Theme:  Moving Stories

The Oral History Association invites proposals for papers and presentations for its 2021 annual meeting to be held October 13-17, 2021 virtually, around the world, and in Cincinnati, Ohio.

For this conference, we invite you to reflect on the idea of movement in expansive terms from the geographical to the technological to the political. In 2020 we saw sudden and massive shifts in how we move physically around the world. Many of us moved much less. At the same time, we saw rapid changes in social and cultural life and an effervescence of social movements.

Oral History has become an international movement in historical research. Our practice has long been used to document the movement(s) of people and of ideas. And at the heart of our work, we are midwives to meaning making in the processes of remembering. We move memories from the past to the present to promote their reverberations in the future.

The 2021 conference highlights the many ways that oral history moves stories, ideas and memories. The Program Committee is interested in proposals that consider how stories move through generations, communities, and geographies; what stories get told about periods of movement, transition and stillness; stories of migration and transition across time, space and bodies; how the movement of memory shapes the stories groups of people tell about themselves; the movement of oral history across disciplines and mediums; and how oral history utilizes the movement of narratives towards transformative social change. We are also interested in how oral history is used to document these movements.