Convener: Associate Professor S Field

Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme.

This option offers hands-on training in oral history research and interviewing skills and is suitable for students from a wide range of disciplines. The central focus is on the relationship between a person telling oral stories and another eliciting and listening to those stories. There is no simple road map on how to do oral history interviewing. Rather, training in oral history methodology is a learning process of how to make a series of research decisions appropriate to specific social, cultural and historical contexts. Students will learn how to do interviews on audio and video, and will explore applied theoretical approaches to oral narratives and memories. We will also explore questions of copyright, ownership, audio-visual archiving and the ways in which oral history can contribute to development practice. All students will have to complete an oral history project which could become a pilot study for an honours, master’s or doctoral dissertation.