Concordia Journal Home > Archives > October 25, 2007 issue >

Recording survivors 

By Karen Herland

Montrealers who have come from areas of violent conflict will be able to record their stories and have them preserved through a five-year, $ 1-million project funded by a national program called CURA, the Community-University Research Alliances.

Steven High will serve as principal investigator for the project. It will be housed in the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, which High was instrumental in creating.

Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations developed as a way to build on the History Department’s strengths in oral history and genocide studies through Frank Chalk’s Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies.

This is Concordia’s first CURA project, and has the potential to promote healing in divided communities and a greater understanding of the impact human rights violations have on the lives of those affected.

“The CURA program is ideal, because it reflects our emphasis on shared authority. Traditional history puts distance between the subject and the researcher,” High said. Oral history breaks down those categories by combining a researcher’s interview training with the lived experience and storytelling ability of the subject.

Life Stories incorporates many perspectives, both academic and social. Eighteen partners represent community groups and projects in Montreal. The other 22 partners are academic, coming from history, sociology, anthropology, political science, theatre, applied human sciences, cultural psychiatry, religion and communications.

Governance is equally shared between the academics and the community partners. Meetings occur on evenings and weekends to accommodate community partners’ day jobs. Everyone involved in the project, from community representatives to technicians and students, is expected to participate in the interviewing process.

Biweekly meetings will take place to allow those who have recently conducted interviews to debrief. Psychological support will also be available for interviewers who find the material challenging and for those who share their stories.

“When you actually conduct an interview, you feel it in your chest,” High said.
The project is organized around seven working groups. Four focus on cultural communities: Jewish, Haitian, Cambodian and the African Great Lakes region.

“The inter-cultural aspect is really unique. The project allows cultural communities to talk to each other. Rwandan community leaders are interested in how the Jewish community has remembered and commemorated the Holocaust,” High said.

SSHRC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, funded 12 other CURA projects across the country from a field of 96 applications. SSHRC officials praised the Life Stories project’s unique cross-cultural approach and active partnership model.

The project’s other three working groups are concerned with how the material collected can be shared. One group focuses on filmmaking, another on performance, and one investigates how to adapt the material for pedagogical use.

The intention is to conduct interviews with about 600 people in Montreal, in some cases several times. High underscored the importance of grounding the historical perspective in the here and now. “Now they are part of Montreal and Canada’s history,” High said. “If you study Montreal, you study the world.”

The material will be available within the participating cultural centres’ collections, as well as through the Centre for Oral History.

Partner organizations are providing contacts, resources, space and other support for the project. Concordia is also contributing $140,000, including two $8,000 entrance awards for graduate students who will participate in the project.

With the funding in place, the focus shifts to developing practices for training interviewers. “Some of the partners have been involved in discussions for two years,” High said. “They’re ready to go interview.”

Life Stories will be officially launched at an event organized by the project’s three local Cambodian partner organizations on Oct. 28. For a complete list of partner organizations, click here. For more on the project, go to: artsandscience1.concordia.ca/history/cohr1/CURA/TheProject.html