Community Voices: Oral History on the Ground
Call for papers: deadline, 1st December 2013
Venue: Manchester (exact location to be confirmed)
Date: Friday 4th to Saturday 5th July 2014
Next year’s conference will showcase how oral history is practised in the community, exploring its challenges, successes, ‘products’ and legacies. We are looking for papers, panels, presentations, workshops, posters and displays on any aspect of community oral history. We invite proposals that are reflective, rather than a step-by-step explanation of how a project was run, and suggest the following themes as a starting point:
• Collaborative working – how communities have worked with other sectors such as academic institutions, health and social services, and youth organisations
• Communities of interest – ways of defining a community beyond the geographical
• Sustainability – what happens when a project ends?
• Audience – who is your project for, and how do you present it to different audiences?
• Conflict within communities – can community oral history be divisive as well as unifying?
• International projects – we actively seek proposals from speakers from abroad
Proposals
The deadline for submission of proposals is 1st December 2013. Each proposal should include: a title; an abstract of between 250-300 words; your name (and the names of any co-presenters, panellists etc); your institution or organisation; your email address. Importantly your abstract should demonstrate the use of oral history or personal testimony and be directly related to its use in the community.
Proposals should be emailed to the conference administrator, Belinda Waterman, at belinda@essex.ac.uk. They will be assessed anonymously by the conference organisers, and presenters will be contacted in February 2014.
Organising group
Cynthia Brown, Fiona Cosson, Anne Gulland, Sarah Lowry, Robert Wilkinson
Please keep an eye on the Oral History Society website for more information.