Oral History at the Crossroads

Creates a new model for how oral and public stories can be recorded and curated.

Drawing on a collaborative research project, this book provides an alternative model for how oral and public histories should be recorded and curated.

Over the span of seven years, hundreds of people displaced by mass violence told their stories to the Montreal Life Stories project. From the outset, the project’s organizers sought to develop an alternative model to traditional oral history practice, one where community members “shared authority” as equal partners. Together, they challenged long-held beliefs about how oral stories should be collected and shared. As a sustained reflection on this large-scale experiment in collaborative research, Oral History at the Crossroads has methodological and ethical implications for scholars. It also provides a contemporary model for curating public history, pushing the field in new directions.