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Call for Papers ESSHC 2010 - Network Oral History and Life Stories

Evidence and Testimony in Life Story Narratives

The Oral History and Life Stories Network has become the major regular international forum for European oral history and life story researchers. The European Social Science History Conference has been held biannually since 1996. The Oral History and Life Stories network has met at each conference since 1998, and interest in it has been steadily rising. In 2004, some seventy participants gathered at the network sessions. Both in 2006 in Amsterdam, and in 2008 in Lisbon, the network hosted seventeen sessions, making Oral History and Life Stories one of the largest and most popular networks of the European Social Science Conference.

We invite proposals for the Ghent conference on 13-16 April 2010 both for individual papers and for entire sessions. Sessions can have various formats: panels, round table discussions, presentations in other media followed by discussion.

We wish to encourage reflection on the construction of testimony in life stories, the evolution of stories over time, how to discern the truth value of eyewitness accounts, and how to approach deeply autobiographical sources. We invite contributions discussing conceptual and methodological issues related to memory, evidence, and testimony, based on oral sources and/or personal accounts.

We would welcome proposals addressing the following issues:

• Formal components of narrative and their relationship to truth-telling and truth value;
• Past silences, how to study testimonies through time;
• Theory and methodology related to the construction of testimony;
• Humor/irony as an implicit way of telling the story;
• Why oral history matters;
• Teaching oral history;
• Digitalization/archiving oral history; the rights of interviewees;
• Contrasting traditional oral history and audiovisual oral history;
• Truth in oral history: whose perspective determines the truth;
• Eyewitness narratives and transitional justice;
• Rethinking personal history through narratives, the deliberate construction of the account;
• The influence of cultural constructions of identity on the life story narrative;
• Comparing interviews over time;
• Disseminating oral history: oral history in documentaries, exhibitions and on the internet;
• The media's use of oral sources;
• Using and re-using archived oral history data

Please send your proposals to both network chairs:
Nanci Adler (N.Adler@niod.knaw.nl) and Albert Lichtblau (Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at)(Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at). Upon submission, you must also pre-register on the conference website http://www.iisg.nl/esshc/ where more general conference information is available. The deadline for sending your abstract is 1 May 2009.

The Network Committee advising on the 2010 ESSHC includes:

• Nanci Adler (N.Adler@niod.knaw.nl), Network Co-Chair
• Timothy Ashplant (T.G.Ashplant@livjm.ac.uk)
• Joanna Bornat (j.bornat@open.ac.uk)
• Gerhard Botz(Pgerhard.botz@univie.ac.at)
• Ela Hornung (michaela.hornung@univie.ac.at)
• Selma Leydesdorff (s.leydesdorff@uva.nl)
• Albert Lichtblau (Albert.Lichtblau@sbg.ac.at), Network Co-Chair
• Hugo Manson (h.manson@abdn.ac.uk)
• Graham Smith (Graham.Smith@rhul.ac.uk)
• Penny Summerfield (penny.summerfield@man.ac.uk)