Preliminary Programme

The oral history portal Kogu Me Lugu ('All Our Story', kogumelugu.ee) is an online platform of the Estonian Institute of Historical Memory where one can find interviews on various topics about the history of Estonia in the 20th century. Since 2013 we have been conducting interviews with people in Estonia and abroad using three languages (Estonian, English, Russian). The aim is to give a universally accessible overview of the events in Estonia in the previous century both locally and globally.
As the manager of the Kogu Me Lugu activities since 2019, I would love to give an overview of what and how has been done so far, and what kind of opportunities could be there for researchers if they intended to use our platform and our stories. (Show less)

How many culturally treasured recordings remain on shelves in oral history archives, inaccessible to the communities who made them? How can we, as curators of oral history collections, ensure that they see the light of day, preserve them and make them accessible to assist communities in their efforts of cultural and language revitalization projects?

With a grant from the National Recording Preservation Foundation, the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks will be able to professionally digitize, preserve and make accessible 59 ‘Cuttlefish Project’ magnetic audio reels. From the early 1970s to 1982, Ray Hudson supervised groups of Unalaska high school students in his Cuttlefish class. Community Elders were asked to come to the class and share with students in their Unangam Tunuu language, sometimes through the use of a translator, and sometimes in English, stories about themselves and other cultural and historical details. Ray recorded many of these sessions and they are the only recordings of their kind that exist from the Cuttlefish classes. Although the students produced 6 books in the Cuttlefish series, much of the information contained in the recordings was not used.

These recordings are very important culturally, historically and linguistically. Today all three remaining dialects of Unangam Tunuu are critically endangered. Many of the Elders featured were the last generation whose mother tongue was Unangam Tunuu. There is almost no documentation of interactions between Elders and children which is exactly what these recordings are. These recordings help contribute a voice to the diversity of Indigenous languages and cultures found not only in Alaska but in the entire United States. They are of the utmost importance to the Unangax? people themselves, for educators around the world who study the diversity of Indigenous people in the United States, and for worldwide linguists and historians. (Show less)

This communication focuses on the teaching of history from oral sources and the benefits and drawbacks when incorporating this methodology in education. In this sense, the use of oral history allows students a greater approximation to the situation of groups and individuals far from the spheres of power and allows reconstructing the past by interrelating it with the present. In this way, students discover a new way of actively approaching history and become generators of knowledge, while at the same time identifying with the past through their relationships with the people interviewed, which contributes to generating a significant learning, to establish social bonds and work on values and emotions
Thus, an investigation is presented focused on a didactic action aimed at teachers in training of Primary Education to teach history and at the same time deal with unfeasible topics, through oral sources, as is the case of the history of women in the second half of the 20th century in Spain.
The results obtained were positive, since they allowed the students to learn about an invisible history through an active and motivating methodology, while they learned about the didactic virtues of working with oral history in the classroom. (Show less)

The paper locates the colonial revenue archive in India (1803 and onwards) as a vehicle of imperial rule and punitive criminalization, in contrast to its obfuscating role of portraying conditions of laissez faire or methods of revenue extraction. Using the example of West U.P the paper shows how the archive can be re-imagined by remaining attentive to the historians contemporaneous socio-political temporalities. Such an exercise is borne out of the lens of field notes, oral memory, and official files lodged in government offices, where the act of archiving and history writing is pushed to respond to the quotidian exercise of field work and documentation. This, as the paper argues, offers the historical method the potential to excavate longer continuums of violence and criminalisation that traverse the colonial and post colonial. (Show less)