47th Annual Conference of the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI)
September 7 – 10, 2016
* * * Call for Papers * * *
Heritage of Social Movements in a Global Perspective: Collection and Helsinki, Finland Preservation of Sources
While we live in the post-digital digital age, and digital has become the norm in memory institutions by now, social history curators, often the ultimate guardians of the unsolicited past still face the same questions of collecting, preserving the materials of labour and social movements. This multifaceted heritage is not only endangered by obsolete media, fast changing technologies and limited digital preservation capacities, but its transnational and hybrid nature offers the utmost challenge of consolidating and reconnecting documentary legacies around the globe. As the definition of historical resources has extended to new categories such as digital, digitized collections or so-called Intangible Cultural History as proposed and practiced by UNESCO, including oral traditions, social practices and craft skills the global perspective raises new problems on the conditions of storing and preserving in the Global South: warm and humid climate, or the often rather limited access to expensive digital infrastructures increases the gap between professional benchmarking and praxis driven solutions by social history curators working in the field.
At the 47th Annual IALHI Conference we will discuss the many different aspects of preserving the legacies of the past, in addition to collecting, recording, acquiring social history documentation and the changing way in which we do this:
- Paper issues remain: what emerging strategies exist to preserve analogue material long term, especially in the regions with high humidity?
- How can we authenticate testimonies of the past? How should oral history interviews be conducted? What kind of ethical issues need to be addressed during the interviewing process and during the reuse of the material? In general, how can we address the ephemeral nature of audiovisual materials documenting social memory?
- What kind of challenges are there in documenting and adapting new formats and media in a digital environment?
- How to deal with social media as a specific source of political and social communication? What are the best practices to preserve data on social media platforms, user generated content and crowdsourcing data?
- What about immaterial cultural artefacts like the songs, traditions or practices of the labour movement all over the world?
- What types of social history collections are endangered by their obsolete media?
We as IALHI are also interested in exploring more general questions:
- What are the unintended consequences of pervasive digital media on research?
- What are the effects of technology dependency on access to information and creation of knowledge?
We hope to receive proposals for papers from all over the world and especially from southern regions.
Submissions must include:
- an abstract (300 words)
- a biographical note (200 words)
- full postal and e-mail address
Please send your proposals to Työväen Arkisto, e-mail: ialhi2016@gmail.com, no later than Friday, June 30, 2016.
Petri Tanskanen Director Työväen Arkisto / Finnish Labour Archives Sörnäisten rantatie 25, 00500 Helsinki, FINLAND 358 40 455 6976