March 6: Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Authority in Practice in Project-Based Research

Thursday, March 6, 2014

509 Knox Hall, 606 W. 122nd St.

6-8PM

Co-sponsor: Institute for the Study of Human Rights 

For the past seven years, Steven High has been principal investigator of the Montreal Life Stories project (www.lifestoriesmontreal.ca ), a major community-university research alliance recording the life stories of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide and other human rights violations. These stories were then integrated into online digital stories, radio programming, audio walks, art and museum exhibitions, animated film, pedagogical materials, and so on. This talk will reflect on the ways in which the project sought to extend the notion of “sharing authority” from the interview outward to subsequent stages of the research process. As we all know, who is in the conversation matters.

Steven High is Canada Research Chair in Oral History and serves as co-director of Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. He is the author of a number of books and articles that reflect on oral history methodology and ethics in an era of multi-media authorship and collaborative practice. Most recently, he has co-edited with Ted Little and Ry Duong, Remembering Mass Violence: Oral History, New Media and Performance (to be released in December 2013) and a monograph entitled Oral History at the Crossroads: Working with Survivors of War and Genocide (to be released in March or April 2014).

This event is free and open to the public and is part of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series.