The Oral History and Life Stories Network is one of the 28 networks of the ESSHC. It brings together oral historians, life story researchers and practitioners who explore memory, narratives, and history. Broadly, we want to encourage papers that explore methodological questions and challenges as well as the relationship between oral histories and the construction and analysis of life stories, both in terms of processes and outcomes.
This is a thematically open Call for Papers, but we would like to stimulate some topics that may attract broader interest:
- Theoretical and methodological challenges of oral history today
- Impact of the digitization process on doing oral history and the analysis; challenges of digitization (audio and video), e.g. transcript, keywording, archiving
- Reuse of (archived) oral history materials
- Shared authority/sharing authority
- Reflections on legal issues and ethical questions in oral history
- Themes of oral history today, e.g. whose memories are collected, analyzed, and archived
- Teaching oral history and supervision of oral history projects – experiences, challenges, concepts
- Reflections on combining oral history and life story methods
- Relations of oral history to other fields (e.g. social sciences, ethnology, memory studies, etc.)
We welcome panel proposals as well as individual paper proposals. Panel proposals must be international in membership (and from different institutions). The decisive selection criterion is the quality of the proposed paper, respectively, the proposed contributions in a panel, and their coherence.
Our Network does not favor discussants. If a panel proposal includes a discussant, the panel may consist of a maximum of four speakers plus one discussant. Overall, proposed sessions can have a maximum of five papers.
The DEADLINE for the required pre-registration and upload of a paper or a session proposal at the ESSHC website is APRIL 15, 2026. Please refer to the ESSHC website for more information at https://esshc.iisg.amsterdam/en/guidelines.
Network chairs:
Anne Heimo, University of Turku, Finland, anheimo@utu.fi │ Andrea Strutz, University of Graz, Austria, andrea.strutz@uni-graz.at │ Malin Thor Tureby, Malmö University, Sweden, malin.thor@mau.se
For details, see: CALL FOR PAPERS: ORAL HISTORY AND LIFE STORIES NETWORK