8th OHAI Conference 2023

More people became literate in the two decades from 1991 to 2011 than they did in the first nine decades of the 20^th century in India, according to Census data. In these two decades about 455 million Indians learnt to read and write, entered the world of textual communications. The gross enrolment rate in higher education institutions rose to more than 27% in 2019-20, from single digits three decades earlier. Since 2010, school enrolment rates have remained in the high 90 percentages (though there has been a recent fall due to the covid shock). The rate of growth in education, both in school and higher education, has been higher among traditionally marginalised and discriminated communities as millions of young people struggle to overcome every challenge to get themselves educated. Even as India’s literacy and higher education rates remain far lower than global standards, the people of India are slowly coming to inhabit a textual world.

What does living in a textual world do to memory—collective and individual – and the cultures of orality which so define large swathes of India? As oral historians and, broadly, as scholars who work on memory and the cultures of orality, how has the spread of textuality affected us? What happens when communities shift from oral to written cultures; what are the modes of change and the new structures of memory, to recall and nostalgia? What happens to forgetting with the arrival of textuality? How do oral communities engage with print capitalism and textual modernity? What is the new orality of the history that is remembered; how is it remembered and what is forgotten? How are history’s appropriation of memory reconfigured? How do we – as Oral Historians – understand the relations between listening and remembering? Is primary orality still available as a historical resource? How do we define secondary orality? What does the shift to textuality mean when it is mediated in several ways by the growth of computational technologies? How do we understand the rise of the new orality of digital communications?

We wish to focus our collective attention on these and related concerns of doing oral history in a textual world. We hope that oral historians, together with scholars working with and on memory, remembrance, orality and oral cultures can share our knowledges, interests and learn from each other. To this end, we invite proposals for panels, individual papers, poster and other presentations for the 8^th Annual Conference of the Oral History Association of India, which will be held at IIIT Hyderabad on 10, 11, 12, March 2023.

Abstract submission guidelines:

Panel: Total of 1,000 words which should include the proposed title, names, designation, email and contact phone numbers of the panel proposer and all the panel members, panel abstract, as well as individual abstracts of each paper. Typically a panel should take up one of the questions identified above and have three to four presenters.

Individual paper, poster: Maximum of 200 words and five keywords. In addition, the title of the paper, name(s), designation & institution, email id and contact number of the author(s) should be provided.

We also welcome proposals to present films, audio-video presentations, art or other innovative modes of presentation. Please send a 200 word proposal. 

All proposals and abstracts should be sent to: oralhistoryindia@gmail.com on or before the abstract submission deadline mentioned below.

Dates:

Call for Papers: 10 Dec 2022
Deadline for Abstracts: 15 Jan 2023 – Extended to 20 Jan 2023!
Acceptance List: 31 Jan 2023
Early Bird Registration: 01 – 10 Feb 2023
Registration Closes: 05 Mar 2023
Final Paper Submission: 05 Mar 2023
Conference Dates: 10 – 12 Mar 2023

Venue: The 8^th annual OHAI conference is being hosted at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. The conference will be in person, but we are open to consider one or two panels/papers in the hybrid mode. (We shall inform participants of accommodation options and rates when registration opens).

Registration Fee:
OHAI members: Rs 1750 (Rs. 1,400 early bird)
Non-members: Rs 2500 (Rs. 2,000 early bird)
OHAI student members: Rs.  500 (Rs. 400 early bird)
Student non-members: Rs.  750 (Rs. 600 early bird)