UC EVENTS

A masterclass by Professor Marcia C. Schenck of the University of Potsdam, to be held at the University of Canberra on Friday 23rd February 2024. The masterclass is for PhD and ECR researchers in African studies, Anthropology, Creative Writing, Global Studies, Heritage Studies, History, Indigenous Studies, Migration Studies and related disciplines. It will be of special interest to those wanting to find a place within the university for oral forms of knowledge production.

The masterclass is free and lunch will be provided.

Readings to be supplied. To apply, please see below. 

Programme:

In this session, we will think about the complex relationship between orality and knowledge production. We will do so by thinking through various relationships between orality and memory, similarities and differences between oral and written documents and their relationship to the past, as well as how to transform oral into written sources. We will draw on writings by—and conversations with—scholars from displaced communities, as well as on the reflections on orality and oral narratives other scholars have produced, to examine the various approaches to collecting stories. In the process we will be asking, among other questions, about the qualities and opportunities of oral sources in comparison to written material. We will think through how we approach the transformation of oral sources into written analysis and we will reflect on ethical interviewing and collecting of stories.

Bio:

Marcia C. Schenck is professor of global history at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her research interests include global history, African history, oral history, migration history, and the history of international organizations. With UNHCR training in higher education in emergency settings, and in collaboration with Princeton’s Global History Lab, Marcia has since 2016 worked in providing access to higher education in the humanities to refugee and host-country learners. This has included teaching in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, and the development and teaching of a research methods and ethics course that supports refugee learner and host country student teams in Rwanda, Kenya, and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region to formulate their own history research projects. A former Mercator Fellow in International Affaris, Marcia has held research fellowships at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Princeton University and the Historisches Kolleg, Munich. Her latest books are Remembering Labor Migration to the Second World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and the co-edited anthology, The Right to Research (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023), while her current book project seeks to center African refugee management in the era of decolonization to argue for the importance of that time period in understanding the evolution of the global refugee regime.

To apply, please contact Professor Paul Magee on paul.magee@canberra.edu.edu with 2-3 sentences on the topic of your research. A tangential link to the topic is fine — tangents are good.

Places are limited, so please apply as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

Any questions and accessibility requests please contact: cccr@canberra.edu.au