Past news and events
Oral History and Interviewing in Contemporary Russia with Elena Racheva
- Venue: TBC
- Start: Wed, 27 Nov 2019 16:00:00 GMT
- End: Wed, 27 Nov 2019 18:00:00 GMT
Elena Racheva
Oral History as Journalism and a Method of Academic Research
Abstract:
What are the differences between journalistic interview and oral history? Can a newspaper interview be used in academic work and vice versa? To what extent is it possible to edit oral speech? How to verify the information received from informants? Is a notion of truth applicable to oral history? In her talk, Elena Racheva, a journalist from Novaya Gazeta, the only independent newspaper in Russia and a Oxford University PhD candidate, will discuss similarities and differences of using oral history as a method by journalists and scholars. The talk will be based on her work collecting interviews of victims and perpetrators of Stalin’s GULAG which was published as a book Article 58. Unseized: Stories of The People Who Went Through What We Fear the Most (Moscow, AST 2015; English translation is forthcoming from Glagoslav Publications).
Speaker Biography:
Elena Racheva is an award winning journalist and writer. For more than 15 years Elena worked as a special correspondent of an independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta where she covered political and social events, disasters and mass protests, in addition to topics related to Soviet history and collective memory. In 2018, she published The Wolf's Place – a collection of her reportages from different parts of Russia. She's also an author of Article 58. Unseized. Stories of The People Who Passed Through What We Fear Most – an oral history of former victims and perpetrators of Stalin’s GULAG.
She is currently working on her PhD project at the University of Oxford, where she investigates the cultural and anthropological basis of violence through the lens of “cycles of violence” in 20th century Russian history.