Meet Our Networkers in Yorkshire

Trustee

Michelle Winslow

My roles within the OHS are Trustee, Regional Network Representative (South Yorkshire), Accredited Trainer and Website Officer. I teach public health subjects and oral history in palliative care in the Division of Nursing and Midwifery, University of Sheffield. I have worked on numerous palliative care and end of life research studies and in 2007 established an oral history project as a service for patients in a Palliative Care Unit in Sheffield. This project continues to offer patients an opportunity to create life history recordings as personal and family records and for research. I also lead an Oral History Group which focuses on oral history research in healthcare and collaborates with care providers in establishing new oral history projects. Key to this work has been the development of a bespoke training and development programme for hospices and palliative care centres.

Regional networker

Sam Smith

I am an Oral History Society accredited trainer on the introductory and digital editing courses. I am also a regional network representative for South Yorkshire. I am currently completing a PhD “Understanding oral history in palliative and supportive care” in the Health Sciences School at the University of Sheffield. I have been an oral historian for over 15 years, starting my career as an interviewer and coordinator on an oral history in palliative care service at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. I have also managed and consulted on several heritage oral history projects throughout the UK and worked for clients including England Heritage and the Arts Council. I am particularly interested in oral history as a form of digital legacy, and the ethics of its public reuse in the digital realm. I teach this topic at undergraduate level at the University of Sheffield. If you’re looking for oral history advice or training in or around South Yorkshire, please get in touch.

Regional networker

Stefan Ramsden

Regional Networker

Tracy Craggs

Having been fortunate enough to be involved in oral history for 25 years, I wear a variety of hats as a freelancer, including interviewing people from all walks of life, from Generals to Oscar winners, then editing, transcribing and cataloguing the results. It has been a joy, an opportunity to learn about people and their experiences, and being privileged to record their memories. There have been many varied and interesting projects along the way, working with museums and community groups both in the UK and abroad, from Leeds to Louisville, including English Heritage, the Royal Armouries and local authority museums. For 13 years I have also freelanced for a Yorkshire based Holocaust survivor charity, now as Head of Collections. As a Trustee for the Duke of Wellington’s Regimental Museum I focus on our digital based work, including developing the oral history collection. If you are setting up a new oral history project and would like advice from me as a Regional Networker, please just ask.

Regional networker

Van Wilson

Regional Networker

Clare Jenkins

As a journalist, my interest has always been, in the words of Agatha Christie’s autobiography title, ‘Come, tell me how you live’. I’ve been a member of the Oral History Society for as long as I can remember and, at the tail-end of the 20^th Century, worked on the ground-breaking British Library/BBC collaborative Millennium oral history project, The Century Speaks. I was Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Oral History Research, where I worked on their Asian Voices project, and an oral history of the Two-Minute Silence, which led on to a Radio 4 programme on the same topic. I set up the Vox Pops oral history training company – www.voxpopsoralhistory.com – with Stephen Kelly, the OHS North-West regional organiser. We worked with community groups on projects as varied as deafness, rugby league, the Elephant and Castle area of London and the Miners’ Strike in Lancashire.  I’ve interviewed people for drama-documentaries on subjects ranging from Isle of Man TT racers to gang deaths in Manchester, written and edited oral testimony-based books and, until 2019, I co-ran the radio production company Pennine Productions – www.pennineproductions.co.uk. We made a number of programmes centred on oral history, among them Teatime at Peggy’s – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05tpwc7 – about India’s Anglo-Indian community. I am now co-writing a book on the same topic.