Location: Utrecht, Drift 25, room 2.06
Date and time: Friday 23 January, from 14:30 (doors open 14:15) to 16:30, followed by drinks
Registration: Please register at [email protected] to help us plan the catering
The Oral History Network of the Huizinga Institute organizes an exciting gathering in which the practices and reflections in Oral History, Transitional Justice, and Memory Studies come together around an exploration of The Multivoiced Archive.
Nicole Immler, Rosa Mul, Leah Niederhausen, University of Humanistic Studies (UHS), Utrecht will tell us more about their Multivoiced experiment to rethink the oral history archive: how to get beyond an academic depository, towards critical/productive dialogue? Can connecting the oral (hi)stories of different victimized groups and their claims to recognition contribute to a more structural approach to repair and justice? Can the oral history archive become a reparatory archive? And if so, how? Built in the context of the Vici-NWO project ‘Dialogics of Justice’ (2020-2025), they utilize the concept of multivoicedness to display and question the resonance between different sorts of injustices and their overarching structures.
In particular, they will discuss some examples from a recent collaboration with a community archive in Namibia and the relationship between oral history archives and Transitional Justice. Questions we particular puzzle with, are: How to display “unheard voices” in a way that people retain their multivoicedness? How to archive data in a way that makes the relations between different experiences of violence and injustices visible? How can materiality facilitate multivoicedness?
Students, teachers, heritage specialists, and anyone else who feels concerned by these issues are warmly invited to join the discussion.
About the speakers:
Nicole Immler is professor of Historical Memory and Transformative Justice at the University of Humanistic Studies (UHS), linking in her work History, Transitional Justice, Memory Studies, and Oral History. She is the principal investigator of the ‘Dialogics of Justice’ (2020-2025) project: assessing recognition and reparation processes for historical injustices. (Recent publication: The Multivoiced Archive, in: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict.)
Rosa Mul is project assistant for the Dialogics of Justice project, responsible for managing and collecting data for the Multivoiced Archive. She specializes in the dynamics of heritage making and the method of ‘emotion networking’.
Leah Niederhausen conducts PhD research at the UHS into the restitution of colonial archives, focusing on historical memories, narratives, and justice. At the moment, Leah works on a collaborative oral history and community archiving project in Namibia. She is the coordinator of the Huizinga’s RMA/PhD Council