The panel will look at issues concerning both oral documentation and
visual representation; concerning the archiving of both sorts of material
and the ownership and accessibility of the archive; concerning the relationship
of the archive to social agency and change; and concerning the mediation
of memory in the material created and archived. The empirical bases
of the discussion – though only its starting point – are
the major, recently completed and archived, Lives in the [North
Sea] Oil Industry Oral-history Project, and the ongoing Oil Lives Documentary
Photography Project, at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
In the main social centres of the global economy today, an uncritical
visual culture predominates, often to the detriment both of the voice
and of critical thought about both visual and oral documentation. Crucial
to overcoming this is a critical approach to how and why material is
gathered, placed on permanent record and made available for use both
within, and particularly outside, the academy.
Oral history, over the past generation or two, has become an increasingly
practised academic discipline and an internationally popular community
activity. It has attracted some major theoretical discussion, but its
methods and approaches have arguably not undergone the same rigorously
critical debate that has attended the almost contemporaneous evolution
of documentary photography.
The panel will aim to promote discussion about what the practitioners
of oral and photographic documentation can learn from each other, and
about how archives can inform social criticism, and be more efficient
in informing the agents of humanist and progressive social change.
