Oral History at the Crossroads

Book excerpt: How do we engage difficult histories and the experiences of new immigrants displaced by war, genocide, and human rights violations? This book reconfigures the conventional relationship between those who have sought refuge and rebuilt their lives and those who seek to record, understand, and transmit these life stories. It offers an alternative model to traditional research practices based on the idea of shared authority, whereby communities become partners in the research. Drawing on the collaborative Montreal Life Stories project, this book has methodological and ethical implications for scholars of oral history, collaborative research, public history and memory studies, and refugee studies.