This workshop has four overlapping aims: firstly, naming the wide range of feelings and emotional states that might be evoked in fieldwork encounters and oral history interviews. Secondly, ways to contain feelings expressed by interviewees especially memories that evoke painful losses, sadness and anger. Thirdly, we will discuss ways to contain and understand researchers’ emotions, in and after, interviews. Four, we focus on the primacy of intersubjectivity, recognition and misrecognition within fieldwork and interview dialogues.
Dr. Sean Field is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cape Town and served as Director of the Centre for Popular Memory (CPM) from 2001 to 2012. He is the author of several prize-winning books including, Oral History, Community and Displacement: Imagining Memories in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2012), and Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town (2001). He is joining us at COHDS for a three week residency.