Past Events
Seminar Series: Anna Green, Origin Stories and Family Memory
- Venue: Armstrong Building G.08, Newcastle University
- Start: Thu, 20 Jun 2019 17:30:00 BST
- End: Wed, 12 Dec 2018 19:00:00 GMT
When asked about their family past, where do families choose to begin?
Origin stories are uniformly perceived to exert considerable power and emotional traction in the narrative construction of both collective and personal identities. In this presentation I want to explore two kinds of ‘origin stories’ evident in my current Marsden-funded research into Pākehā intergenerational family memory. The first story might be characterized as ‘from the outside in’, and the second as ‘from the inside out’. I will draw upon the oral history interviews conducted over the past three years with sixty multigenerational families, throughout the country, whose European forebears arrived in New Zealand between the 1830s and the onset of the First World War in 1914. How did our participants begin their family stories, and which origin story might be the most powerful in the creation of personal narrative identities?
Anna Green is Associate Professor in the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her current research focuses upon family memory, and recent publications include ‘Grandparents, communicative memory and narrative identity’, in Oral History (Spring 2019); ‘Who Do You Think You Are? The Family in Public History’ in What is Public History Globally? (Bloomsbury, 2019); and ‘Intergenerational Family Memory and Historical Consciousness’ in Contemplating Historical Consciousness (Berghahn, 2019).
The Oral History Seminar Series brings leading figures in the field of oral history to Newcastle to discuss their work and the ideas that inform it. Each event aims to provide a thought-provoking forum for conversation and debate. Whatever your experience or interest in oral history, we will be pleased to see you there.