London Regional Network
 Verusca Calabria Oral Historian, Elders Voice 181 Mortimer Road, London, NW10 5TN Telno: 020 8968 8170 Email: verusca.calabria@googlemail.com  Rob Perks Curator of Oral History British Library, National Sound Archive, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB Telno: 020 7412 7405 Email: rob.perks@bl.uk  Pam Schweitzer Director, European Reminiscence Network 15 Camden Row, Blackheath, London SE3 0QA Telno: 0208 852 9293 Email: pam@pamschweitzer.com  Solomon Yohannes Curator of Oral History and Contemporary Collecting Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London, EC2Y 5HN Telno: 020 7814 5756 Email: syohannes@museumoflondon.org.uk British Library Sound Archive Demand for oral history training remains high and phone calls from community projects seeking advice for an application to Heritage Lottery Fund show no sign of abating. To help respond to enquiries about HLF funding for oral history in the London area, we helped organise a day seminar with HLF's London team earlier this year at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, which was well-attended despite being held on the only snowy day of the winter. Workshops led by several BL and OHS staff focused on different types of project and aimed to provide examples of best practice to would-be applicants. HLF also led a 'beginners' session' at the annual OHS conference in July. Moroccan Memories in Britain: an Oral and Visual HistorySince January 2007 I have been working on an oral and visual history of Moroccan people in Britain, a two year project which is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and run by the Migrants and Refugees Community Forum, an umbrella organization made up of 40 migrant and refugee community groups in London. Seventeen 'insider' interviewers have been recruited and trained to carry out life history interviews across three generations of Moroccans across five British sites, namely London, Crawley, St. Albans, Trowbridge and Edinburgh. The aim is to collect and have fully transcribed 100 life stories which will be deposited at the British Library Sound Archive. The team of interviewers will also benefit from reminiscence training in October. The interviewers have received feedback on their interviewing skills based on their first two interviews. I have also helped organise and coordinate a number of workshops in each site to seek out potential interviewees, with the help of volunteers who gave more than 150 hours of their time to support this project. Visitors were encouraged to write something about their life history on wooden jigsaw pieces coloured by school children and themed according to the life history model, and examples of oral history interviews and publications were also available as a tool to explain how oral history sources can be used. From a visual history perspective, a promotional video has been produced including footage of both interviewers and project staff discussing the aims and objectives of the project, in an attempt to encourage people from the community to participate in it and to tell their story. Furthermore, another video is in the making which captures the process of interviewers interviewing members of their community, which will serve as a resource to other oral history projects. A number of art sessions using photography, creative writing and collage have been run with children of Moroccan origins to encourage them to explore their own cultural heritage and identities. An exhibition of the art work took place at the Migrants and Refugees Forum in July 2007. The aim is to run a further five series of workshops composed of seven sessions in which children will produce art work that will tour both nationally and internationally in 2009 (provided the funding is secured in the meantime). Information on the Moroccan Oral and Visual History Project can be found at www.moroccanmemories.org.uk. Information on the Migrants and Refugees Community Forum can be found at www.mrcf.org.uk. Lastly, I have been contacted as a Networker for the Oral History Society for advice mainly on technical questions, such as acquiring and using recording equipment - namely the Marantz PDM 660 - career opportunities in oral history, and studying oral history at postgraduate level. Verusca CalabriaMuseum of LondonBelonging: voices of London’s refugees was a major exhibition held at the Museum of London from October 2006 to February 2007. While there is a huge amount written and spoken about refugees today, too much of this is based on misconceptions, stereotypes and fear, and too little on a real engagement with refugees. Through oral history, Belonging placed the voices of refugees centre stage, providing a public space where they could be heard and where the challenges they face and the contributions they make to London could be acknowledged. The exhibition was part of the Refugee Communities History Project, a major partnership project led by the Evelyn Oldfield Unit (a refugee agency) and involving the Museum of London, London Metropolitan University and fifteen refugee community organisations, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Trust for London. Between 2004 and 2006 this groundbreaking project collected, archived and disseminated more than 150 in-depth oral history interviews, in more than fifteen languages. The interviews were conducted by fifteen fieldworkers, many refugees themselves, each of whom was based at one of the partner refugee community organisations. The fieldworkers received accredited MA-level training in life history methods at London Metropolitan University before conducting at least ten interviews with people from their communities. In addition to Belonging, each refugee community organisation created its own film, exhibition or interactive and organised an event. The process of developing Belonging was highly collaborative, with staff from the Museum of London, the Evelyn Oldfield Unit and London Metropolitan University, the fieldworkers and representatives from the refugee community organisations working together closely over two years to create the exhibition. During its four-month run, Belonging received 32,235 visitors, while 19,644 people visited its website during this time. It achieved more than 100 items of press coverage, including television, radio and print media, with this coverage being overwhelmingly positive. The exhibition has now been shortlisted for a Visit London Award 2007 in the category of ‘Best Celebration of Cultural Diversity’. The aim of Belonging was not to provide a chronological history of refugees in London. Rather it was to bring personal narratives and perspectives to the fore; to reflect the complexity and multiplicity of experiences and opinions among refugees; to offer visitors from refugee backgrounds a source of pride, inspiration or encouragement; and to help visitors from all backgrounds to better understand the realities of life for refugees and the contributions they have made and continue to make to London. An external evaluator, Emily Johnsson, was engaged to undertake evaluation of visitor responses to the exhibition through exit interviews, focus groups and analysis of the visitor book. Her conclusions underlined the value of oral history: ‘It is unusual, as a visitor researcher, to encounter such engagement and impact during and as a result of one single experience of an exhibition. This is unique and extraordinary and shows the power of museums to move, engage, educate and inspire into action. It was suggested by participants that one of the key interpretative media that had encouraged this impact was the emphasis on people’s own stories, in the form of oral history, in combination with photographs and personal objects.’ Further information about the exhibition and the project can be found here and here. Annette DayMaking Memories Matter ‘Making Memories Matter’, the exhibition of the European Reminiscence Network will be in London between 29 October and 7 December 2007. It will be the opening exhibition of the new Stephen Lawrence Gallery at Greenwich University’s Maritime Campus. Opening hours are Mon - Fri 10am – 4pm and Sat 11am – 4pm. Admission is free. This exhibition of Memory Boxes has been touring Europe over the last two and a half years, showing in galleries, museums, cultural centres and at conferences concerning life history and creative ageing. The boxes were made in 2004-5 in seven countries (Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain and the UK). The armies in each country donated redundant grenade and ammunition cases to the project to be used for purposes of peaceful co-operation as a symbolic gift to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of hostilities in Europe. A total of 120 boxes were made and each box was the result of a collaboration between an artist and an older person. They met over a six-week period to put together a representative three-dimensional life-portrait featuring an aspect of the elder’s lived experience. Joanna Bornat will speak at the opening on Monday 29 October (6-8pm) and Pam Schweitzer will give a curated tour with some of the elders and a related workshop on visual representation of reminiscence and life history on Remembrance Sunday 11 November (12-4pm) at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery. The catalogue of the exhibition Making Memories Matter with full colour plates of the Memory Boxes and life-story texts is available at the exhibition or can be ordered via Pam Schweitzer, European Reminiscence Network, 15 Camden Row, London SE3 0QA, email Schweitzer@beeb.net The Sites and Signs of Remembrance project of the
European Reminiscence Network Passage of Music Pam Schweitzer is now teaching a course in Reminiscence Theatre at Greenwich University where she has been made an honorary research fellow. The students will be working with local elders to create original theatre pieces to be performed at a theatre festival in Greenwich 5-8 March 2008. This event will tie in with the next London meeting of the European Reminiscence Network. Remembering Yesterday, Caring Today In this project, family carers and people with dementia attend weekly workshops over a 3-4 month period (followed by monthly meetings for a further year) in which they retrace their life stories together through a wide range of topics, often using non-verbal and creative approaches. They are led by trained practitioners with backgrounds in the arts and dementia. The project is running across eight centres in the UK with research teams in six universities analysing the results. The trial platform for this project has been supported over the last two years by the Medical Research Council and this gave an indication, through results from 50 people with dementia and their caregivers, that the ‘Remembering Yesterday, Caring Today’ approach to reminiscence work was associated with a significant increase in autobiographical memory for people with dementia, and a significant reduction in depression for their caregivers, compared with a control group receiving no intervention. A new publication entitled ‘Remembering Yesterday, Caring Today: reminiscence in dementia care’ by Pam Schweitzer (European Reminiscence Network) and Errollyn Bruce (Bradford University Dementia Unit) will be published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers in May 2008. Pam Schweitzer |