The Winter School is the seventh edition of the two-week advanced workshop that CPH has been organising since 2013, with each edition being on a different theme relevant to Oral History or Public History. This year, our theme is “Memory and Materiality”. It will focus on the ways in which memory and materiality work together within public history, particularly within a participatory engagement with the past.
Do people make their own pasts? What role do objects play in people’s remembrance of the past? Does the experience of the past differ from its historical reconstruction? If so, in what ways? Scholarship on memory, heritage, and oral history has enabled public historians to explore how communities remember and engage with the past as well as the ways in which that understanding interrelates with objects from the past. The task of the public historian is to engage in different ways with a broad range of publics and historical practices. Public historians have to necessarily engage with social memory, community identities, collective experiences and individual identities alongside the awareness that all these factors are in a state of constant flux. The complex field of public history, therefore, presents many challenges to its practitioners. The Winter School attempts to unravel some of these themes that have emerged in the field through readings, dialogues and discussions with scholars, archivists, museum curators and other practitioners who have worked in this area.
The Winter School will be facilitated by Dr. Indira Chowdhury, Dr. Siddhi Bhandari, and Dr. Srijan Sandip Mandal from CPH@SMI, who will be joined by:
Professor Graham Smith, Newcastle University, UK
Professor Kavita Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India
Professor Luisa Passerini, European University Institute, Italy
Dr. Faye Sayer, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Dr. Nadeem Omar Tarar, Centre for Culture and Development, Pakistan
The Winter School will also introduce participants to a number of public history initiatives in South Asia through interactive showcase sessions. These sessions will feature representatives of institutional and corporate archives, photo and object collections as well as online oral history archives. They are:
Avehi Menon, Sarmaya Arts Foundation, India
Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, Nepal Picture Library
Mofidul Hoque, Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh
Nandini Oza, Oral History Narmada, India
Radhika Hettiarachchi, Herstories, Sri Lanka
Venkat Srinivasan, Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, India
Vrunda Pathare, Godrej Archives, India
To register for the Winter School, please fill in this form: https://forms.office.com/r/2kuYhyNjri
If you have any questions about the Winter School, please do not hesitate to write to Dr. Siddhi Bhandari at siddhi.bhandari@manipal.edu or to Dr. Srijan Sandip Mandal at srijan.mandal@manipal.edu. And please do forward this invitation to anyone who might be interested in participating in the Winter School.