Oral History Community And Displacement

This book uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case studies, it traces the human impact of this disruptive, often violent feature of apartheid's social engineering.

How do we engage difficult histories and the experiences of new immigrants displaced by war, genocide, and human rights violations? This book reconfigures the conventional relationship between those who have sought refuge and rebuilt their lives and those who seek to record, understand, and transmit these life stories. It offers an alternative model to traditional research practices based on the idea of shared authority, whereby communities become partners in the research. Drawing on the collaborative Montreal Life Stories project, this book has methodological and ethical implications for scholars of oral history, collaborative research, public history and memory studies, and refugee studies.

How do we engage difficult histories and the experiences of new immigrants displaced by war, genocide, and human rights violations? This book reconfigures the conventional relationship between those who have sought refuge and rebuilt their lives and those who seek to record, understand, and transmit these life stories. It offers an alternative model to traditional research practices based on the idea of shared authority, whereby communities become partners in the research. Drawing on the collaborative Montreal Life Stories project, this book has methodological and ethical implications for scholars of oral history, collaborative research, public history and memory studies, and refugee studies.

Community projects often falter after the interviews are completed. This final book of the five-volume Community Oral History Toolkit explains the importance of processing and archiving oral histories and takes the reader through all the steps required for good archiving and for concluding the oral history project so that it is preserved and accessible for future generations. The authors give special attention to record-keeping systems and repositories, and provide several examples from actual projects to ground the information in practical terms. Charts, checklists, and sample forms also help the reader apply concepts to practice. Volume 5 finishes with examples of creative ways community projects have used oral histories, such as performances, exhibitions, celebrations, websites, and more, in order to promote history and engage the community.

This book uses oral history methodology to record stories of people who experienced the brunt of racist forced removals in the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Through life stories and community case studies, it traces the human impact of this disruptive, often violent feature of apartheid's social engineering.

Practicing Oral History among Refugees and Host Communities provides a comprehensive and practical guide to applied oral history with refugees, teaching the reader how to use applied, contemporary oral history to help provide solutions to the ‘mega-problem’ that is the worldwide refugee crisis. The book surveys the history of the practice and explains its successful applications in fields from journalism, law and psychiatry to technology, the prevention of terrorism and the design of public services. It defines applied oral history with refugees as a field, teaching rigorous, accessible methodologies for doing it, as well as outlining the importance of doing the same work with host communities. The book examines important legal and ethical parameters around this complex, sensitive field, and highlights the cost-effective, sustainable benefits that are being drawn from this work at all levels. It outlines the sociopolitical and theoretical frameworks around such oral histories, and the benefits for practitioners’ future careers. Both in scope and approach, it thoroughly equips readers for doing their own oral history projects with refugees or host communities, wherever they are. Using innovative case studies from seven continents and from the author’s own work, this manual is the ideal guide for oral historians and those working with refugees or host communities.

In addition to the problem of language, conducting oral histories with immigrant narrators often requires special considerations: past violence, cultural sensitivity, and lack of trust. Yet, these narrators are often witnesses to, or participants in, important historical events, or can describe otherwise-undocumented social phenomena. The first book to focus specifically on oral history practices with immigrant narrators, it -gives both the novice and experienced oral historian insights into their narrators’ needs;-provides the tools to effectively plan and execute an oral history project in an immigrant community;-includes case studies, additional resources, and templates of important oral history processes.

Oral history is inherently about memory, and when oral history interviews are used "in public," they invariably both reflect and shape public memories of the past. Oral History and Public Memories is the only book that explores this relationship, in fourteen case studies of oral history's use in a variety of venues and media around the world. Readers will learn, for example, of oral history based efforts to reclaim community memory in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa; of the role of personal testimony in changing public understanding of Japanese American history in the American West; of oral history's value in mapping heritage sites important to Australia's Aboriginal population; and of the way an oral history project with homeless people in Cleveland, Ohio became a tool for popular education. Taken together, these original essays link the well established practice of oral history to the burgeoning field of memory studies.