Session Notes: OHAI Conference 2021

DAY 1: Mar 6, 10am – 5:30pm

CONFERENCE INTRODUCTION & INTRODUCTION TO OHAI: 10:00am
OPENING REMARKS: Maya Dodd and Nandini Oza

Vrunda Pathare : Introducing OHAI briefly, Nandini Oza and Maya Dodd
Nandini Oza: This year has been a LOT of crisis, which is why it makes sense to make crisis and community the theme. Introduction to all the panels and the key speakers. 
Maya Dodd: Brief about Oral History as a concept and conferences in pandemic-year; thank-you to FLAME; decolonizing academia, and preparing for future crises. 

OPENING TALK: 10:15 am – 11:15 am 
Oral History’s Bad Timing – Crisis in Bhopal, Disability and RTI Movements
Speaker: Rama Lakshmi
Facilitator/Moderator: Nandini Oza

Introduction by Nandini Oza
A slide and a short audio clip from Rama Lakshmi’s work on Bhopal
Nandini Oza: Remember Bhopal / RTI movement / disability crises
Elizabeth Zach: “graying of the civil rights generation” — memory gap between two generations — “memory mobilizing experience” — recent incidents (police violence against Black people) also mobilizing people — crisis could be internal, external, even intellectual, when political forces try to rewrite history
Remember Bhopal: A minister from Delhi saying “Look I’m not coughing” undermines the memory, and takes over knowledge creation, how seriously we take the event later.
RTI: urban memory undermines the mass rural effort, in Rajasthan
Disability rights: Missouri History Museum has a 9ft statue of Thomas Jefferson, loved by white people but a slave owner. How to bring siloed histories together, while respecting them? There’s a shared language in the struggle for rights. The midwest was missing in disability history. Anniversaries leading to commemoration
“Race against time” in Oral History – something ominous and crisis-y
Not just a responsibility to the community and crisis, but also an obligation to return during “peacetime” — best time to get granular detail and diversity

Q&A

Indira Chowdhury: When does one enter the scene? Does it take a while for the oral historian to be trusted by the community?
A: Defining frames of references: Rama’s context switching as a journalist and an oral historian. Emphasis on the history of now. Rama has been lucky enough in all her work to be present and have access to communities, and trust came through her contacts with the community leaders, who were trusted to begin with.

Malvika: When do you stop taking in histories? When thinking of projects.
A: You don’t. If you have the time, energy funds, never put a fullstop. Memories can be embellished but also forgotten, so get while you can. There will be other factors — doctors and nurses don’t have time to document Covid right now, a displaced community will by nature not be holding onto their old memories — but especially around traumatic/turbulent events, the sooner the better. Rama emphasises using “talk” rather than “interview”.

Session I: FILMS AND CRISES: 11:15am – 12:00pm

Tabdeeli, 24 min.
Film, followed by discussion with filmmakers: Anmol Saini, Anna Binu, Rishika Revo, Sankarsan Behera, Vyshakh Balachandran, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Facilitator/Moderator: Avehi Menon

Opening:
Avehi: We are screening Tabdeeli – meaning transformation – the film showcases transformation of two women leaders working to eliminate domestic violence working predominantly with the Muslim community of Kamla Raman Nagar area in Mumbai

Tabdeeli (points from the film)
– “Pyaar pyaar pyaar ya maar maar maar”
– Members of CORO speak about their backgrounds, the nature of precarity that is imposed post-marriage due to domestic violence
– Members also recount the difficulties faced in conversing with the members of the community because of the private nature of the matter
– Importance of laughing in moving past sadness
– Woman from the community recalls life in the neighbourhood, the tedious process of marriage, the violence inflicted on her eldest daughter post marriage, and how she became a mentor at CORO after the tragic demise of her daughter
– At community meeting, several women discuss nefarious forms of subjugation – forms of exploitation – how only certain categories of labour are determined as “productive work” – how “Violence becomes a habit” – the importance of collectively educating the youth – how the law is largely employed and advocated by women of privilege due to easier access

Avehi: Can you explain the process of setting the interview? Talking to the women?
Anmol: Anmol and team were introduced to several development organizations, one of which was CORO. Were introduced to Kausar and Sadiqa – extremely passionate about their roles and high spirited. Both were very hesitant to speak, be in front of a camera. 
Anmol and team went to the community and for the first fortnight or so just shot footage, without much specificity. They also broached the women initially with an entirely different questionnaire and ended up with an entirely different story that focused on their personal narratives as opposed to solely focusing on the work they do. 
Took two to three weeks for the women to be comfortable with the camera. Majority of footage we saw was only coincidentally shot. 

Avehi: How does the negotiation take place across 5 film makers?
Biggest fear was misrepresentation and so we had a lot of collective decision making, Despite differences of opinion, we had a common goal with the project in terms of one vision which we were clear about.

Malvika: What did the husbands of the women think of the films? Did they have an opinion?
Anmol: He could not do much considering there was a whole crew at their house but he was not okay with it. However, we were concerned if things might go wrong but the women assured us that their husbands’ attitudes should not negatively affect the making of the film and that we should go ahead with the shooting. 

Session II: CITIZEN AND THE STATE: 12:15pm – 1:00pm

Facilitator/Moderator: Abhineety Goel

Understanding the scars of erasure of people from the National Register of Citizens in Assam through Oral History
Debasreeta Deb, University of Otago, New Zealand

– Very few parallels to Assam’s tenuous history
– Citizens of Assam asked to prove certain documents to get themselves out of the non-citizen list
– This puts several citizens in deeply precarious positions
– Debasreeta did field work that showcases a personal and granular account of individuals navigating the crisis of citizenship
– a brief history of Sylhet
– Assam NRC – everyone became a de factor foreigner and had to prove citizenship — even literate people sometimes did not have documents, let alone illiterate people
– talking us through narratives of people who died by suicide, and others who had their whole worlds essentially turned upside down. 
-fears of how a State can instantaneously render someone a foreigner with the inability to prove requisite documents
– Rashmi Allah Begum was put in a detention camp despite her grandfather being a freedom fighter – because of some incongruence in the date of births she was declared a foreigner
– instances were a pregnant lady was placed in a detention facility instead of being given proper care raises questions about the basic humanity of the policy
– also instances where individuals are called “Bangladeshi” and are taunted by being asked “where is your real home” and where marriage is broken because the parents of the bride were deemed “foreigner”
– NRC and State fails to recognize voter id as valid proof of citizenship
– the importance of oral history in exposing the underlying humanitarian crises that ravages parts of the country and ways in which bona fide citizens of the country stand to be erased from the country’s history

Finding Voices of Denotified Tribes
Megha Poonia, NIAS, Bangalore, India

  • -A history of denotified tribes of India
  • -Lack of representation in education and politics
  • -Can avail very few jobs/no respect for traditional occupations
  • -Not included in population lists
  • -Social stigma 
  • -Clubbed with other nomadic communities
  • -Communities lack other identity documents
  • -Preserved history through their dance(banjara) and oral traditions
  • -Have largely been out of mainstream culture
  • -Interviews and oral history help glean their rich culture and past

Q&A

Debarati: How was your experience interviewing the people you interviewed?
Debasreeta: Began by approaching the broad, overarching question of how NRC had impacted their lives. Several respondents were first or second generation partition victims and often thought of themselves as Stateless. They even felt their home state Assam thought of them as foreigners. Extremely heart-wrenching experiences of interviewing the respondents. 

Mithilesh: Do we have examples where oral histories and narratives have been able to pursue state authority as an evidentiary claim to change policy?
Debasreeta: Not aware of State taking oral history as evidence. Roma tribes of undivided Slovenia (inaudible)
Megha: (missed the name) Community maintains  genealogies, sometimes the government relies on them for land disputes + Pastoral communities of Brazil contribute to GDP – how citizenship is largely contingent on economic benefit to a country 

Dhruba: Could Debasreeta archive her data somewhere?
Debasreeta: Not been able to publicize the tapes and data, but hopes in the future her work will be helpful to policymakers and researchers

Session III: GENDER: 2pm – 3:15pm

Facilitator/Moderator: Sanghamitra Chatterjee

Buddhist Nuns of Spiti: (Re-) Claiming Spiritual Space
Neekee Chaturvedi, University of Rajasthan
Kesang Thakur, ICSSR Project on on Continuity and Change in Spiti
Aniket Alam, IIT-Hyderabad
Aman Panta, ICSSR Project on on Continuity and Change in Spiti

  • Women were rarely educated, limited to meditation and home practices. Recent changes towards this, and this is drawing women towards it, in the last 2 decades. This is a historical change and not much research is done on it. Oral history helps in capturing nuances, Oral history methods have been essential to unearth this history of transformation.
  • ‘Chomos’: Spiti word for nuns
  • Change due to: modernization (strategic for Spiti to change since its on the borders); the way that religion itself is being experienced by the people is causing the change; Lamas are still powerful but changes are slowly but definitely taking place 
  • Women in Spiti are empowering themselves: with mahila mandals etc.
  • Traditional nuns: “householder/homebound nuns”: to serve the household. There are, blurring of boundaries of spiritual and domestic by the work they do, but their work isn’t respected as such
  • Institutional access to Nuns: where they did ‘kabza’ on lands and asserted their rights over it — this exposure is opening various pathways and opportunities for them
  • Is this institutional access helping them to break the glass ceiling? 
  • Himalayan nuns when they moved to Tibet, felt discomfort. Now they have become sisters. Now half the nuns are Himalayan Nuns. Nunneries give opportunities and access to digital advancement and secular jobs; and can choose to not study Buddhist philosophy if they do not want to. To help the Nunnery, the ones who opt for secular jobs contribute 5% towards it.
  • Hence, there is a change in Nuns spiritual and institutional status. They are becoming Keisha and being trained in Tantra. They are invited to conferences.
  • The Principal says that while the Nuns will go back to their regions to spread Buddhism, they are not looking at the regions to fund them as such. The sustenance of the nunnery as an institution that exists for Himalayan nuns is here to stay.
  • Aniket Alam: it is impossible to understand the history of the rise of the nuns without oral history. It is the only way to get access to this knowledge. They have written scripts and learn language, but orality brings out nuances of their knowledge and experiences. 

Narrativising #MeToo Beyond the Media Storm
Nithila Kanagasabai, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

  • Questions in MeToo paid little attention to the long history of journalists complaining about workplace harassment.
  • Sexual harassment was so pervasive that it was considered an occupational hazard
  • Early 2000s: with liberalization came better books and salaries, but silencing of structural inequalities. 
  • The influx of new blood, frequent casual conversations and open floor offices made the news room more egalitarian but also made it a space of transgression and oppression
  • Approaching ICC can be futile: targeting and vilification of the complainant, employees feel like seeking help of the ICC hinder the career of the complainant more than the accused. 
  • Sexual harassment is now finally inching towards becoming more a part of the discourse within newsrooms than the news being reported
  • The Pandemic: the sections which majorly employ women were the first ones to shut down.  Regional language newsrooms worse hit
  • Oral history narratives allows us to see MeToo as an important step towards creating a collective consciousness.

You can’t just stick them in an archive: taking care with the Panos Women and Conflict testimonies
Siobhan Warrington, Oral History Unit and Collective, Newcastle University

  • Revisiting ‘Arms to Fight, Arms to protect’ to recognize the historical value of the accounts of women, to not forget history and not go through what they did: post conflict context and sensitivities remain. 
  • Archive in the University of London and UK Data Archive, connect the narrators, interviewers and groups that had coordinated the projects of women in conflict. 
  • For women to are in public positions: they did not feel the need to hide their identity. In others, it was advised that they removed their names. So one-size approach doesn’t fit all.
  • Hawaiian conflict: a transcript of a woman who worked for peace by art, blood donations, campaigning for the disappeared — she wanted her transcript to be deleted, which was shocking given her public profile. 
  • One feels that this is such important historical material: as a researcher. But our ethical responsibilities lie with individuals living in the present rather than their past.   
  •  We need to return to the ethos of collaborative work: continue the archive with continuing to work with women and supporting them to revisit the archive so that its interpretations are driven by those who continue to live in post conflict contexts. 

Session IV: COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE AND CRISIS, Part 1: 3:15-4:15pm

Moderator: Rahi Soren
Facilitator: Hari Sridhar

Panel: Reimagining Santal Heritage through Oral History
Rahi Soren, Jadavpur University
Daniel Rycroft, University of East Anglia
Nishaant Choksi, IIT-Gandhinagar

Daniel Rycroft

  • -Focusing on contexts engulfing adivasis in India, drawing on my experiences of working in Jharkhand on the aftermath and legacy of Santal rebellion
  • -Aftermath – colonial suppression of rebellion and impact of this violence on Santal settlers 
  • -Legacy – Political transitions that occurred after the rebellion, such as the formation of the Santal parganas and the Santal Parganas Act
  • -Point is to define a historical geography of resistance. It permeates the historical as well as contemporary logic of indigeneity in India. Indigeneity continues to be defined in a local sense, in association to tribal lineages. With the nationalization of tribal lineages , the notion of tribal identity gets reworked. 
  • -Concept of tribe acquires a metaphorical reach because it alludes to a culture, a translation from the local to the national. Inscription of the tribal into national policy – one emphasizing cultural diversity – it retained a relatively positive meaning. As a sign (of both national and local belonging), the idea of the tribe becomes a complex and contested phenomenon. 
  • -Concept of scheduled tribe co-created with idea of scheduled areas. In this presentation we keep our focus on the people and the productive tension between people representing themselves as members of tribal lineages and representatives of a tribal or adivasi consciousness.
  • -‘Tribes’ and ‘adivasi’ linked but not identical. 
  • -Tribe is lineage based or vertical. Adivasi is horizontal generated via social and political affiliation and affirmation rather than through descent. It is in the complex domain of adivasi that meaningful oral history work can be done. 
  • -As insurgents involved in important anticolonial anticipation  – it provided the template for a pan-adivasi sense of humanity, justice, territoriality, and dignity. 
  • -Hul Sengel Part 1 Part 2 
  • -Multiple oral responses to the revolt and its aftermath – how did it create an adivasi narrative, besides a local narrative?

Nishaant Choksi – Education-inside and out: Life histories in the Santali language movement

  • -Language activism and education through the lens of oral history wrt santali language activism
  • -A lot of demands from minority language communities center around schooling in the mother tongue
  • -Looking at life histories of santali language activists and teachers – challenge this notion that schooling is where language consciousness is accepted or rejected
  • -Santali only recently introduced as a mother tongue subject in local high schools
  • -Fieldwork based in Bandowan-Jhilimili in Bankura disrict
  • -Most Santali language activists were school teachers – why did they become language activists despite their role as teachers of the “official” language?
  • -All literacy work in the past was done in households, and yet it was done in Bengali despite being in a 100% Santali area with no formal schooling infrastructure. Learning Bengali had to do with class dynamics within the community than with mainstream pressure from outside. 
  • -At the same time the Jharkhand Movement was happening which started changing the mindsets of the more elite educated Santals, people who were speaking and writing in Bengali and school teachers took a big lead in this movement. A Santali-speaking school teacher created a script (Ol Chiki script). 
  • -Literacy movements began outside the school, at the grassroots level. After the political transition of the Jharkhand Movement and the Ol Chiki script literacy came to be associated with the Santali language, where previously it had been associated with Bengali. 
  • -Movements forged the idea of Santali as a language of literacy with a script etc
  • -Changing ideas of mobility within Santali social structure 

Rahi Soren – Remembering the Santal Hul through Song Narratives

  • -Building an archive from the ground level
  • -Mapping used by indigienous as a tool for reclaiming reimagining renewing indigneous connection to land and water, supporting inter generational knowledge transfer, reconnecting them to the place they come from
  • -Several indigenous communities have taken it upon themselves to document their own cultural heritage. Eg. Sound Project, Maori Revival in new Zealand, the Program for Indigenous Language and Cultures, Kikuyu Hymnbook. Such initiatives needed in India.
  • -Project to map and collect audio recordings of Santali songs and music in National Library of France, Paris
  • -Arnold Blake Collection at British Library
  • -Potential of community archives – the act of recording changes ownership from performer to recorder until it is reclaimed and repatriated. 
  • -Santali songs, language and culture are a great source of oral history and literature, reflecting the voices of the minority in the digital era and help generate subaltern narratives. 
  • -Impact of Hul has been embodied into the song – Debon tingun Adivasi bir (Let us stand together, o adivasi forester) – written in the backdrop of the electoral setback of 1937 – earliest recording found in the Deben Bhattacharya Collection – change in political scenario of the nation, the song and its meaning has undergone transformation, 
  • -Reimagination of cultural heritage is a common phenomenon in oral cultures. 

Q&A

  • Indira Chowdhury: Reminded of a recent paper by a Maori historian Nepia Mahuika making a very strong argument about redefining oral history to include the kind of memories indigenous people have, songs and traditions shouldn’t just be called traditions, they are ways of remembering, so the way we do oral history has to change.
  • Aparna Vaidik: Ethics of collecting, archiving and representing the community and indigenous histories – do academic/bourgois categories fall short of capturing these words and at some level inflict epistemic violence?
  • Daniel Rycroft: Vaacha: Museum of Voice and Adivasi Academy project Through the Eye of the Ancestors, were archives singularly embedded in the European institutional system but were invisible. 
  • Nishaant Choksi: The process of doing a PhD and writing peer reviewed articles, one is forced to reuse these epistemic categories. Close attention to language is another way to build and develop indigenous categories, without which it is very difficult to develop resonant categories.
  • Rahi Soren: Interesting to note who identifies as tribal and who identifies as adivasi – why and what are the reasons behind that choice?

PUBLIC TALK 1: 4:30PM – 5:30pm
Rob Perks, former lead curator of oral histories, British Library
In conversation with Indira Chowdhury

Facilitator/Moderator: Fleur D’Souza

Fleur D’Souza introduces Rob Perks (RP) and Indira Chowdhury (IC).

Indira talks about Rob’s important role in proposing the idea of OHAI during his visit to India in 2011 and shares some photos of Rob from that visit. 

IC: How did your journey into oral history begin? 
RP: I was always a history enthusiast, partly through my father, and studied history at university, starting with political history and then moving to social history. That’s when my interest in oral history started. 

I was also always interested in tape recorders. 

Landed jobs in museums to run oral history projects heading large teams. 

IC: Talk about your work in the British museum ,especially your experience heading largish teams. 
RP: Doing history is lonely, but oral history is probably closer to the sociable end of history. Teams bring different skills and background and enriches the work. Having headed such teams gave me an edge in my job in the British museum. It was around the time that Paul Thompson had started the British Life Story collection. When I started I was asked to oversee this project, alongwith Paul who I knew quite well. We worked together to develop the oral history programme at the British Library. Paul’s charity allowed us the resources to bring in a whole range of people to work on the project.

IC: In the later 80s, was oral history being taught in the universities? 

RP: It was patchy. Few individuals in universities who were doing oral history and teaching their students. Not much presence at the UG level. In the 90s the national curriculum was intro. That allowed kids to do community oral history. Changed only in 2000s, with a lot more oral history being done in universities. Similarly in museums, and less so in libraries and among archivists. Happened later there. The change has to do with universities being encouraged to engage through their universities. And a good way to do that is oral history. Last 10 years, there is a lot more work. 

IC: All of your published work has been collaborative, including the Oral History Reader. Could you talk about how these books came about? 
RP: I’ve always enjoyed working with other people, to argue and bounce off ideas. Doing the oral history reader with another author meant i could share the huge amount of work required (you have to read everything) and bring in complementary skills. In the case of the Ukraine book, the key collaboration was with a photographer, to do the fieldwork in the 90s during an extraordinary time, politically in the region. There was a lot of suspicion of the work we were doing but it also reminded me of the democratic power of oral history. I’ve also always believed in the power of visuals in oral history, which was an important part of the Ukrainian work. 

IC: What skills does one need to do oral history with victims of oppression and what is the afterlife of such interviews?
RP: You need to understand how traumatic memory works, and how that affects the responses, and how one should approach doing such interviews. Interviewers should also remember that they need to support themselves in such projects. Alot of such work has been done on the Soviet Union, including the book “The Whisperers”, which is one of the best oral history books on the Soviet Union. 

IC: What is the right time to do oral history of crises – as they are happening or after some time? 
RP: Crisis oral history is well-embedded in North American historical practice but treated with some skepticism in Britain, for instance, where the thinking is that OH needs some time for reflection. A longitudinal project might be the way to go for crisis projects. We should certainly not just be repeating what journalists are doing. But there is no easy answer to this question. 

IC: Tell us a little more about what you mean by longitudinal oral history.
RP: Embedding questions about the crisis (e.g. Covid) within a broader biographical context. 

IC: What are the ethical challenges of doing oral history during the pandemic? 
RP: One question was whether we should even be doing oral history in this time, when people are lonely, grieving, facing all kinds of challenges etc. and especially whether we should be doing such interviews remotely. There is no doubt that in-person interviews are better, although technology can do a very good job (e.g. Zencastr). But it changes the dynamic of the interview, e.g. we don’t get body language cues that you get in a face-to-face interviews; building rapport is difficult; questions tend to be shorter, follow-ups are difficult, and questions dealing with emotions are particularly difficult. You get flatter interviews! I think the way forward will be a hybrid model – people will start using technology more to interview people they would be able to access otherwise, or where there are budget constraints. 

IC: What are the implications for archiving with interviews recorded remotely? 
RP: Archivists have reconciled to receiving material of varying quality during the pandemic. That reflects the emergency we are living through. For example, we are becoming used to watching low-quality video on the news during the pandemic. We have to be realistic, and continue carrying out our jobs. 

IC: There has been a lot of discussion on what should be the nature of public oral history, especially in relation to indigenous histories (i.e. the distinction between academics doing oral history of indigenous communities and oral cultures of such communities)? 
RP: We’ve shifted a little away from the latter and we probably didn’t give due to people who were doing such work. But with the internationalisation of oral history maybe we are drifting back to appreciating such work more (e.g. Indira’s work in India, aboriginal histories in Australia/NZ)

IC: How did your changing view about oral history (that it goes deeper into memory and language) influence the Listening Project and the Sound Heritage Project?
RP: It is an open question whether the Listening Project is even oral history, because both people are sharing. It is more like a conversation between two lives, where they are telling each other stories. Also,  many of the conversations are between younger people, or younger people with older people, and it has really enriched the oral history collection in the British Library. 

The Sound Heritage project is really like my legacy project, my attempt to save the huge collection of recordings that are present in houses, community centres, etc by digitising them. 

IC: What is your advice to oral history practitioners in India about archiving oral history, when we don’t have a large national archive?
RP: The answer is easier today because we are all recording digitally. Gradually, we can stop worrying about the physicality of the recorded material, but need to figure out how to organize all the material. We can even hold material outside of places where it is being produced, if it is safer to do so. There are also greater opportunities to collaborate with people remotely. 

Q&A

Furrukh Khan: As someone who has been involved in oral history, what is your view on the hierarchy of knowledge, i.e. that the written document is superior to the oral record? 
RP: Good question. oral history reminds us about the subjectivity of the past, and that memories of the past shift over time. And this is not a weakness, but a strength of understanding the dynamic between past and present. Also, there is growing recognition among historians who haven’t used a lot of oral history traditionally that oral history can be really useful in filling the gaps in knowledge got from written archives, and juxtaposing different kinds of evidence in forming a picture of the past. Historians value oral history much more today than 20-30 years ago, but there is still some criticism of oral history that is present as it is, and is not critically interpreted. So, there is also a growing feeling in the oral history community that oral history can’t stand alone but needs to be looked at in relation to other forms of evidence. 

Neekee Chaturvedi: How far can we go in persuading interviewees in allowing their testimonies to be available publicly?
RP: Depends on whether it is just reluctance (or lack of confidence) that you have anything valuable to contribute or there is a genuine fear about the testimonies being used against them. Important to discuss the terms of the agreement with interviewees clearly in full detail before the interview and reassuring them about the control they have over the material. 

Fleur D’Souza: Tell us one way in which the definition of oral history has shifted over time? 
RP: One would be the Listening Project/StoryCorps model, which is called oral history, but is not historical. In the 70s when I started, people didn’t really know what oral history was. It always had to be explained, but when it was, people knew exactly what you were talking about. So, it was actually the phrase oral history that people didn’t understand. Earlier some people used the phrase “Aural History” instead, where the focus is clearly on listening. The phrase “Spoken History” was also used occasionally. But the phrase has become much better known over time, and as the phrase became better-known many groups started adopting the phrase for their own work, often for work that wasn’t really oral history. I’m not too concerned about the definition. I think it has changed in interesting ways over time. 

Nandini Oza: What crises do you think oral history practitioners should definitely be taking up around the world today?
RP: Like I was saying earlier, I’m not sure whether oral history should be dealing with crisis as they are happening, as journalists do, but instead embed questions around crisis within larger oral history interviews. Oral histories focused on crisis (e.g. on Brexit) have tended not to be very interesting, but they should definitely figure within the larger context of biographical oral history and make sure they are broadly embedded. To answer your question more directly in a global context, we should definitely be doing more oral history around climate change, with scientists, activists etc. 

DAY 2: Mar 7, 10am – 6:30pm

Session V: DISPLACEMENTS: 10am – 11:15am

Facilitator/Moderator: Debarati Chakraborty

Revisiting the 1947 Partition and Displacement: Subjective and “Intangible” Experiences of Hindu Migrants of Bahawalpur
Shaifali Arora, IIT Indore

Partition historiography — colonialist and nationalist history — subaltern school of historiography — revisionist and oral history– theoretical concerns about subjective oral testimonies as documented history

Focus on Hindumalkot border region in Rajasthan
— a need to expand scholarly attention to “intangible” subjects
— move from Urdu to Hindi => post displacement erasure, speaking Bahawalpuri language was considered crude and embarrassing
— Piradatta (one of the respondents) : “we wanted to forget everything”
— popular written texts remain buried, because of the linguistic change. 2nd 3rd generations have no link to them.
— language avowal and “ethnic amnesia” as a response to displacement
— one of the respondents remembers non-eventful, non-dramatic parts of life — wells, farming, shopkeeping — she didn’t want to remember the trauma
— stories of escaping from the violence of religious conversion, patriarchy — challenging the trope of martyrdom and sacrifice

Crossing Over – Women’s Oral Histories of Settlement in the Andaman Islands
Raka Banerjee, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

— migration from West Bengal around partition
— “refugee labour” for national development
— criteria : male head of household who had farming/labour experience; women were attached subjects and not eligible for settlement/rehabilitation on their own
— first step : Port Blair Secretariat Archive, documents are primarily correspondence between settlers and administration, mostly govt reports on settler issues. Identified 8 narratives of first-gen settler women
— methodology : indepth semistructured interviews with 8 women and 4 men + documents from aforementioned archive
— one woman’s husband abandoned her, archival debate on letting her stay vs “let her go, good riddance” and repatriate her elsewhere. Hunger strikes and protests by women, re-education and employment
— testimony :  “we are not like the women from Bangladesh” (as opposed to East Pakistan)
— testimony : people have acquired “bad taste” (non-conservative dressing) through television etc., it is not solely the fault of “guests” (migrants)
— came up with their lexicon, drawing from statist vocabulary
— crossing over and politics of settler memory due to multiple displacements; place attachment; conception of mainland; tropes of “islandness”
— patriarchal underpinning 

The 1971 War of Bangladesh in the Diaspora: Some Reflections on Documentation, Ethics and Politics
Paramita Purkayastha, Jadavpur University

–those who suffered never forgot, moving on is not that easy
–some of the respondents are very anti muslim — but someone may support BJP and not CAA. many permutations and combinations of loyalties and prejudices
— some have moved to US etc to escape the entangled violence of caste, class, religion
— barely any sense of continuity among generations
— feeling targeted due to progressive community work, not just social location
— respondents hesitant

Q&A

Indira Chowdhury — to Shaifali: what is the significance + context of the janamsakhi text, did the older gen try to translate it into hindi for the younger gen?
A : spiritual significance. Collective readings. Only one respondent had a copy. Not passed down since the text was in urdu; some of the youngers do read it, some of them are still comfortable with urdu but newspaperwallas etc could not deliver urdu newspapers due to lack to demand ⇒ lack of access and continuity.
Communities on both sides used to worship rivergod “jhulelaal” ; collective symbol. 

Mithilesh Kumar — to Shaifali: could you comment on the politics of script (nastaliq / gurmukhi / devnagari in bureaucratic and educational contexts)
A : in census docs, a lot of times migrants would defer to census admin and bureaucrats re what 1st language to write in the census; most said Hindi even though they spoke something else at home. 2nd 3rd gen is aware of disappearance and erasure so they do want to revive. There are people who are trying to write bhawalpuri (originally nastaliq) in devanagari, which has a politics of its own.

Nandini Oza — Raka Banerjee: would like to know what the original settlers of Andaman thought, if the research looks into that?
A : begs the question who are the original inhabitants, they are the indigenous people. Neel Island (home of research) allegedly never had an indigenous population, so the first population was the admin, and convicts. Bengali settlers feel mainland people have taken over material resources; other settlers feel the Bengali settlers have a cultural majority. Banerjee has not come across accounts of indigenous people on Neel island, so cannot comment on the aforementioned “allegedly”.

Indira Chowdhury — to Raka Banerjee : more of a comment than question, comparing Andaman and Marijhappi settlement, and the kind of physical labour.
A : would have loved to talk more about ecology. Deer meat. Crabs would eat crops. Adapting previous knowledge to settled ecology. Boil papaya for all meals, rice would be delivered once a week (and sometimes not at all). Perhaps the labour helped women step out of the private, but also problematized the border between public and private.

Indira Chowdhury — to Paromita: how do you approach interviewees, is about lives in general or just “crossing over”?
A : try to refrain from mentioning crossing over in the beginning, since it’s sensitive. Says her focus is the war, and it’s up to respondents what they want to talk about. In the beginning people struggle, sensitivities around birth certificates, year of crossing over etc. People were most comfortable talking about violence, and getting it out of their system; but specificities being recorded makes them tense. Safer to figure out how the respondent wants to approach.

Angana Chatterjee — for Raka and Shaifali : in what way does local knowledge live intergenerationally? 
Raka Banerjee : mothers in law etc would chime in interviews, memories of multiple displacement are lost to younger settlers. A lot of narratives are inter- and intra-island, generational knowledge is context driven. 2nd generation sees the need to document, the gen that were very young when they came over. Men tend to privilege legit documentation of history, women tend to go with the flow (notetaker’s note, is this because of literacy??)

Venkat — for raka: i’m reminded of Sivasundaram’s Islanding, could you share more examples to learn from?
Raka : used “islanding” as a bureaucratic term and administrative category

Mithilesh: I am still unable to formulate my question in a precise manner but hopefully this will make some sense. At one point in your presentation, you make this extremely crucial point that although for some Hindutva politics may be at the core of their political ideology they are also stridently against CAA-NRC exercise. Which led me to think about the graduated way in which Hindutva fashions itself. Do you think that these disjunctions especially in the case of your respondent actually are creating a Hindutva ecosystem which is differentiated too? There is a notion that Hindutva is a homogenous ideology and maybe there are strands we need to watch out for closely which are dependent on variegated experiences across “local” experiences.
Paramita: My respondent identified himself as a Namashudra, and while many members of the Namashudra community revere Ambedkar a lot as a leader of the downtrodden, they are reluctant about identifying themselves as ‘Dalits’. From this and from what I gather from your question, I think one can look at these two current issues – one being the appropriation of Ambedkar by the Hindutva caste, and the other being the assertion by some progressive Hindus that Hindutva and Hinduism are different entities. From what I have read and observed till now, I would say that this in itself shows two things – how flawed as an ideology Hindutva itself is, and how variegated Hinduism as an idea is. The citizenship exercises are of course meant to be exclusionary in nature – and therefore is based on only one idea of being a Hindu, of being an Indian. This is a point I had to actually cut out from my paper because of time constraints. But citizens are real human beings at the end of the day. Whether and how Hindutva is able to adapt to these nuances remain to be seen. And also for me to explore as a researcher. And thanks a lot for raising this issue.

Session VI: COMMUNITY KNOWLEDGE AND CRISIS, Part 2: 11:30am – 12:30pm

Facilitator/Moderator: Poonam Gandhi

Panel: The Ownership of Public History in India: The TOPHI Project 
Maya Dodd, FLAME University
Aparna Vaidik, Ashoka University
Ranjani Prasad, Keystone Foundation
Faisal Rehman, Keystone Foundation

Poonam Gandhi introduced by Debarati
Poonam Gandhi introduces the panelists
Poonam Gandhi introducing TOPHI project — an initiative to mix academic documented histories with public history. Aims to create co-ownership between universities and communities, to create a critical public sphere. 

Aparna Vaidik : genesis of TOPHI
– There’s been a narrowing of public intellectual space in the last 5-6 yrs, though in some ways space for conversation has expanded. This has changed the way we know the world, fracturing earlier ways of knowing and practicing history.
– most academics don’t take their questioning and radical pedagogy outside the classroom, which makes them complicit in an insidious way of keeping power intact.
– a lot of (delhi) academics seem to be directly in dialogue with State, and the discourse gets entangled in agenda, paradigm, state policy. Makes one lose sight with communities and histories. Internal churn in academia.
– a lot of questioning rests on foundational beliefs, one of the chiefs being “liberalism”. Being seen as an insufficient category, so what are we left with?
– specialisation breeds a culture of non-knowing — what happens to other ways of knowing the past? Historians are self appointed custodians of india’s past, who write but not for the public sphere. How does a historian engage with the limits of the profession? What tools to engage popular notions of the past?
– public participation in the act of writing and analyzing history, not just consuming — critical public sphere, dislodges hierarchy.
– how to make an archive public, how to move towards community and living archives?
– false binary between real academic history vs public community history

Maya Dodd : locating the project and involved academics
– this project exists in the future tense
– decolonizing academia is the larger context, but very aware of the imperial context of approaching tribal populations etc. is there a definite right way to approach this? No.
– there are only mistakes of the past to learn from : 1) i dont believe the past is unchanged, i dont believe youll find it in the present. I dont think it can be recuperated. Silences may contain more than any record keeping, erasure speaks more than evidence. When recording, mediation is paramount — always an editorial act. We are in territory of cliche when talking about indigenous culture, because we have no other way of thinking about it. Aims to bring marginalized epistemology into school and university education — but why?– binyavanga wainaina – how to write about africa. Remix – we can fit anything to mean anything.
– wayback machine. As a panel, very aware that they are dependent on british library funding – crossroads of ethics. Moving from orality to digitality, have bypassed literacy and annotation by the people who should have had first rights to inscription.
– 2020 has been all about digital agency.
– archives are never complete, born out of the subjectivity of its creator.
– the only way to look forward to our uncertain futures is to try, even if we fail.

Ranjani Prasad
– nilgiri biosphere reserve, pilot site.  22 tribes — v complex sociology and ecology. Every few kilometres, contexts change — so how do you conceptualize history?
– lots has been written, but all western — no resources in the nilgiri itself.
– varallara history is more analogies, less time and space. This project allows for interdisciplinary work and experimental methodology. unlearn/debunk/recreate oral history methodologies so that communities themselves can use it (there’s a trauma related to cameras and recorders; community radio makes more sense to communities). Reclaiming power of the written history via digital means. Merging tech and tradition for participatory history writing, in the hope this will be a site for retelling and multiplying of narratives.
– “History” is untranslatable, the native idea is more like “traditional knowledge”

Faisal Rehman
– new modes of knowledge production
– Areva (tamil) – sense. Community sensibilities = knowledge.
– community fellowships = having community members as researchers. Look at what knowledge has been produced already – indigenous declaration (tandenya?) — want the communities to understand what is being said about the communities, in the mainstream.
– read the texts along with comm researchers, encouraged to take these notes and texts back to elders
– Badaga histories are best preserved but politically tricky to get into
– reading histories through reading maps — comm researchers encouraged to add names of hills etc, as given by indigenous ppl, to “formal” maps
– place names, place making
— a long note about ethical concerns, and more benign ways of bringing in research methodology in a context where research has largely meant violence. Indigenous ideas of history are different, the prehistoric coexists and aligns with the past and the future.

Q&A

Indira Chowdhury — for a moment, let go of notions of scientific history. Different kinds of speech act.

Manasi — what does final output look like?
Maya Dodd — pasted the aims and objective doc [1. Develop a comprehensive account of community knowledge production 2. To build new capacity 3 to create a network of public history educators in india 4 contribute to archival practice scholarship activism and policy debates]  — but tophi is more co-creator, collaborator with communities, not custodian of some knowledge.
Aparna Vaidik : hope to form a syllabus, hold workshops with educators for brainstorming.

Session VII: COVID-19 & ORAL HISTORIES: 1:45pm – 3:00pm

Facilitator/Moderator: Sudebi Thakurta

COVID-19 and Mutual Aid – temporary phenomenon or chance for a better society? 
Alison Atkinson-Phillips and Silvie Fisch, Oral History Unit and Collective, Newcastle University

Mutual aid project grew out of a foodbank research project, through the “decade of austerity” in the UK.
Aim : to understand the phenomenon of ppl stepping up and joining mutual aid groups — as historians, want to understand the historical processes they’re drawing on. Most organizers had been involved in community / mutualaid work / organizing for a while, before cov19. Some politicized through their own hardship, and draw from the union movement, some have more personal backstories.
– ‘the pringles controversy’ and austerity
– mutual aid a relatively new phenomenon in uk; new groups had to quickly get used to Docs and Zoom and whatsapp etc in covid times.
– not tied down to bureaucratic systems. Support varies from exchanging recipes to helping people avoid eviction and deportation. Anti authority, horizontal structure, no divide between helpers and ppl being helped.
– crisis soon exposed pre-existing inequalities.
– practical problems : returning to work, co-optating into existing institution, becoming depoliticised
– “well meaning middle class”, not just anarchists. Mutual aid argues that minorities in power are responsible for this mass form of undignified living. Virtue in being able to look after our selves, for govts can’t. Some groups have petered out , some are on their way to becoming cooperatives, becoming bigger.
– “mutual aid gives you space to dream. If people have time, they can do amazing things.” 

Confronting the Nightmare: Covid and Women Carers in Pakistan
Furrukh Khan, Lahore University of Management Sciences

– Khan + 3 former students conducted interviews (Zoom) of college educated urban women, 22-58 yrs old, 50 hours of footage, Lahore and Karachi
– gives stats about cases and deaths — pakistan has been doing fairly well in terms of healthcare
– govt response and “smart lockdown”
– foucault’s governmentality — working through consent and coercion but using critical events to assume a greater role, becomes a guardian
– polio infrastructure
– the general “fear of death” can result in display of prejudice
– dual process model, post traumatic growth theory
– findings — women assuming primary caregiving. Self diagnosing mental health conditions.

Painting the Pandemic: Crisis and Memory in the works of Patachitrakars
Indira Chowdhury, Centre for Public History, Srishti

-in isolation : the view from her window
– the first person to check-up on her, in covid, was a patachitrakar.
– images of a patachitra showing covid and isolation. One more showing skulls, and temple+church+masjid.
– a patachitrakar’s song and patachitra showing the global nature of covid. In villages they had to learn through tv etc, about sanitizers and masks.
– in earlier pats, Ranjith showed death (tsunami, 9/11, aids) but not in this crisis — because of the scale of it. Seen the plight of migrant labourers, don’t want to compound the pain, that’s not what he wants to say. He ends his story with people recovering and coming home, taking vaccine etc.
– for ranjit time is not just linear but also cyclical puranic yugic time.
– cyclone ampan blew away half his house but his pat focuses on reconstruction. That crisis is one he has seen before, but he’s not able to cope with the destruction of corona. This is kalyug.
– so is corona kalgi? it ‘s the beginning. Too much education :: children go to school and forget how to respect their ancestors.
– drawing from past incidents to make sense of the now — not linear past but a yugic, puranic past.

Q&A

Graham Smith — to Indira: can you tell us more about the biographies of the patachitrakars?
A : same group that i worked with previously. They’re muslims but they sing from hindu puranic texts. Now they look for new texts ie tsunami etc. they’re also employed by govt for public awareness so they have songs about domestic violence, aids etc. they use veg dyes, make their own paints, have a particular way in which they’ll collect those resources.

Furrukh Khan following up — how do they sustain themselves?
A : they sell these scrolls, most of them are subsistence farmers. In covid they werent able to tend to their lands. They sell at handicraft fairs, sometimes to institutions, one of the things they hope is that some institution buys his rendition of the virus.

Siobhan Warrington: an observation, reminds her of rob perks talking about reflection in orality.
Indira : ranjit and i talk a lot, and he’s always been very reflective

Sudebi — to all: each presentation spoke about covid and orality and all but also they pointed to much larger concepts — austerity, insignificant death and hope/coping respectively. How do you be aware of yourself within that act of interpretation?
A : Silvia fisch : our research was planned longitudinal at the start, begin and then followup after lockdown, but also note how researchers evolve. Austerity : problems not just with relearning but also acquiring technology to deal w covid
Alison Atkinson-Philips  — these interviews appreciate the interviews as a chance to reflect and think about things.
A : Furrukh khan – anecdotal talks with students suddenly having their world shift, dealing groceries and insulin and things like that, their worldview changing. The married respondents did not feel that complete shift, but for the young ones there was a serious change in world view.
A : Indira – the cyclicity of time, something coming to an end, did not come up in the previous conversations surrounding tsunami pat, 9/11 pat etc.

Graham Smith : can you say more about how social class histories and gender with respect to Covid?
Furrukh : the respondents are thrust in more public spaces, but not public spaces they are familiar with.
Silvia : sample size not big enough to conclude anything, but involvement of different ethnic backgrounds, many young people, lots never involved in anything like that before

Session VIII: TOWARD ORAL HISTORIES: 3:15pm – 4:15pm 

Facilitator/Moderator: Vrunda Pathare

Indian Community Cookbooks: Archiving Food Histories
Ananya Pujari, Muskaan Pal and Khushi Gupta, FLAME University

Ananya Pujari
–Attempt at digitally preserving cook books. They are important cultural artefacts representative of national identity and history. Useful in understanding origin and interplay of diverse identities. Moreover, most of them written by women. Cookbooks therefore become important texts in documenting their undocumented lives.
–Cookbooks can be traced to 19th century, used as instruction manuals for Indian servants giving rise to Anglo-Indian cuisine. Post-Independence, large scale migration of Indians to other parts of the world, bringing in new influences. Exponential increase in cook book production, tied to growing Indian diaspora and their desire to connect to their roots. 
–Publication itself is a process of inclusion and exclusion – what gets included and what doesn’t? Caste and class are factors. Most cookbooks published in urban areas and written by upper and middle classes. Many recipes are passed down orally and therefore go undocumented. 
–Increasing nationalisation and standardisation of Indian cuisine, misrepresenting various cuisines. 
–Impact of technological change, eg. microwaves
–Digital media presents food as lifestyle choice
–Indian cook book repository documenting both oral and written recipes

Khushi Gupta
–Tangible and intangible forms of heritage to be sustained, such as by recording and mapping culture. 
—The Indian Community Cookbook Project documents community recipes across India, open access archive. Started from Tuluva and expended to include cuisines and recipes from across India, using mapping tools.
–Convenience sampling and secondary data together 
–Timeline helps understand chronology – to have a single repository for all cookbooks. 
–KG shows screenshot of timeline and explains it
–Archive – through crowdsourcing on social media and interviews. Have also included family recipes.
–Screenshot from family recipe archive of S. M. Joshua’s recipe book

Muskaan Pal
–Spatial Mapping through ArcGIS – community cookbooks post-1990s liberalisation. Relied on snowball sampling to increase our range of cookbooks. This tool aims to ask: which cuisines are more prominently featured in cookbooks and by how much?
–Project seeks to map evolution of India’s cookbook history using cultural mapping tools and accounting for intangible heritage through oral history and family recipes. 
–Limitations – limited visibility and reach on the web, dearth in cookbooks in vernacular languages, online dependent methodology and some communities cannot be spatially located eg Parsis. 

Of unearthing voices and writing histories: Exploring the oeuvre of Kalyani Dutta
Krishnendu Pal, Jadavpur University

–19th C. Bengal – intelligentsia accorded limited mobility to women to match European sensibilities
–Kalyani Dutta interacted with women within and outside her family in late 19th C and early 20th C – widows, elderly aunts, wives of important men. 
–Relationship of trust enabled these women to speak of their grief
–Works: Sitting In a Cage
–Narratives of Widows 
–Widows expected to reside in liminal state b/w being physically alive and socially dead. Often widows deprived of husband’s property. 
–Attempts at laying claims to their authority through pride and adherence to norms – recurs in these narratives documented by Dutta
–Engagement with food – widows expected to eat meagre portions of food. 
–Sexual abuse and deep-rooted trauma

Understanding the orality associated with the Temple of Jawalamukhi; a Shaktipeetha (Kangra District, Himachal Pradesh)
Asmita Vaid, Panjab University

–Focus on one legend associated with Jawalamukhi and Emperor Akbar – a famous folklore song
–Through OH – highlight perspective associated with the goddess and how it is viewed within the community
–JT – according to puranas – Shaktipeethas originate from dismemembered body parts of Sati 
–Tongue of Sati is believed to have landed at the site of Jawalamukhi temple in Kangra
–AV retells legend of Akbar and Jawalamukhi
–This legend has no historical reference but famous folk song is based on this legend
–Why is Akbar relevant? – It was during 15th C nd 16th C hills arising as important element for Mughal rule. Akbar as a ruler stands out, due to common perception of his supreme authority. The legend of Akbar seeking blessings from the goddess elevated the status of the goddess. Many Rajputs adopted Jawalamukhi goddess as family goddess. 

Q&A

Alison — to Ananya, Khushi and Muskaam: How is the website being used? Has it reached back to the communities and people who contributed?
Convenience sampling so friends and family. The response has been positive.

Indira Chowdhury: Have you explored how displaced people cook and what they cook? Eg the idea of “making do” after Partition, because you didn’t always have the material you were used to. Many refugees carried their pots and pans with them as they crossed the border, as documented in Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation
Hoping to collaborate with others who are interested in this. (Ananya)
Muskaan: When we were collating cook books, we realised there is a great dearth in community publication of food and culinary histories, and representation online, it was difficult to get in touch and gather such information. We reached out to the actors of Akhuni and we got family recipes from them. But beyond that even connecting with people from these communities, eg North East, is really difficult.

Indira (for Krishnendu): There are examples of women who do not live by the prescribed norms. Experience is one thing and the normative is another.
Krishnendu Pal: Because of certain time constraints I could not talk about the subversive potential chronicled in Kalyani Dutta’s writing. Eg erotic innuendoes in exchanges with some women Kalyani Dutta spoke to, very radical for the widow figure to indulge in. In the case of my interviews, because of the age difference between me and the women I interviewed, there is this element or notion of indulgence. There are points of subversion that often come up in the interviews.

Suggestions for cook book archives

Gauri Raje: Distinction between food histories as an experience vs food and preparation of food becoming part of the new normative of longterm migrant communities. Post-partition migrants to Scotland coming from the border areas of Punjab and up in North India – in gathering oral history a lot of the retrospective remembering of what changed in terms of cooking practices, availability of food is not necessarily looked at as a ‘making do’, maybe for a month or so, over time it begins to become part of a way the migrants talk about how they start becoming ‘Scottish’ – they start embedding them in newer ecologies. A strand of this came up in my fieldwork with displaced hill tribals in the Ukhai Dam area, the whole ecology changed, a lot of the food practices had to be subtly tweaked.

Nandin Ozai: In the Narmada, the dams have changed the fish source, the rivers go dry. Drop in variety of fish. Forest produce, roots, varieties of fruit, suddenly gone. Looking into this would make things richer. New laws around food like beef ban, suddenly how a law changes food habits of people. 

Avehi Menon: Comment that follows from Nandini. Food s hierarchical and political in India. Could oral histories be a way to document food histories that don’t occupy the space of cook books, such as Dalit cuisine, partly because they are not looked at as regional aesthetic cuisines. Collaborations with people who are already doing this. Sharmila Rege’s work for eg, the work of artist Rajshree Gudi. 

Vrunda: Annahe Annapurna Brahma – book that talks about Dalit food in Maharashtra

Indira Chowdhury (for Asmita Vaid): Mentioned a number of oral stories. We hvae been talking about that which gets passed down from one generatio to another, and the interviews we do as oral historians. 
Asmita Vaid: When I interviewed Bhojkis they claimed that Jawalamukhi is their kul-devi too, a claim that the Rajput clans claim too. Brahmins of the temple, they say it was passed down intergenerationally. 

Krishnendu’s response to Sylvia about personal motivations for doing this research: I grew up in a household with elder widows, their contribution to the making of me as a person today is immense. There was this constant tussle of power b/w married and widowed women because the majority of the work was done by the widowed women but in case of representation, such as a festival happening in someone’s name, it always happened in the name of the married women. Decisions about what food to prepare for religious occasions were taken by married women, but the labour involved in carrying out the execution of decisions was performed by widows.

Session IX: CHANGES AND PEDAGOGY: 4:30pm – 5:15pm

Facilitator/Moderator: Nidhi Kalra

Participatory Oral history as an exercise to reflect on cross-generation resilience
Elisa Sevilla, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador

–This talk part of Tomorrow’s Cities Urban Risk Hub – an interdisciplinary hub for creating safer cities for national disasters in the future
–Quito, Ecuador – exposed to several active volcanoes, built on top of an active tectonic fault. 
–Is there a role for family or intergenerational memory in resilience and how do we learn from the past to build a safer city for the future? 
–Role of communicating risk and construction of urban risk in the public space – through exhibits scheduled for last March, which could not happen due to Covid-19 Pandemic. Took the exhibit to the digital space through an interactive digital platform. 
–Focusing on high schools, giving teachers in different disciplines materials and tools to reflect on disaster risk. 
–One pedagogical exercise based on memory and resilience – students interview their parents/grandparents about past experiences and learnings from past disasters and compare them to their own experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. 
–Students reflection – people recover after disaster (life goes on)
–solidarity and working together one way to get through the experience and prepare for the future
–Experiences put in perspective through comparison with that of earlier generations (extraordinary in our lifetime but not in history)
–Identify key elements of preparedness and importance of planning
–Asking elders for stories received from their elders that helped them cope with and anticipate crisis. Exercise enables going back multiple generations. 
–Students produce reflections in different forms – written, pictorial, audio, theatre etc. 

The Crisis of Colonialism: Memories and Legacies of European Imperialism in Student OH Projects
Derek Elliott, Al Akhawayn University, Morocco

–Based on recent oral history assignment in class – interview oldest family member they can and ask them about the experience and legacy of colonialism for their family. 
–Wanted an assignment open for interpretation by students, and not be based on conventional presentations and papers, especially with the pressures of a global pandemic. 
–Enable human connection, let them forge a personal connection to historical issues through this exercise. 
–Spanish and French colonialism in Morocco officially from 1912-1956. 
–Current school curriculum focuses on role of Morocco monarchy and exile of current king’s grandfather Mohamed V who returned to lead Morocco to independence. This emphasis leads to colonialism sometimes being seen as benign. Students bring up comparisons with the colonial experience of nearby Algeria. 
–How do students born in the 21st century relate to the past?
–Student responses:
Learnt about history from interacting with a human being, a different experience from learning about history through books and documents. 
Understood how family’s life changed and how colonialism contributed to who I am today, and the need to understand the past to prepare for the future. 
2 courses (56 students): 1 video, 55 written submissions
24 noted violence of colonialism, only 9 recognized both French and Spanish imperialism, 10 narratives of development
8 mentioned famine (1940s), social life during French Resistance (1950s), most discussed both good and bad things

–Where to go from here?
–Responses reveal how little general knowledge of the colonial era is in the public consciousness.
–Use as mid term project to build upon? Use as basis for class debate or other project Pose more specific questions to focus results? Dedicate 2 weeks of course to focus on colonialism in Morocco?
–How to deal with a glowing, positive assessment of the colonial experience? Question of positionality and intersectionality, as a white male from the global North teaching a course about deconstructing Eurocentric myths about history in the global South.

Q&A

Indira Chowdhury: Both papers talking about inter-generational oral history. Trying to understand the two different projects. Elisa’s has a more focused purpose for the exercise. Did they feel the crises the older generation went through comparable to Covid? 

For Derek: Similar exercise for design students at Srishti called History at Home, bringing together object and story. 

Elisa: They saw commonalities, but earlier experiences were seen as more localised, not the whole world being affected. Idea of economic impact of diasters, and the idea of context. We are coming from an economic crisis that started a few years ago and the pandemic, and memories of previous economic and political instability were connected. 
Derek Elliott: Several examples of oral history projects especially during the pandemic

Venkat: Thanks for sharing this work, Elisa. A comment really: I thought your work and this book below might be some ways to see links between this kind of work on building resilience and also seeing how governments and infrastructure management has responded to disasters.
Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters- Megan Finn, MIT Press

Siobhan Warrington: Just an observation: These are 3rd and 4th examples I’ve come across of Oral History as a student assignment during lockdowns. Others are Czech Republic and Kenya. Something worth acknowledging. I’m sure there is also a lot of family history also going on ‘informally’ in different ways across the world at this time.

Alice Preethi: Mr. Derek, this is just a point of view. That was a very educative presentation on how documenting the oral history assignments at a personal level can provide a future platform for a more diversified theme basis of important topics or even new minor ones arising from it. I feel it’s an important step that needs to be adopted in more institutions to understand these practises better.

Silvia — for Elisa: how come the students put their experiences in the bigger historical context? Were they encouraged to?
Elisa: Encouraging history in other professions, so we had to encourage them to put their experiences in the bigger context. Experiences are comparable but they have to be put in context. One of their questions was to ask interviewee about social, economic and political context of that time. 

Furrukh Khan: Use of oral history for transmission of knowledge
Elisa: Informality, the idea that this was an informality exercise. Some students really didn’t know things about their family that they got to know through this exercise. Histories of migration, for example. Many already knew their family stories and they were proud to retell them, reinforcing those connections. 
Elisa (@Derek): I used mine as a middle term exercise, with the promise of some of the work being displayed on the digital platform, or as posters at the university or some event. I had to do some discussions on vulnerability and resilience. I did it after the exercise, not before. It was interesting to have them reflect on this after having done the exercise.

Siobhan Warrington: How can we ensure our intergenerational oral history work doesn’t reinforce the one way requirement that young must at all times respect older people? Does the work generate respect for the young from older people also? 
Elisa: Yes! I think there is a respect of older members of the family after this type of exercise. 

–Vrunda Pathare delivers vote of thanks

PUBLIC TALK  2: 5:30pm – 6:30pm
Jason Kelly, COVID-19 Oral History Project, IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, Indiana University
In conversation with Dr. Maya Dodd

MD: Introduces Jason Kelly 

JK: Oral project at IU started on March 10, 2020. Talk: practical challenges and opportunities the project has presented, theoretical concepts on performing and interpreting oral histories
–Three major projects: anthropocenes network, cultural ecologies (art interventions in cities) and the covid-19 oral history (rapid response project aimed at recording lived experiences of professional researchers and broader public) information is open access
–It creates a historic archive that provide different experiences of living through 
–Tools for individuals and communities to share their experiences before and after pandemic 
–As resource for researchers and future audiences future pandemic 
–Website – Get Involved 
–Interviewer or interviewee – don’t have experience but would like to participate – training is provided – Sharing their oral histories and uploading it in the database – All the metadata is checked and  is handed over to the journal of plague year (JPY)
–Starting the project: 
Teaching a course in public history, how to participate in the historic moment, decided to develop a project dedicated to the pandemic, one of the projects we reached out was the journal of the plague year, hold the two projects together, the covid oral history project would share the accounts with the JPY, JPY allows individuals photographs, items to their website, they are then curated by participants within JPY, rather than having a decentralised number of archives, the JPY would serve as a base, the Covid-19 project would curate the oral histories accounts, the strength of these project lie in its collaborative nature
–Challenge (1)
Irish covid-19 oral history project – the idea was to share the platform but because Ireland was in the EU and other privacy regulations – JYP was using google servers, challenges arose – because of nation-state frameworks and international regulations – two similar projects are led side by side 
–Challenge (2)
Nature of archives – reproduce power and may produce silences – who were participating? – what kind of stories were going to find its place in the archive – questions of race, class, gender etc. – passive nature of self-uploading 
Solution: JYP has ‘calls’ – focus on specific silences in the archive ; In classrooms – Embed students in already existing projects & students write reflective papers on silences in the archive  
–Challenge (3)
Concerns over what people are sharing, identifiable nature of items shared
Solutions: anonymous interviews and separate consent forms 
–Challenge (4)
Divergence in quality in of oral history interviews – working with multiple groups
Solutions: Zoom and in person trainings 
Online training modules 
–Challenge (5)
Standardizing the collection of data – Interface is user-friendly and catching as much as metadata – to what extent should the archivists shape the interpretation of the item shared (labelling, putting context etc.)
–Theoretical perspective on the project: 
When would be rapid-response over / when would the project end / are we simply focused on covid-19 or as we see the pandemic in a broader context / Not looking at covid-19 not just as a biological entity but rather a socio-cultural entity as well, it is this entanglement that defines the pandemic 
Covid-19 emerges from the anthropocene condition (the condition of global commerce , hyper engagement and transportation networks etc.) (characterised by global networks) As zoonotic disease – emerge from environmental and habitat degradation but it is because of the pre-existing anthropocene conditions that connect it to the urban populations. Not just how viruses are exchanged between humans but how we respond to the crisis (conditions of equality, inequality and the nature of diplomacy) It is in the entanglement that oral historians need to focus. 
–How long will the project last: socio-political impact will last for at least a decade. 
In the U.S., other political instances (ex: insurrection at the capitol, anti-mask crowds) also shape the pandemic –  looking at the intersection between BLM and the pandemic – focus on indianapolis – merging oral history with multi-modal exhibitions with community curators to look at racial violence and the pandemic 
The question of oral history as pedagogy – series of programmes aimed at archiving amongst a network of universities and broader public – The new humanities lab at IAHI – Hamburg University, Germany & IU – Corona Archive – Comparative work on northern germany and indianapolis 
–Expanding community engagement

Q&A

Elisa Sevilla: What are the difficulties in doing an OH project of the present? How to encourage through them a historical contextualization, to look at it not as a disruption that emerged out of nowhere, but as part of a historical process? How to curate these oral histories in a contextualized history?
JK: when we started on the project, the question of oral history of the present – (?) plague outbreak at Athens (example for exceptionalism,) – became necessary to observe and interpret, bringing together various subjects, the pandemic is not exceptionalism in the context of broader human history because the civilization has been impacted by pandemics and other trouble before 
MD: The Age of Pandemics (Chinmay Tumbe) – very little documentation of the plague, archival deficits in the history 

Siobhan: Can you say something about how we can best acknowledge or respond to the potential of a lack of representation/inclusivity of experience in university-led crowd-sourcing projects. I think you talked about the importance of partnerships with civil society organisations who might be better connected to different groups within our societies.
JK: make a long term commitment, the university’s mission should be embedded in the community, build with systems of trust, network and community partnerships, embed a reflective and critical methodological process to challenge the lack of representation, for example: Embed critical theorists to critique the project,

Elisa Sevilla: A reflection –  there exist many structural problems and the pandemic has been a kind of lens that provided a view to these problems.