by COHA President, Pavel Mücke
The 5th Conference of the Czech Oral History Association (COHA), hosted by Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University (under auspice of Dean, prof. Milan Pohl) and the Moravian Museum was held in Brno, Moravia, Czech Republic, between February 15 and 16, 2017. In more than forty papers, presented in three parallel panels, several topics from the fields of contemporary history, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, pedagogic studies and psychology were discussed. This successful event was visited by a record attendance of more than hundred participants (coming from several regions of the Czech Republic, but also from Slovakia and one from Canada/U.S.A.). Among the key note speakers can be mentioned Dr. Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, dealing with family memory studies, Prof. Michael Kilburn, presenting a paper about the politics of memory of Czech underground and Miroslav Vaněk, past-IOHA president and Honorary Czech Oral History Association President, who was re-thinking in his presentation the actual development of oral history in worldwide context. During the Evening Ceremony, which was held in the baroque palace of the Moravian Museum, in the presence of the General Director of Museum, Dr. Jiří Mitáček, the collective monograph “On the Border between Past and Present: Contemporary Perspectives of Oral History” was presented for the first time in public. In this new book (co-published by Czech Oral History Association and Ostrava University) are collected the best contributions presented during past COHA conferences and workshops since 2013.
I would like to thank the local organizers (mainly Jiří Zounek and Jana Poláková) for brilliant hosting and also all participants (especially to abroad ones) for a lot of well-prepared presentations and fruitful discussions. The next venue and locality for the 2019 conference is still unknown (it seem to be city of Olomouc, also in Moravia region), however I wish to prospect organizers and participants for such nice conference event like Brno.
