New workshop series on ‘Creative Storytelling and Oral History’
We are a group of Oxford University historians and community-based heritage and health practitioners. We created this series to connect and reflect with each other, and to share our practice of oral history and interest in creative storytelling with our students, colleagues, and the wider public.
In this series, we will explore the relationships between oral history and creative storytelling. Oral history could not exist without storytelling. Oral histories are always full of stories, often stories that have been handed down, passed around, and are shaped by communities. The practice of oral history is creative and relational -- in interviews we make narratives together with our interviewees. And as we seek to narrate oral histories, creative storytelling becomes a crucial tool in any oral historian’s toolbox. Yet academic oral history has often defined itself in contrast to storytelling and to oral traditions. But it is not a one-way street. Academic research deeply informs and has the potential to amplify stories told by placing them within historical contexts and social structures that shaped them.
In December 2024, the organising team is hosting a two-part creative storytelling workshop in Oxford, bringing together artists, researchers, and practitioners to explore core tensions in the practice of oral history through the creation of narrative art in a range of genres and forms, including creative and life writing, sequential art narration (graphic narratives), performance and film.
For our students we are organising several oral history workshops throughout the academic year 2024/25. The first workshop took place in Michaelmas 2024 and covered oral history theory, method and practice. The second workshop will focus on helping students with their own projects and providing feedback on interview design and techniques.
The series will culminate in an oral history symposium at the Faculty of History in Trinity Term 2025. For more information, please contact: suzan.kalayci@history.ox.ac.uk
Creative Storytelling and Oral History is a new workshop series funded by the John Fell Fund and hosted by the Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide. Organising partners are Community History, Everyday Muslim Heritage and Archive Initiative, Oxford Health Histories.
