Crisis Oral History focuses on the intersection of recent events and individual or community trauma and memory in direct response to a societal crisis, including but not limited to: wars, natural disasters, repression of political, economic, or social identity, and disease.
Oral history allows us to capture the perspectives of the everyday citizen; historical records usually focus on the national context and government’s response or the stories of privileged and affluent members of society.
As a field, oral history is diverse and appeals to many academic fields. This allows the collection of history to also be diverse, centering the stories of development and identity.
The Oral History Society explains, “the development of the ‘new’ oral history in the late 1960s attract[ed] a range of diverse interests. Social scientists, archivists, and broadcasters, as well as museum and library staff, were becoming interested in the potential uses of oral history. This diversity was reflected in the development of the Oral History Society in the early 1970s. Within 20 years a growing number of practitioners were helping to develop a new range of topics that would include histories of art, science, land rights, business, and even garden design. Influenced by developments in women’s history, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, oral historians in Britain also began to explore the historical construction of identities. So, by the 1990s oral historians were engaged in black and ethnic minority histories, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender histories, and the history of medicine.”
The Oral History Society, through its activities, continues to involve a wide spectrum of individuals. While this has resulted at points in tensions between academic and community oral historians, the Society maintains a commitment to inclusiveness and a rejection of a narrow professionalization. Above all else, the Society also continues to encourage people to engage in making histories through the use of oral history. To learn more about the organization visit their website: https://www.ohs.org.uk/
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