OHA Biennial Conference 2022

Welcome

Oral History Tasmania and Oral History Australia, in partnership with the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania and Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, welcome delegates to the rescheduled 2022 biennial conference in the island jewel of Tasmania.

Oral historians, in a variety of guises and combining age-old listening skills with dazzling new technologies, record intimate stories and create challenging histories. Our conference welcomes participants who have decades of experience or none.

The title Oral History in Troubling Times: Opportunities and Challenges reflects the current era of uncertainty amid a global pandemic and extreme occurrences of drought, bushfire and floods.

The conference will be held on Friday 14, Saturday 15 and the morning of Sunday 16 October at the Tramsheds Function Centre in historic Launceston, Tasmania. Oral history training workshops will be scheduled on Thursday 13 October, and there will be post-conference tours on the afternoon of Sunday 16 October.

Conference theme

The conference theme invites reflections on the challenges and issues of undertaking oral history in troubling times, and to consider how oral history can illuminate the lived experience of troubling times both in the past and in our contemporary world. Through oral history recordings, we hear the intimate stories of everyday lives, and we create histories that challenge orthodoxy and speak truth to power. Oral history drills beneath the big histories of state, society, and politics. It illuminates ordinary people’s extraordinary lives and the ways in which people deal with the troubles of their lives and of our world.