CMNH Oral History Workshop with Professor Sean Field: On Working with Transcripts

This workshop is an opportunity to explore with Professor Sean Field some of the methodological challenges of working with oral history interviews. It will provide a space for reflective discussion and consider issues of translation, interpretation, and intersubjectivity. Attendees are invited to contribute a brief extract (roughly a page) of an interview transcript relevant to their research, and identify specific challenges they have faced in its analysis. These will be circulated in advance to all participants and a number of them will be selected for collective consideration in the workshop. Sean will open the discussion with some reflections on interview challenges faced in his own work. Those who wish to do so should send their transcript to Lucy Newby, l.newby@brighton.ac.uk. Places are limited to 15 people so please register in advance. 

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.