The Challenge of Oral History to Environmental History

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Williams ◽  
Mark Riley
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Environmental Practices ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Colonial Archives ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Key Interventions

Oral history has much to offer environmental history, yet the possibilities and promises of oral history remain underutilised in environmental history and environmental studies more broadly. Through a reflection on work in environmental history and associated disciplines, this paper presents a case for the strength and versatility of oral history as a key source for environmental history, while reflecting on questions of its reliability and scope. We identify three major insights provided by environmental oral history: into environmental knowledge, practices and power. We argue that, rather than being a weakness, the (inter)subjective and experiential dimensions of oral accounts provide a rich source for situating and interrogating environmental practices, meanings, and power relations. Oral history, moreover, provides a counterweight to a reliance on colonial archives and top-down environmental accounts, and can facilitate a renewal - and deepening - of the radical roots of environmental history. Furthermore, as a research practice, oral history is a promising means of expanding the participatory and grassroots engagement of environmental history. By decentring environmental expertise and eroding the boundaries (both fictive and real) of environmental knowledge production, oral environmental histories can provide key interventions in pursuit of a more just, sustainable world.

scholarly journals Mining, Waste and Environmental Thought on the Central African Copperbelt, 1950–2000

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iva Peša
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Mining Industry ◽  
Environmental Knowledge ◽  
Environmental Aspects ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Central African Copperbelt ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Forestry Policies

Since the early twentieth century, the copper-mining industry on the Zambian and Congolese Copperbelt has moved millions of tonnes of earth and dramatically reshaped the landscape. Nonetheless, mining companies, governments and even residents largely overlooked the adverse environmental aspects of mining until the early 1990s. By scrutinising environmental knowledge production on the Central African Copperbelt from the 1950s until the late 1990s, particularly regarding notions of ‘waste’, this article problematises the silencing of the environmental impacts of mining. To make the environmental history of the Copperbelt visible, this article examines forestry policies, medical services and environmental protests. Moreover, by historically tracing the emergence of environmental consciousness, it contextualises the sudden ‘discovery’ of pollution in the 1990s as a local and (inter)national phenomenon. Drawing on rare archival and oral history sources, it provides one of the first cross-border environmental histories of the Central African Copperbelt.

Transdisciplinary Research and Aboriginal Knowledge

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 78-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Christie
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Transdisciplinary Research ◽  
Indigenous Research ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
The University

AbstractIndigenous academic researchers are involved in Indigenist, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, all of which present problems and opportunities for Indigenous knowledge traditions. Transdisciplinary research is different from interdisciplinary research because it moves beyond the disciplinarity of the university and takes into account knowledge practices which the university will never fully understand. Indigenous knowledge traditions resist definition from a Western academic perspective - there are Indigenous knowledge practices which will never engage with the academy, just as there are some branches of the academy which will never acknowledge Indigenous knowledge practices. In this paper I present the story of my own non-Indigenous perspective on Indigenous research and what happens to it in a university. I am not concerned here with the knowledge production work Aboriginal people do in their own ways and contexts for their own purposes, but rather turn my attention to some of the issues which emerge when transdisciplinary research practice involves Australian Indigenous communities.

Invocations of Indigeneity in the Colonial Red/White/Black Triad

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-158
Author(s):  
Carsten Junker
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
The Enlightenment

AbstractThis essay takes as its assumptive backdrop the “Red/White/Black demographic triad” in the sense of Stam and Shohat that resulted from the European colonial conquest and settlement of, and the transatlantic enslavement of Africans in, the Americas. It homes in on the ambivalent functions and effects of different evocations of Indigeneity in early abolitionist discourse, considering this very discourse as a specific strand of settler colonial knowledge production during the era of the Enlightenment. While Euro-American abolitionists around 1800 centrally and critically focused on relations between the positions marked by “Black” and “White,” they also made recourse to the position of “Red.” Paradigmatic readings highlight that abolitionists mobilized Red as a trope in contradictory ways according to their argumentative needs, substantiating the hegemonic character of White self-referential knowledge practices in the early US republic and abetting the justification of settler colonialism.

scholarly journals Activist Research Practice: Exploring Research and Knowledge Production for Social Action

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aziz Choudry
Keyword(s):  
Social Action ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Informal Networks ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Knowledge Practice ◽  
A Current

Research is a major aspect and fundamental component of many social struggles and movements for change. Understanding social movement networks as significant sites of knowledge production, this article situates and discusses processes and practice of activist research produced outside of academia in these milieus in the broader context of the ‘knowledge-practice’ of social movements. In dialogue with scholarly literature on activist research, it draws from the author’s work as an activist researcher, and a current study of small activist research non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with examples from movement research on transnational corporate power and resistance to capitalist globalization.. It explicates research processes arising from, and embedded in, relationships and dialogue with other activists and organizations that develop through collaboration in formal and informal networks; it contends that building relationships is central to effective activist research practice. In addition to examining how activist researchers practice, understand and validate their research, this paper also shows how this knowledge is constructed, disseminated and mobilized as a tool for effective social action/organizing.

Reflections on the Public Interpretation of Regional Environmental History In Western Pennsylvania

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Chris J. Magoc
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Industrial Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Interpretation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Natural Resource Extraction ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Western Pennsylvania

This essay attempts to counter the scarcity of efforts to address issues of natural resource extraction and environmental exploitation in public history forums. Focused on western Pennsylvania, it argues that the history of industrial development and its deleterious environmental impacts demands a regional vision that not only frames these stories within the ideological and economic context of the past, but also challenges residents and visitors to consider this history in light of the related environmental concerns of our own time. The essay explores some of the difficult issues faced by public historians and practitioners as they seek to produce public environmental histories that do not elude opportunities to link past and present in meaningful ways.

An Essay on Evidence and Authority

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-224
Author(s):  
Wesley C. Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Public Access ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Entire Nation

Movements themselves are important sites of knowledge production. They have the potential to illuminate how young people, often under 25 years old, shape the entire nation for the better. Their history is our public patrimony, one that should not be held hostage by bureaucratic restrictions that universities and archives often follow. Public access to creativity and memory, not reserved or made secret, has the potential to open up gatekeeping so that scholars and archivists are not the center of reference for knowledge production. This essay examines topics of extractive versus collaborative scholarship, oral history methodologies, and documentary epistemologies to address two questions: Who gets to tell the story? What counts as historical evidence? These are deceptively simple questions and so vital to knowledge production that this essay at the end of the book addresses them more thoroughly. Such inquiries lead to thornier issues underneath: who gets to establish what does and does not “count” as documentary evidence on freedom movements, and thus what is left in the archive for future generations of civic actors to build on?

Event, Process and Pulse: Resituating Floods in Environmental Histories of South Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan D'Souza
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Livelihood Strategies ◽  
Perceptual Shift ◽  
Environmental Histories ◽  
Geomorphological Processes ◽  
Conceptual Shift ◽  
Complex Relationships

The notion of the flood in South Asia is no longer solely characterised as the archetypal natural disaster. This perceptual shift, as this article will point out, draws from a conceptual shift within the field of environmental histories of South Asia. In the course of exploring and debating ideas about environmental change, environmental historians have drastically reconsidered the role and impacts of flooding in South Asia through three distinct narrative frameworks: (i) extreme hydraulic events; (ii) geomorphological process; and (iii) biological pulses. Environmental history as a field has thus helped to flesh out and radically revise our understanding of flooding, which has changed from previously being seen as an ahistorical calamitous event to instead providing contexts for revealing complex relationships between geomorphological processes, biological pulses and livelihood strategies. The notion of the flood in South Asia, consequently, is now acknowledged as an ecological force that is mediated by social, cultural and political interventions rather than exclusively borne out as an effect of nature.

scholarly journals Activist ESD Pedagogies and the End of Critique: An Edu/Poetic Attempt to Bring in the Missing Child—Becoming Child

2020 ◽  
pp. 107780042097874
Author(s):  
Anne Beate Reinertsen
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Collective Responsibility ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Assessment Practices ◽  
Knowledge Practices ◽  
Affective Processes ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Zero Points

The idea of this article is to interrogate what I conceive of as an onto-epistemic acceleration and knowledge production spoken by life. Immanent knowledge practices for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Love, care, learning, and collective responsibility transmigrating throughout the aeons of time. It is an attempt to write planetary differential Activist Pedagogies and Life Sciences: experimentations and explorations of putting parts of components together, reaching into the future, playing toward an interest. It is a nonlinear, mannerist, and poetic approach to education, learning and play, research, and pedagogical practices of critique. An approach and style possibilizing and opening up for affective becomings in which ongoing processes are vitalist parts of ontological change. I work with thinkable categories as they disappear, collaboratively linked to a natural web of human and more-than-human agents. It implies a de-facto end of critique or a normalizing of judgment and/or our assessment practices: a Deleuzian clinical practice. Counting myself in and staying accountable to my immanent situatedness, to the child. Processes seen as zero points in action only graspable in hindsight, hence always unpredictable. Affective processes bring concepts into play and seek to continue keeping them in play. Concepts are thus always performative and methodological, inherently experimental, and open to yet-unknown territories of thought. I speak of happenings in language. Thinking with, through, and beyond concepts involves developing conceptual foci while also, and at the same time, designing for debate. I ask, how to continue not knowing what is right or wrong even in times of crisis?

In-between practice: working in the ‘thirdspace’ of sensory and multimodal methodology

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hurdley ◽  
Bella Dicks
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Mixed Methods Study ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Sensory Ethnography ◽  
New Space

This article discusses how emergent sensory and multimodal methodologies can work in interaction to produce innovative social enquiry. A juxtaposition of two research projects — an ethnography of corridors and a mixed methods study of multimodal authoring and ‘reading’ practices — opened up this encounter. Sensory ethnography within social research methods aims to create empathetic, experiential ways of knowing participants’ and researchers’ worlds. The linguistic field of multimodality offers a rather different framework for research attending to the visual, material and acoustic textures of participants’ interactions. While both these approaches address the multidimensional character of social worlds, the ‘sensory turn’ centres the sensuous, bodied person — participant, researcher and audience/reader — as the ‘place’ for intimate, affective forms of knowing. In contrast, multimodal knowledge production is premised on multiple analytic gaps — between modes and media, participants and materials, recording and representation. Eliciting the tensions between sensorial closeness and modal distances offers a new space for reflexive research practice and multiple ways of knowing social worlds.

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