studies, University of Exeter
Cornish Braids was the cornerstone project of the Cornish Audio Visual Archive (CAVA) from 2003 to 2005. This community oral history project investigated key strands of cultural activity, in particular work, religion, politics, leisure and social relationships, with the aim of creating a multigenerational profile of community life in Cornwall - both past and present. Cornwall radiates a multiplicity of historical images and community narratives that range from it existing as a Celtic nation to an English county. We cannot necessary speak of one Cornish community within the richness and complexity of contemporary Cornwall.
The presentation will explore the tapestry of community narratives that were collated for Cornish Braids. It will focus on how Cornish Braids challenged the notion of a homogenous Cornwall from Lands End to the Tamar, by revealing a diversity of different spatial, social and ethnic communities that constitute Cornwall as a whole. It will include excerpts taken from oral testimony recordings from the core strands of the project to demonstrate issues relating to ‘whose voice’ constructs and defines these Cornish communities both within Cornwall and overseas. It will conclude with an evaluation of both the challenges and achievements met by Cornish Braids and how it can be sustained as an essential part of CAVA’s ‘living archive’ for future generations of Cornish communities.
‘STEALING OUR MEMORIES’: FOUNDATION MYTHS AND IDENTITY AMONGST THE COALMINING COMMUNITIES OF KENT
Dr. Lynda Pearce, Oral Historian, Coalfields Heritage Initiative Kent (CHIK) project, Dover Museum, Kent.
The CHIK project is a community archive project, funded by Heritage Lottery Fund and local sponsors under the guidance of Dover Museum, to establish and train six community groups within the ex-coalfield communities to collect a virtual museum of images and recollections (see website at www.kentcoal.co.uk). The project has an established oral history archive collected by the oral historian containing over 200 hours of life histories. The project has also trained community group members in basic oral history techniques to enable volunteers to continue collecting oral testimonies within their communities.
Despite the closure of the Kent pits by the end of the 1980s, the communities associated with the four pits remain relatively isolated, with a strong sense of their own separate identity. The presentation examines how stories of the arrival and early treatment of the coalminers who migrated to Kent from the traditional mining areas of Britain during the ‘20s & ‘30s engendered a sense of shared identity amongst mining families. The paper will also reflect on how these memories continue to reinforce a sense of otherness and to shape aspects of their community identity.
Considering the subject of ‘What Community’, I will reflect on the difficulties faced with engaging this type of closed community and the validity of an accusation made during an initial meeting with one of the parish councils that the project, in particular the oral historian, was intending to ‘steal our memories’ and the implications of this for understanding the dynamics of collecting community histories.
EVOKING COMMUNITY HISTORIES FOR FILM
Nirmal Puwar, Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths
Just as 'communities' are not homogenous entities, the collecting and making of 'communities' is similarly a contested and conflict laden task. These two films I have - Khabi Ritz Khabie Palladium and Coventry Ritz - are memory texts that work with a specific cinema as a site of memory. Thinking through the interwoven and textured nature of visuals, words, songs, debris and architecture, this session will elaborate on the methods which have deliberately employed to produce evocation. The film can be glimpsed from the BBC online site. Click here to visit the page.
Nirmal Puwar: Author of 'Space Invaders: race, gender and bodies out of place', 'South Asian Women in the Diaspora' (co-ed), Special Issue on Orientalism of Fashion Theory (co-ed) and co-editor of numerous issues of Feminist Review. Working on creative critical methodologies through a series of collaborations.
THE TELLING TALES OUT OF SCHOOL PROJECT – EXPLORING THE HISTORY OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION IN THE COMMUNITY OF NORTH TYNEDALE AND REDESDALE IN NORTHUMBERLAND, 1870 TO 1944.
Dr Ian D Roberts, WEA tutor and Hon. Fellow of the Department of History, University of Durham.
The presentation is about a project being carried out in a relatively remote rural community which has changed radically in the last hundred years and which could be described in many ways as suffering significant economic and social deprivation. It began as a study of local educational history using traditional sources located in record offices, the local Heritage Centre and in private collections supplemented by oral history interviews of former pupils and others associated with the schools still living in the community. This has been refined to an exploration of elementary education in the period 1870 to 1944 which is now being turned into a book and a permanent oral history archive with the assistance of a grant from Awards for All.
The presentation will consist of an initial brief outline of the project but will then concentrate on its oral history aspect in which former pupils and others have been interviewed in order to provide a picture of what it was like to be a member of the community and its schools in the period 1919 to 1944. Issues that will be considered are the identification of the community, determining its social and economic profile and its effect on the schools, identifying and interviewing informants, assessing educational experiences and their value and exploring the impact of external policies and events on the pupils and the community in which they lived. A hand-out incorporating essential information will be provided for participants and recorded extracts from interviews will be used during the presentation.
SITES AND SIGNS OF REMEMBRANCE: TRACING THE EMERGENCE OF MINORITY COMMUNITIES AND THEIR LOCAL SUPPORT SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ORAL TESTIMONY OF ETHNIC ELDERS
Pam Schweitzer, Co-ordinator of European Reminiscence Network
Sites and Signs of Remembrance for peace, democracy and reconciliation in Europe is a 2-year lifelong learning project supported by the EU with partners in UK, Berlin, Dresden and Poznan (Poland). Project teams from the partner countries are interviewing older residents in their respective cities concerning those sites and signs of remembrance which have a particular personal or a community significance. Project teams and interviewees are visiting the other partner countries and learning about one another’s post-war history through personal and community testimony in direct meetings. They are also learning about the different cultures of remembrance and the different approaches to the recording and dissemination of memories in each country. How does biographical work of this kind, whether conducted through group or individual interviews promote tolerance, understanding and a greater sense of inclusion. The project process, as well as its products, is being documented in an online- platform including the oral testimony collected in each country.
The UK part of the project involves reminiscence workers (assisted by Greenwich University students of community history) and ethnic minority elders in local community groups working together to map the local area from the perspective of the elders’ direct experience. Interviews have focused on their early experiences in the UK as new immigrants in the 1950s and 60s and their involvement in the gradual creation of self-supporting minority communities with their own services, local visibility and representation.
In this presentation Pam Schweitzer will share some of the results of group and individual interviews conducted with ethnic minority elders from different community groups in the London Borough of Greenwich, including Chinese, African, Indian, Caribbean and Irish elders. She will also demonstrate how these memories are being translated into sharable forms through dramatisation and theatre workshops in schools and the wider community.
REDISCOVERING COMMUNITIES & COMMUNITY LIFE THROUGH REMINISCENCE
Kath Smith, Project Co-ordinator, Remembering the Past, Resourcing the Future Project;
Pip McKever, Project Manager, The GifTT Project (Generations Interacting for Today & Tomorrow)
This award-winning user-led project records the memories of older people in North Tyneside in the North East of England and disseminates them on a website to a world wide audience. The project has been running for over five years with support from a variety of grant funders and we have been able to create an archive of over 400 local memories.
Much of the work is undertaken by volunteers and the project offers new opportunities for leisure and learning for older people, encouraging them to make links with others to combat social isolation and enabling them to become more familiar with computers and the internet. Volunteers manage the project, give talks on the material in the collection and contribute to other local history activities in the area.
Recently our reminiscence work in sheltered housing schemes, undertaken in partnership with the GIfTT project, has produced wonderful oral history material, some of which has been published on our website and in booklet and CD format. Collaborative working and a user-led approach has deepened our understanding of contemporary community life and made us realise that ‘community’ means different things to different people, especially where reminiscence is concerned.
We’d like to tell you about how we’ve approached the work, how it has been shaped and developed by the people we’ve met along the way, and about the way it has revised our views on ‘community’ in its past and the present sense.
THE OUR TOWN PROJECT
Colin Stott, Learning Manager and Laura Matthews, Community History Officer,
Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service (Great Yarmouth)
The Our Town Project aims to make a community archive by recording people’s experiences of living and working in Great Yarmouth over the last 60 years, through oral history, reminiscence sessions, film and photography projects and contemporary collecting. The work is building on the existing Great Yarmouth Voices Archive at the museum.
The speakers will outline:
- How the project is working with the community to record their memories for future generations;
- The methods used to engage the local community in recording oral histories both as interviewees and researchers;
- How the museum have been recording people’s motives for participating;
- How the interviews will be used and made accessible to the public.
THE CHALLENGE OF RECORDING AN INDUSTRY
Peter Sturley, Assistant Curator of Photography, Film & Sound, National Railway Museum, York
In 1999 the National Railway Museum and its Friends embarked on an oral history project to capture the memories of people who worked in the industry at all levels. The result to date has been some 600 recordings lasting 1,100 hours and associated material collected by volunteer interviewers. The information captured has been used in displays at the museum, broadcast by the BBC and in print.
Whose story are we recording?
How do we ensure projects are representative and recognisable to (local) communities?
The challenge of recording the oral history of an entire industry (or attempting to) has both positive and negative aspects which this presentation will discuss. Recording industrial oral history by members of the industry itself is different to the norm; insider involvement may be affected by former professional relationships, hierarchy, area of work, Trade Union/management. Pre-existing relationships are often complex and unspoken or even unrecognised.
Career stories and life stories often encounter resistance to areas of interviewing from interviewers and interviewees that are painful – memories of accidents for instance – that impact on historically objective recording of the industry (a potential problem for any single subject museum with (inevitably) close links to their industry).
Interviews can tend to be biased towards the interests of the interviewer and this can lead to a predominance of certain types of work and/or worker. Being too close to the subject can also mean that obvious questions are not asked
There are benefits too with this system. Interviewers will have knowledge of the complexities involved in the industry and understand technical jargon, organizational structures, geography etc. There may well be a feeling of common understanding and shared experience which can assist when probing questions are asked.
THE SHAPING OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY IN A VOLUNTEER PROJECT
Paul Thompson, Brenda Corti and Janet Turner
The great majority of recent community oral projects, particularly those currently supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, are carried out by volunteers primarily interested in local history rather than in academic research. This has been a major change brought through the growth of local oral history activity since the 1980s. By contrast, earlier most community studies were carried out by social researchers, mainly anthropologists and sociologists, who had their own intellectual tradition, and sought through their investigations to confirm or develop these wider perspectives. What is the significance of this change for our understanding of community history?
Paul has worked in both kinds of project. His earlier oral history research on fishing communities in Scotland for Living the Fishing was strongly influenced by this earlier more academic tradition. In the last three years he has led a community oral history project in his own Essex village, Wivenhoe, with a team of over twenty volunteers.
In this paper we want to share some of the fruits of our community project in Wivenhoe, but at the same time offer some brief reflections on the differences between earlier community studies and a contemporary volunteer-based community oral history project. These will concern, firstly the choice of who is interviewed; secondly, the self-censorship in the interviews of some controversial topics; and thirdly, the differences in audience.
Paul Thompson is Research Professor in Sociology at the University of Essex, and director of the Wivenhoe Oral History Group’s project, `Remembering Wivenhoe’; Brenda Corti, retired, is Secretary and Administrator of the project; Janet Turner, retired is Wivenhoe Oral History Group’s audio specialist. All three were active interviewers on the project.
ORAL HISTORY IN MULTI-CULTURAL COMMUNITIES
Ann Westgarth: Project Co-ordinator The Immigrants Project (Reading Local History Trust)
The Immigrants Project collected the experiences of people who came from all over the world to settle in Reading, Berkshire in the last sixty years. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and archived in Reading Museum, published in a book ‘Routes to Reading’ and on a website: www.theimmigrantsproject.org.
The project was highly participatory and involved local volunteers in interviewing, transcribing and making editorial decisions about content and publication. ‘Experts’ were only called upon to offer advice and support when necessary. Those involved from the community were passionate about its purpose. Such emotional commitment has advantages and drawbacks and these will be explored.
Initially, fifty people volunteered to be interviewed, posing questions about who should be interviewed. In addition, many people from different ethnic backgrounds attended interviewer training resulting in the possibility of a wide variety of cross-cultural interviews and raising a number of issues. For example, whether people from a particular community should be interviewed by people ‘known’ to them? Whether a dialect common to interviewer and interviewee is re-enforced during an interview and what impact does this have? Should interviewers themselves be interviewed? In selecting a number of individuals from different ethnic minority backgrounds, do they become ‘representatives’ of that community?
The title of the project stimulated discussion around the perception of the term ‘immigrant’. Further discussion took place regarding the publication of verbatim transcriptions and how non-standard spoken/written English might sound/appear to others.
The common experience of being an immigrant helped to identify certain common themes for the project although there were a variety of reasons why people came to Reading in the first place. The project’s largest public event required careful facilitation in bringing together such a culturally diverse group of people. Unprecedented in Reading, this resulted in generating a lot of very positive publicity.
BRIDGING THE YEARS: AN INTER-GENERATIONAL PROJECT CELEBRATING THE COMMUNITY HERITAGE
Heather Williams, Community Development Project Officer, Northern Marches Cymru (NMC)
NMC is a partnership organisation which serves the needs of rural communities by helping to develop and implement projects in the rural Wrexham area, (in North East Wales) which will give long-term benefits to the economic, social, cultural and environmental vitality of the area. This project was Rural Community Action project, which was funded and facilitated by the Welsh Assembly Government.
Bridging the Years was initiated as a project to encourage primary school pupils to develop their awareness, understanding and appreciation of the local environment through oral history. The aim of the project was to interpret, preserve and celebrate local heritage and also, to assist in the development of links between the youth and older people in the Bangor on Dee area.
The pupils interviewed local residents capturing their memories of the local area during the 1960s and 1970s - exploring what the village was like and discovering what changes had taken place. In each interview session the pupils were split into small groups and each group interviewed one person who had been chosen to talk about certain topics using a prepared list of questions. Further details about how the project was carried out and the topics covered will be given in the presentation. In addition the benefits that the pupils and school have gained from this project will also be revealed.
1000 copies of a CD with edited recordings of the interviews were produced and available free of charge in the community. The pupils also prepared their own exhibition about the project, which was displayed in the local church. Finally, a touring exhibition was created using transcripts from the CD, together with photographs to complement the text.
You may download a PDF copy of the programme used during this conference from here.
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