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Inaugural Lecture

Oral History in the UK Being an oral historian: the route from the margins to the centre

Prof Joanna Bornat
This event took place on 6th September 2006
Berrill Lecture Theatre, The Open University, Walton Hall Campus, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Oral history, the investigation of the past through memory, has never been more popular. Family history, local history, the story of empire, the professions, migration, parliamentary history, science and medicine, the fire service, the stage, what we eat, buy, create, design, conflict, combat, oppression, there's no shortage of people ready to interview eye-witnesses or of people ready to tell. Audiences are world-wide, no longer local or specialist, they're global and accessible at the tap of a keyboard. It hasn't always been so. Oral history in the UK began as an organized endeavour over forty years ago in quite different technological and political circumstances. Oral historians were on the margins of academe and of society and though we railed at our exclusion, we revelled in our singularity. We were the people who enabled talk of remembered pasts, challenging and disturbing official and dominant accounts. Now we've moved from the margins to the centre, what does this mean for oral history and oral historians? Have we done our work and is it time to move on to other things, or does being in the centre offer us new and exciting challenges?

Professor Bornat will argue that while the centre is an attractive place to be, it presents problems for oral historians who hold to their original mission of disturbance and challenge. We championed people who were marginalised out of history; there are new margins created ever day, new arguments to stir up. From this new position for oral history she will point to the future while looking back at the past.
Click below to play the event (60 minutes)
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