Getting Personal: working with family stories

With Anna Sheftel

Oral historians are increasingly using their recorders closer to home, to try and understand the lives and legacies of their own families. This is often in the context of violence, migration, and diasporic experience. We study our families not just for our own benefit, but also because we know that the personal is political, and that the lives of our own parents, grandparents and ancestors can help us to make sense of broader social, cultural and political dynamics. What does it mean to do very intimate historical work and then to share that with the world? In this workshop, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges of documenting family histories, including questions of silences, interpretive authority, intersubjectivity and who has the right to tell what stories.

Anna Sheftel is Principal of the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University. She has published extensively on oral history methodology, ethics and pedagogy, with a focus on collaborative and community-engaged practices and listening to difficult stories. She is internationally recognized for these publications, most notably for Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-edited with Stacey Zembrzycki, which won the OHA’s 2014 Book Award, and for her article, “Talking and Not Talking about Violence: Challenges in Interviewing Survivors of Atrocity as Whole People,” which won the OHA’s 2019 Article Award.