Workshop: Deep Listening to Life Stories

The workshop invites you to engage deeply with a videotaped interview of an unaccompanied child migrant to Canada. The interview with Deeqa Ibrahim (April 14, 2010) was conducted by Montreal Life Stories Project, a seven-year project on the life stories of Montrealers displaced by war, genocide, and human-rights violations.

Together, we will listen to a thirty-minute excerpt of Deeqa Ibrahim’s interview and then explore different ways of interpreting an interview recording and transcription, including narrative analysis, life course visualization, and the analysis of emotions. We will also examine the underlying interviewer-interviewee dynamic that structures this oral history recording; for oral histories, to quote historian Ronald Grele, constitute a “conversational narrative.” How does the interview dynamic shape the story that is being told?

In preparation for this workshop, you are invited to read D. Soyini Madison’s “Story, History, and Performance: Interpreting Oral History through Black Performance Traditions,” Black Sacred Music 8, no. 2 (1994): 43-63.*

Barbara Lorenzkowski is an oral historian of childhood and youth whose work explores the ways in which global processes of migration, displacement, and violence have shaped small people’s lives in outsized ways. She is co-editor of the anthology Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, and Conflict in Canada and Beyond (with Kristine Alexander and Andrew Burt, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023). She is in the process of completing a FQRSC-funded book project on “The Children’s War,” a large-scale oral history project on children’s sensuous and emotional life-worlds in Atlantic Canada during the Second World War. Based at Concordia University, Montreal, Barbara Lorenzkowski is the Lead Co-Director of Concordia’s “Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling.”

Co-organized by UNB's Atlantic Canada Studies Centre and the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society

*Please note: if you don't have access to the reading, please reach out to [email protected] and we will provide you with a copy

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Host or Publisher Department of Historical Studies, ACSC (UNB-Fredericton)