2012 OHA Annual Meeting
October 10-14, 2012
Cleveland, Ohio
Deadline: January 20, 2012

The Oral History Association invites proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and presentations for its 2012 annual meeting to be held October 10-14, 2012, at the Marriott Downtown Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.

Voices raised in song, in anger, in celebration, in protest, in joy, in memoriam–all have been gathered by oral historians in the course of their work. Over the years the methodology of oral history has given voice to many different individuals from diverse communities and locations around the globe. Oral historians make a difference by gathering up all of these disparate voices and making them accessible as a larger chorus, whether through traditional archives, online databases, books, museum exhibits, theater performances, documentaries, radio broadcasts, podcasts, or blogs. The 2012 OHA meeting will focus not only on the many ways that people express themselves within oral histories, but also the ways in which people craft existing oral histories into other means of expression.

Click here to view the full CFP, and be sure to look at the helpful Proposal Guidelines and Abstract Guidelines links at the bottom of the document.

At Home In Utopia

“At times the mixture of courage and naivete is enough to break your heart.”
–Ty Burr, Boston Globe

For further information, see:
http://www.newday.com/films/athomeinutopia.html
http://www.itvs.org/films/at-home-in-utopia
http://www.athomeinutopia.com/

Our belief in the transformative power of art and storytelling inspired the project’s cinematic element; a short animated documentary. Selected excerpts will be married with animation and stylized video footage. By animating individual experiences we hope to give a general audience a deeper understanding of women’s experiences and their prominent role in the January Revolution. The documentary is currently in the development stage.

Sawt was founded and co-directed by Rhana Natour and Tamara Shogaolu. For more information, visit http://www.sawtvoices.com

The Nakba Archive

The expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands in 1948, an event commonly referred to as the Nakba (‘the catastrophe’), remains the pivotal moment in the history and collective experience of the Palestinian people.

Since 2002, the Nakba Archive has recorded over 650 interviews on digital video with first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon about their recollections of life in pre-1948 Palestine, and the events that led to their displacement. While some interviews have been conducted with middle class and elite Palestinians, the majority of interviewees are illiterate refugees of peasant origin, Palestinian Bedouin and poorer city dwellers, living in camps and informal gatherings around the country. Most of the Palestinians who took refuge in Lebanon hail from around 250 villages and towns in the northern Galilee and from the coastal cities of Jaffa, Haifa and Acre; the archive contains interviews with elders from over 150 villages and towns. These eyewitness narratives recall social and cultural life in Palestine before 1948, relations with neighboring Jewish communities and the British Mandate, and the events of the expulsion; they represent an intimate record of loss, bringing to life a world that has ceased to exist outside of memory.

The aim of this testimonial initiative has been to document this critical period in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices and personal experiences of those who lived through it in a way shaped not by political symbolism but rather by the rhythms of personal memory and experience. Conceived as a grassroots project, the interviews have been recorded by a collective of Palestinians from the camps; the goal has been not only to compensate for an incomplete written record, but also to involve refugees in documenting community histories in their own terms. The use of video aims to capture the affective and performative dimensions of memory in context, dramatic emphasis in speech and gesture, emotional intensity in recollection, contrasted discursive and physical worlds inhabited by refugees, and the eloquence of silence.

As the ranks of first-generation Palestinian refugees continue to thin and hope of return appears increasingly remote, the symbolic value placed on 1948 continues to rise. The context of narration giving meaning to these histories includes the need not only to make sense of and transmit a traumatic past, but also to take hold of an imminently uncertain present and future. In this respect, the Nakba Archive is both a record of the memories of a passing generation of eyewitnesses and an act of witness to the legacy of 1948 and its continuing impact on the Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon. The project was founded and co-directed by Diana Allan and Mahmoud Zeidan.

A selection of subtitled excerpts from the archive can be viewed online: www.nakba-archive.org

Here is her statement describing the project:

EHS Story Corps

In 2008, I co-founded the Multimedia Academy at Edison High School to promote the use of oral history by children ages 13 through 19. The mission of the academy is to create opportunities for racially, ethnically, religiously, and economically diverse students to interview each other and residents of Edison Township in order to encourage civic engagement and community outreach. The ultimate goal of the academy’s “EHS Story Corps” project (inspired by the StoryCorps project of National Public Radio) is to create a safe space and a hands-on learning environment that facilitates an understanding of our shared humanity among children of increasingly divergent backgrounds.

Learning and Teaching

Through the academy’s “EHS Story Corps” project, I am able to enhance learning for students from varied academic levels, many of whom are classified as special educational and 504 plan learners.  Oral history enables me to create projects that strengthen and build the connections between students at EHS, children and their family members (many have interviewed their siblings, parents, and grand-parents), teach the value of listening, and weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that every life matters.  My students are empowered by their work because we are creating an archive of student voices and experiences for our school and the Edison community, across generations. I am building the “EHS Story Corps” digital archive to preserve footage both online and in physical format for future students to use in a variety of classes, including history, social studies, civics and justice, ethics, English, literature, American studies, technology, and history.  Beyond graduation, EHS Academy participants are well versed in oral history best practices and methodologies, skills that are invaluable for any career track.

Rosie Uyola is a teacher at Edison High School in Edison, New Jersey, and Ph.D. student in American Studies at Rutger’s University.  To see a sample of the videos, visit http://rosieuyola.com/story-corp.html

Quest for the Perfect Bourbon: Voices of the Buffalo Trace Distillery is the story of a Kentucky distillery, its people and their quest for the perfect bourbon. Based on the Buffalo Trace Oral History Project, developed by the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, this documentary presents the history and the people of the Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky.

Viewers hear the voices of people who have been making bourbon for over half a century: master distillers, warehouse supervisors, processors, members of the Buffalo Trace family, and descendants of iconic figures like Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr., Colonel Albert Blanton and Pappy Van Winkle. In addition to producing award-winning bourbon, this is one of the oldest distilling sites in the country and it has a remarkably rich history.  Viewers are given an insider’s look at life in the distillery and how world-class bourbon is made.

Directed by filmmaker/oral historian Joanna Hay, and produced by professional oral historians at the Nunn Center, Quest for the Perfect Bourbon premiered at the historic Grand Theatre in Frankfort, Kentucky to a packed audience and Kentucky Educational Television (KET) began airing the documentary in June 2011.

To see the full documentary, go to: http://www.nunncenter.org/buffalotrace/quest/

Oral history was central in the production of this documentary. Over forty hours of oral history interviews were conducted by bourbon expert Dr. Thomas Troland, a faculty member at the University of Kentucky, and archived at the Nunn Center.

The oral history project website is located at: http://www.nunncenter.org/buffalotrace.  The interviews in their entirety can be accessed online on the Kentuckiana Digital Library (KDL).  On the KDL we host the video recordings of the interviews in our OHMS system which makes the transcripts searchable and connects users from the transcript to the corresponding moment in the interview.

The award was established in 1993 to recognize a published book that uses oral history to make a significant contribution to contemporary scholarship; and/or significantly advances understanding of important theoretical issues in oral history; and/or is an outstanding example of sound oral history methodology.

The OHA review committee described the book as “an antidote to the many accounts of segregation and the Civil Rights movement that overlook women as major forces of change,” and cited the book’s methodological sophistication and the “skillful weaving together of first-person narratives and photographs.”

Living with Jim Crow presents African American women’s personal recollections of their public and private lives during the period of legal segregation in the South, emphasizing their role in their families and communities and in the economic, social, cultural, and political life of the region during that time. The women, all of whom were born between 1900 and 1947, were interviewed in the 1990s as part of a major oral history research project of the Center for Documentary Studies—Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South. The narratives in Living with Jim Crow are excerpted from more than 1,200 first-person interviews (recorded on cassette tape) with elderly African American southerners conducted for Behind the Veil. Valk, associate director for programs of the John Nicholas Brown Center at Brown University, and Brown, associate professor of history at Williams College, served as research coordinators for the Behind the Veil project from 1990 to 1995.

Get more information on Living with Jim Crow.

Get more information on the Behind the Veil Project.

Stetson Kennedy died at 9:25 a.m., August 27, 2011.  He was   94.  A friend to labor, folkore and to the oral history  movement, Stetson will truly be missed.  His memory lives on in the Stetson Kennedy Vox Populi Annual Award dedicated to promoting social justice work among oral historians. More…