UBC Press Oral History at the Crossroads: Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement (Shared: Oral and Public History)

Over the span of seven years, hundreds of people displaced by mass violence told their stories to the Montreal Life Stories project. From the outset, the project’s organizers sought to develop an alternative model to traditional oral history practice, one where community members “shared authority” as equal partners. Together, they challenged long-held beliefs about how oral stories should be collected and shared. As a sustained reflection on this large-scale experiment in collaborative research, Oral History at the Crossroads has methodological and ethical implications for scholars. It also provides a contemporary model for curating public history, pushing the field in new directions. Review This book represents an important intervention in the field of oral history. It provides significant insights from a major oral history project that will have lasting influence on both refugee studies in Canada and oral history programming internationally. Author: Alexander Freund, editor of Beyond the Nation? Immigrants’ Local Lives in Transnational Cultures and co-editor of Oral History and Photography Book Description Creates a new model for how oral and public stories can be recorded and curated. From the Author Steven High is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Oral History and the co-director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. He was principal investigator of the Montreal Life Stories project. About the Author Steven High is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Oral History and the co-director of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. He was principal investigator of the Montreal Life Stories project.