Ambedkar University, Delhi, February 1-2, 2019
Community, Place and Identity: Possibilities of Oral History
In Oral History, the purpose is often to “give voice” to the marginal or forgotten individuals or groups, to listen to their stories and give them the possibility to speak from their perspectives (Thompson, 2000). Yet oral history is not simply someone telling a story; it is someone telling a story in response to the particular queries of another. The exchange is historical in intent, an “in depth” inquiry that seeks information about and insights into the past from the perspective of the narrator. Being an interpretation of the past, oral history recognises an element of subjectivity, and itself requires interpretation for it’s meaning to be understood, a possibility that has expanded even as narratives and sources of oral history become increasingly accessiblity in a variety of online formats.
The Fourth OHAI Conference focuses on intersections between Community, Place and Identity, when seen from many ‘other’ perspectives. The Conference calls for Papers and Presentations that examine how in a world increasingly mobile and interconnected, groups and individuals redefine pasts and connect to the present, negotiate their own identities or construct it for others. In the urbanising world of today, this becomes increasingly widespread, as the urban allows the disappearance of certain kinds of strictures, even as it introduces others.
The Conference welcomes papers that deconstruct oral history narratives, and so open new explorations while looking at intersections of categories like class, ethnicity, status, nation, place, religion and gender. Place is space made culturally meaningful, as anthropologists and human geographers would indicate. For example, working with concepts like intersectionality and narrated identity allow an investigation of the interweaving and dependence of social categories that both teller and listener use. In a broader frame, the conference hopes such deconstructions will draw attention to interesting and unexpected assumptions made about multi-dimensional identity constructions.
We hope that conference papers and presentations will explore how construction, narration and negotiation of own and other identities is seen in relation to different situations, contexts and interviewers. A sense of space and time together create the meanings invested by people about the place they occupy, elaborating sociospatial relations of community that account for both instrumental and communicative rationality, when dealing with collective identity and collective action.
Themes
- Reclaiming space and politics of narrated identities
- Negotiating space: Analysing gender (including LGBT) / caste/ race
- Migration and displacement
- Memory and resistance
- Displacement and imagined homelands
- Communities, Traditions and Heritage Sites
- Urban Narratives : Neighourhood, identity and the everyday.
- Urban oral histories – place making and community