scholarly journals Listening Across Difference: Oral History as Learning Landscape

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-47
Author(s):  
Steven High
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Racial Minorities ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Archival Collection ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

Oral history as a field of research, teaching, archival collection, community building or engagement, truth and reconciliation, and creative practice, emerged with the diffusion of the tape recorder in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of enormous social and political upheaval. As a result, oral history was quickly taken up by feminists, working-class and queer activists, racial minorities, and other marginalized people who sought to record the hidden stories that would otherwise be lost. This article introduces readers to the field of oral history, its methodology and ethics. Oral history is a creative practice, open to adaptation and experimentation. As it is a place of listening across difference, oral history interviewing presents itself as a unique learning landscape. Several pedagogical examples are also shared.

“This Room is Yours, Personal!”: The Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Decoration Expertise in the Bedrooms of America’s Teens, 1900–1985

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-129
Author(s):  
Jason Reid
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Room Design ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This article also examines how the decline of teen-oriented room décor expertise reflected significant changes in the way gender and class influenced teen room culture during the tail end of the Cold War. Earlier teen décor strategies were often aimed towards affluent women; by contrast, the child-centric, do-it-yourself approach, as an informal, inexpensive alternative, was better suited to grant boys and working class teens from both sexes a greater role in the room design discourse. This article evaluates how middle-class home décor experts during the early decades of the twentieth century re-envisioned the teen bedroom as a space that was to be designed and maintained almost exclusively by teens rather than parents. However, many of the experts who formulated this advice would eventually become victims of their own success. By the 1960s and 1970s, teens were expected to have near total control over their bedrooms, which, in turn, challenged the validity of top-down forms of expertise.

Dual Powers, Class Compositions, and the Venezuelan People

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffery R. Webber
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Political Development ◽  
The People ◽  
Analytical Imprecision ◽  
Urban Guerrillas ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Dual Power

George Ciccariello-Maher’sWe Created Chávezis the most important book available in English proposing an anti-capitalist framework for understanding the Bolivarian process in contemporary Venezuela, as well as its historical backdrop dating back to 1958. The book contains within it a laudable critique of Eurocentrism and a masterful combination of oral history, ethnography, and theoretical sophistication. It reveals with unusual clarity and insight the multiplicity of popular movements that allowed for Hugo Chávez’s eventual ascension to presidential office in the late 1990s.We Created Chávezhas set a new scholarly bar for social histories of the Bolivarian process and demands serious engagement by Marxists. As a first attempt at such engagement, this paper reveals some critical theoretical and sociological flaws in the text and other areas of analytical imprecision. Divided into theoretical and historical parts, it unpacks some of the strengths and weaknesses by moving from the abstract to the concrete. The intervention begins with concepts – the mutually determining dialectic between Chávez and social movements; ‘the people’; and ‘dual power’. From here, it grounds these concepts, and Ciccariello-Maher’s use of them, in various themes and movements across specific historical periods of Venezuelan political development – the rural guerrillas of the 1960s, the urban guerrillas of the 1970s, the new urban socio-political formations of the 1980s, Afro-Indigenous struggles in the Bolivarian process, and formal and informal working-class transformations since the onset of neoliberalism and its present contestation in the Venezuelan context.

Fonds of Agricultural Cooperatives in Međimurje and Koprivnička podravina after 1945

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-196
Author(s):  
Jasna Požgan ◽  
◽  
Ivana Posedi ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Agricultural Production ◽  
The State ◽  
Large Impact ◽  
Agricultural Cooperatives ◽  
Archival Collection ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
State Archives ◽  
The 1960S

The article deals with issues of agricultural cooperatives in the regions of Međimurje and Koprivnička Podravina between 1945 and 1953, and their reorganisation. The reorganisation itself had a large impact on creation of the archival collection of the agricultural cooperatives. Agricultural cooperatives were established in 1945 and in the 1950s and were active through the 1960s when they were abolished. Their records were acquired by the State Archives in Varaždin during the 1960s and 1970s. While about 30 archival fonds of agricultural cooperatives are preserved in the State Archives for Međimurje, only a few are preserved in the State Archives in Varaždin, Collective Center Koprivnica. The importance of such fonds lies in the fact that records provide information about agricultural production in a certain territory and information about its management.

From Syndicalism to Seattle: Class and the Politics of Identity

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Verity Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Corporate Globalization ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Raymond Williams ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
The 1960S

In the first half of the twentieth century the labor movement promoted the notion of separate working-class values and interests—evident for example in American and European syndicalism, British interwar Communism and Australian interwar Laborism—and was thus identifiable as a social movement. Like the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this prewar identity politics successfully mobilized imagined political communities. By contrast, the retreat from emphasis on class difference and the turn to “equality of opportunity” politics, which Raymond Williams identified at midcentury and warned against, demobilized and weakened the labor movement. With class-based inequalities increasing from the 1970s, the decline of working-class identity politics ensured that the discrepancy between the objective importance of class and its subjective significance became especially marked. However, a newly forged identity politics of the world's economically exploited has recently reemerged in the movement against corporate globalization. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat and resurgence of class identity politics.

Music, the Fête de l’Humanité, and Demographic Change in Post-War France

Red Strains ◽  
2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
Public Outreach ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines music's role in the Fête de l'Humanité, an annual festival organized by L'Humanité, the French Communist Party's principal organ. Beyond generating revenue and mobilizing support for the Party, the Fête has long served an important ritual function, fostering a sense of camaraderie among participants. Music has proven particularly effective in this regard, offering a medium through which one's membership in an imagined (communist) community could be experienced. The chapter focuses on the Fête's transformation during the 1960s and 1970s, a period that saw the Party struggle to broaden its electoral appeal beyond its working-class base. By expanding the range of musics featured at the event, its organizers sought to address an increasingly diverse electorate. Yet the Party's reliance on the Fête as an instrument of public outreach proved problematic, given that the image of inclusiveness it projected masked rather than resolved the Party's long-term demographic difficulties.

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