Oral History Workshop: Engaging with Stories

Northwestern Ontario Archivists' Association presents: Oral History Workshop: Engaging with Stories

Presented by: Stacey Zembrzycki

November 1, 2:00-4:00 pm, Mary J. L. Black Library, Thunder Bay No cost; RSVP to sjanes@thunderbay.ca

The stories that people tell matter. They matter for what they reveal about the past and for how they connect us to our families, friends, and communities. The discipline of oral history enables us to give a voice to all of these stories. In this 2-hour workshop, participants will receive basic training in oral history interviewing, ethics, listening, and project design. No prior experience is necessary; everyone can be an oral historian.

Stacey Zembrzycki is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University. An award-winning modern Canadian oral and public historian of ethnic, immigrant, and refugee experience, she is the author of According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community (UBC Press, 2014) and its accompanying website: www.sudburyukrainians.ca, and is co-editor of Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Zembrzycki’s current SSHRC funded project, Mining Immigrant Bodies, uses oral history to explore the connections between mining, health, and the environment and their impact on postwar immigrant communities in Sudbury, Ontario. She is also completing a book entitled Chaperoning Survivors: Telling Holocaust Stories on the March of the Living, which uses multiple, life story oral history interviews to understand how five Montreal Holocaust survivor.