The 23rd IOHA Conference will be held 16-19 September, 2025 in Krakow, Poland. The theme of the conference is Re-Thinking Oral History. The conference organizers call upon oral historians worldwide to consciously rethink the idea and practice of their discipline. Full details of the conference and call for papers can be found here. The deadline for proposals is 31 July, 2024.
Participants are encouraged to address one or more of the following questions in their proposals:
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Political involvement or independence: is ethical neutrality achievable and morally correct in a polarized world?
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Methodological standards: how much does the technological development of AI challenge them?
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Healing the wounds: how far can the therapeutic role of oral history go?
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Oral history responses to human crises: what methodological and ethical problems of emergency documenting and archiving may we use?
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“Lending our ears” (Portelli): how can we provide silenced and marginalized voices access to the public discourse?
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Oral history and environmental history: what are the areas of cooperation?
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Empowering community archives: how to teach them to create their own oral histories?
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How do we balance the dominance of Western academia with the voices of the non-Western world? – agency and resources.
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Globality versus locality of oral history: how to translate local practices into internationally recognized scholarship?
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Post-coloniality: how does oral history help societies reckon with colonial pasts and assist in building post-colonial futures?
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Disseminating oral history: what new methods can we use to present interviews to our audiences?
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Multilingualism as a challenge to global oral history: how to record stories in mother tongues?
For more information about the conference, please visit https://ioha2025.conference.pl/. If you have any questions regarding the conference or call for papers, please contact ioha.krakow@gmail.com.