OHA Program Committees often choose a focal theme for the annual meeting from among the many dimensions of oral history practice. Our approach for 2009 is a bit different: we identify a broader umbrella under which we hope the meeting, structurally and substantively, can put many of these dimensions in productive dialogue with each other.
Collecting and preserving stories via interviews long has been the central focus of oral history method and practice. The 2009 Annual Meeting celebrates this basic unit of our field, the interview, by placing it within a circle of critical issues necessarily encountered in working with oral histories—in “doing something” with the materials oral historians collect. Too often relegated to the methodological sidelines, these include technological, philosophical, analytical, archival, collaborative, ethical, educational, and public aspects of working with oral history interviews.
Interviews are always conducted within a social/political context, and oral history interviews demand sensitive collaboration beginning with the social contract between interviewer and interviewee. But this requirement extends well beyond the interview to the processes and questions surrounding archives and use, access and presentation, analysis and exposition, ethics and morality, and teaching, research, and public engagement. Oral history interviews in use are not static documents but have human dimension, a quality enhanced by interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches. Oral history is both process and product; it is human interaction and human voice; it is the “raw” interview and the “cooked” documentary and everything in-between.
It is on that in-between ground that the Program Committee hopes to center the Annual Meeting’s discussion: How do we make an oral history into History? How do we transform oral history into exhibits, web-sites, multi-media, and public programming? How do we incorporate oral history into research, writing, documentary and community settings, applications fostered by everything from technological advances to the changing nature of humanities and community research? And how do these concerns alter understandings of the method and meanings of oral history itself?
The Program Committee especially welcomes proposals exploring this middle ground of engaged use from a variety of vantages and in a variety of modes. We invite proposals from individuals and panels, as well as for roundtables, performances, listening and viewing sessions, workshops, and poster sessions. We especially encourage presentations that include audio, transcription, exhibitions, video, and Internet.
The Program Committee invites presenters themselves to help shape the conference focus and structure through early submission. We propose a rolling submission deadline, from November 5, 2008, to January 31, 2009. Starting in November, we will begin to structure the meeting around conversations emerging in the proposals, so as to create unique spaces for discussion across and beyond the program’s individual sessions. Our goal is to enhance what happens beyond the sessions or meeting rooms, including those invaluable conversations in the hallways and happy hours.
OHA is open to proposals from the variety of fields traditionally represented in our meetings, such as folklore, history, sociology, anthropology, communications, American studies, political science, and urban studies. In recognition of the important work taking place outside the United States , we also hope to see a significant international presence at the meeting. And, as always, OHA welcomes proposals from independent scholars, community activists and organizers, archivists, librarians, museum curators, web designers, documentary producers, media artists, ethnographers, public historians, and all practitioners whose work is especially relevant to this meeting’s interest in “moving beyond the interview.”