OHA (United States) Annual Meeting

The annual meeting of the Oral History Association will be held from 18-21 October 2023 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States.

Oral history is the oldest form of education. For its 2023 annual meeting, the Oral History Association seeks to convene a variety of shared experiences that return the field’s consciousness to its most basic and practical roots of dialogical teaching and learning. The politics of education today are contentious, to say the least. Stories of educators being silenced have become alarmingly commonplace, and the pandemic has driven many teachers, especially secondary level, out of the classroom altogether. At the same time, however, educators have been proving their resilience and capacity for innovation. Likewise, as a field, oral history is undergoing a paradigm shift towards radical inclusivity. In this transitional moment, we hope to find new possibilities, generate new approaches, and recall and refurbish the fundamentally humanistic impulse of oral history as/and education.

The 2023 OHA meeting will provoke many generative discussions about the fundamental roles that oral history can play in educational processes, and the ways critical pedagogy can inform oral history practice. What can the spirit and methods of oral history contribute to modern-day educational endeavors, at all levels? How might a learner’s life be changed by an assignment of oral history work in college, high school, middle school, elementary school, or even for adult learners outside the classroom? How do we honor and maximize the educational potential of the oral history encounter, for both participants and audience members?

Find out more:

• Call for Proposals
• Oral History Association website