17th Jun 2019 10:00am-5:30pm
309 Edward Street
This all-day event will be an opportunity to discuss the key themes of Sean Field’s work, emerging partly from a CMNH reading group taking place over May and June (see details below). Participants who have not attended the reading group are also welcome to take part, although places are limited to 20 so it is essential that those who wish to attend register in advance.
Sean Field Reading Group
Tuesdays 5.00 pm–7.00 pm, fortnightly from 16th April–11th June
room 102, 10-11 Pavilion Parade Building, City Campus, University of Brighton
We will be reading chapters from Sean Field's book, Oral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), as well as a couple of recent papers.
16th April - Oral history and the cultural politics of post-conflict/post-apartheid memory
Reading:
'Imagining Memories: Oral Histories of Place and Displacement in Post-Apartheid Cape Town', pp1-23 of Oral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post- Apartheid South Africa.
'Memory, the TRC and the Significance of Oral History in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, 1999, available online here.
30th April - Oral history, local memory and place: Cape Town, Cape Flats, Western Cape
Reading:
'Imagining Communities: Memory, Loss and Resilience in Post-Apartheid Cape Town', pp87- 133 of Oral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
'Windermere: Squatters, Slumyards and Removals, 1920s to 1960s', in Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town (Claremont: David Philip, 2001), pp27-44.
14th May – Trauma, emotional history and the TRC
Reading:
'Beyond "Healing": Oral History, Trauma and Regeneration', pp153-179 of Oral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
‘The Politics of Disappointment: Trauma, Healing and Regeneration in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, available online here
28th May – Psychoanalysis, critical empathy and memory
Reading:
'Remembering Experience, Interpreting Memory', pp23-36, and Fragile Identities: Memory, Emotion and Coloured Residents of Windermere', pp37-51 ofOral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
‘Critical Empathy through Oral Histories after Apartheid’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 31:5 (2017), pp660-670 (DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2017.1357342).
11th June – Oral history, subjectivity, identity
Reading:
'Disappointed Men: Masculine Myths and Hybrid Identities in Windermere', pp69-79 ofOral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa.
‘Loose Bits of Shrapnel: War Stories, Photographs, and the Peculiarities of Postmemory’, The Oral History Review, 41:1 (2014), pp108–131.
All welcome – please email Fearghus Roulston (fbr11@brighton.ac.uk)to sign up for the Reading Group and a pdf of the author's close-to-final text of the book, available courtesy of Sean Field.
Professor Sean Field, one of the world's leading oral historians, will be Visiting Professor at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories, University of Brighton, from 13th to 30th June 2019. Professor Field has worked at the Department for Historical Studies in the University of Cape Town since 1997. Through his published writings, lectures and papers at international conferences and other forums, he has made a major contribution to the theory and practice of oral/life history and the politics of memory with a particular emphasis on issues of violence, loss and identity, usually in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. As coordinator of the Western Cape Oral History Project, and Director of the Centre for Popular Memory at UCT from 2001 to 2012, he has pioneered the use of oral interviews, photographs and the evidence of material sites of memory in work to create community histories of place, belonging and displacement in Cape Town, the Cape Flats and the Western Cape. He has also studied the politics of memory in post-conflict or transitional societies more broadly, and in relation to the movement of refugees within Central and Southern Africa. Prof Field's work has been centrally concerned with issues of subjectivity and experience, trauma and healing, emotion and empathy, utilising psychoanalytic as well as cultural and historical methods. His more recent interests lie in trans-generational memory, gender and family history.
