Deadline extended to February 2, 2024
The Southwest Oral History Association promotes an ever-shifting place and people-making storytelling capacity throughout time and across intergenerational consciousness. Through history and memory, we unearth and combat repressive settler ideologies. Just as both roots and branches strenghthen a tree, stories, memories and reflection center us in history while seeking new ideas between contemporary and future generations.
This conference seeks to expand on these sentiments to activate both the individual and collective histories we share and those we become a part of when we engage with oral history work. Remembering that all histories are shared and distinct in some way is key. Acknowledging the particular ancestral and cultural forms of knowledge passed down through storytelling cultivates such distinctions. At the same time, we can share in understanding the richness of these practices while working to honor them and learn from each other. We help tend to the sprouts cultivated from oral histories, guiding their growth across generations, political realms, and social circles to generate cultural wealth and guide us towards liberations rooted in racial justice and solidarities.
This Call for Papers asks you to consider how oral history practices:
- Expand our capacities to connect and learn from each other
- Help us learn from stories and memories constantly suppressed in a society built upon racial, ethnic, geographical and sexual colonization
- Activate and strengthen tools for contemporary organizing across age, politics, cultures, and places to create equitable educational, political, and economic structures
- Motivate social engagement toward equity for all in the present time
- Encourage us to imagine alternative pasts and envision radical futures
We invite independent oral historians, university-affiliated scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, community members, and others to submit a proposal. Proposals from interdisciplinary fields (such as American studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, musicology and critical dance theory, media and cultural studies, and education) along with traditional fields (such as history, anthropology, and sociology) are welcomed and should include clear evidence of oral history research and/or offer innovative insights on methodologies and practices. Please consider submitting an abstract that includes, but is not limited to:
- Community-based methodologies
- Oral histories as repair work/reparative archives
- Intersectional justice frameworks
- Cross-collaborative memory work
- Storywork/storytelling
- Digital humanities
- Decolonization and collective healing
To review submissions requirements and submit a proposal visit: https://forms.gle/rW6WZQjVxPbKGCHe9. Direct all additional inquiries to soha@unlv.edu.
