The Department of History and the Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg invite proposals for a conference on the practice of oral history in Canada.

Oral history, including the collecting of oral tradition, has become a major research method of historians and other scholars as well as community activists and local historians in Canada. This conference seeks to bring these practitioners from various fields together to assess the state of oral history in Canada and the directions it may take in the future. Now is an important time for such an assessment for several reasons:

• Technology: Recording and archiving technology has been in a challenging transition from analog to digital for more than a decade.
• Method: Video oral history has made a few forays but seems to be marginalized despite affordable equipment.
• Theory: Despite its long-lasting research into complex issues of memory, the new debates about collective memory and commemoration seem to bypass and ignore this work. This seems to be true for the two fields of oral history and oral tradition collecting as well.

We invite students, independent researchers and professional academics to propose panels and individual papers on the above and other issues pertinent to the theory and practice of oral history. Rather than focus only on Canadian topics, we encourage presentations on topics from around the world. Topics to be explored may include, but are not restricted to:

• Oral history and oral tradition
• activism and archiving
• aboriginal oral history and tradition
• narrative and story-telling
• memory, remembering, commemoration
• gender, class, ethnicity/race, etc.
• migration, transnationalism, transculturalism, diasporic experiences
• interviewing people of different ages
• interviewer-interviewee relationships
• interviewing techniques

PROPOSALS must include the following information:

Name, institutional affiliation and department, contact information, degrees (start with the most recent and specify the discipline); recent positions and those relevant to oral history (starting with the most recent one); recent publications and those relevant to oral history; title of the presentation and panel; a 100-150 word abstract in English; a one-page curriculum vitae.

Papers of 15-20 pages (double-spaced without footnotes or bibliography) will be posted online (password-protected) several weeks before the conference. Deadline for the papers is 1 July 2004. Presenters will have 20 minutes to present their papers.

Funding is sought for assisting participants in their travel expenses. For general information about the University of Winnipeg, the Department of History or the Chair in German Canadian Studies, please consult our website (web address given below).

Please send proposals by December 31, 2004 to: Oral History Conference
Linda Gladstone
Dept. of History
University of Winnipeg
515 Portage Avenue
Winnipeg, MB
Canada R3B 2E9

For information about the conference, contact: