The Oral History and Life Stories Network is one of the 27 networks of the ESSHC and brings together oral history and life story researchers and practitioners who explore memory, narratives, and history. Broadly, we want to encourage papers that explore methodological questions and challenges as well as the relationship between oral histories and the construction and analysis of life stories, both in terms of processes and outcomes.

This is a thematically open Call for Papers, but we would like to stimulate some topics that may attract broader interest:

- theoretical and methodological challenges of oral history today
- impact of the digitization process on doing oral history and the analysis; challenges of digitization (audio and video), e.g. transcript, keywording, archiving
- reuse of (archived) oral history materials
- reflections on legal issues and ethical questions in oral history
- themes of oral history today, e.g. whose memories are collected, analysed, and archived
- shared authority/sharing authority
- teaching oral history and supervision of oral history projects – experiences, challenges, concepts
- reflections on combining oral history and life story methods
- relations of oral history to other fields (e.g. social sciences, ethnology, memory studies, etc.)

We welcome individual paper proposals as well as proposals for panels. Panel proposals must be international in membership (and from different institutions). Each of their constituent papers must be of a high quality. The over-riding criterion for the selection is strength of the proposed paper, be it an individual paper or a paper in a panel proposal.
Our Network does not favour discussants; if a panel proposal includes a discussant, it should indicate why they wish to follow this format (if so, the panel must comprise a maximum of four speakers plus a discussant). Sessions can have a maximum of five papers.
The DEADLINE for the required pre-registration and upload of a paper or session proposal at the ESSHC website is April 15, 2024. Please refer to the ESSHC-ESSHC website for more information at https://esshc.iisg.amsterdam/en/guidelines.

Network chairs:
Anne Heimo, University of Turku, Finland, anheimo@utu.fi - Andrea Strutz, LBI for Research on Consequences of War and University of Graz, Austria, andrea.strutz@uni-graz.at - Malin Thor Tureby, Malmö University, Sweden, malin.thor@mau.se

https://esshc.iisg.amsterdam/en/esshc-conference-2025