Articles

Nordic-Baltic oral history on the move

Travel is an essential feature of memory. This themed issue on Nordic-Baltic oral history research concentrates on the movement and travel of both people and memories across time, place and media, and the inevitable multi-sitedness of memory. The issue demonstrates how the social and political changes experienced in Finland and its close neighbours Sweden, Estonia and Latvia during the twentieth century have affected oral history research in these countries.
Author(s): Anne Heimo
Keywords: Nordic-Baltic oral history; oral and written narratives; re-using archival materials; memory processes

Post-Soviet memories and 'memory shifts' in Estonia

This article examines the practice of oral history and life writing as a form of memory making in post-1989 Estonia. It will be demonstrated that the emergence of memory studies during the post-communist turn had distinctive roots in oral history and life writing. Both practices have been active agents in post-1989 mnemonic processes, aiming to democratise memory by accelerating anti-communist remembering and pointing out the taboos generated in its course. They have also contributed to new exclusions of events and actors from the national story and memory-making process.
Author(s): Ene Kõresaar and Kirsti Jõesalu
Keywords: post-communism; memory studies; trauma; ethnic minorities; nationalism; late/mature socialism

The interplay of memory and matter: narratives of former Finnish Karelian child evacuees

After the Second World War, Finland had to cede territories to the Soviet Union and Finnish people from those areas were evacuated. In this article we analyse the narrated memories of former Karelian child evacuees. We focus on the sites of memory and the materiality of memory practices as they are reflected in these narratives. We examine how narrated memories, both written and oral, are formed in the interplay of embodied recollections of the childhood evacuation, with the intra-action of matter such as sources and mementos, and immaterial things such as affects and emotions. We conclude that things and matter are agential in six ways in narrated memories
Author(s): Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen and Ulla Savolainen
Keywords: memory practices; sites of memory; oral and written narratives; childhood evacuation; materiality and memory

Migratory memories between Latvia and Sweden

This article is based on research carried out among Latvians living in Sweden. The dynamics of memory are explored in the context of forced migration. Oral history research is used to enrich an understanding of the complicated nature of the movement of memory, illuminating the difficulties and transformations of memory while traveling in space and time, across political and community borders. The main conclusions are that the complex web of memories is composed through various carriers of memory, multiple forms and functions of narration (differing in private and public). Migratory memory illuminates the nature of memory practices. Additionally, the community involved in the research and researchers both became facilitators of 'memory movement'.
Author(s): Baiba Bela, Ieva Garda-Rozenberga and Mara Zirnite
Keywords: diaspora; life stories; migratory memories; migration; oral history; refugees

Narratives from multi-cultural Sweden: positioning and identification in immigrant collections at the archive of the Nordic Museum 1970-2015

This article is inspired by a cultural approach to oral history which argues that narrators draw on public discourses in constructing narratives for an audience. It also contributes to debates in oral history on the re-use of archived interviews, by arguing that the oral historian has to consider how memory institutions create and preserve oral history collections, and contribute to the shaping of narratives of history. By investigating positioning and identification in immigrant collections at the archive of the Nordic Museum from 1970-2015, the article also engages with debates in oral history about collective and individual remembering by discussing how the individual narrators can resist and transform narratives of the museum about categories such as immigrants, Swedes and Swedishness.
Author(s): Malin Thor Tureby and Jesper Johansson
Keywords: cultural oral history; migration; immigrants; memory institutions; individual and collective remembering

Going from house to house: exploring Roma encounters in rural Finland through oral history and written reminiscences

This article examines inter-ethnic relations between the Finnish Roma and the majority population as recounted in archived oral history and written reminiscence materials. Before gradually settling down after the Second World War, most Finnish Roma families survived by moving from house to house, having daily encounters with the majority population. How is this relationship recalled on different sides of the ethnic divide? Two different narratives emerge in the analysed reminiscence materials: one emphasising well-functioning relations, the other distrust and rigid group boundaries. Analysing this divide, I argue that unequal minority-majority power relations affect not just individual accounts of the past, but also the character of reminiscence materials and positionalities that are produced later.
Author(s): Miika Tervonen
Keywords: Roma; ethnic relations; oral history; written reminiscences; Finland

Reviews

Life Writing and Politics of Memory in Eastern Europe

The Soviet Past in the Post-Socialist Present: Methodology and Ethics in Russian, Baltic and Central European Oral History and Memory Studies

Digging Deep. Stories of Lives for Writing Along

MEŽA MEITAS. 12 SIEVIETES

Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide (Third Edition)

Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis

Prisoners of Rhodesia: Inmates and Detainees in the Struggle for Zimbabwean Liberation, 1960-1980

Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access and Engagement

Singing From the Floor: A History of British Folk Clubs

Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall

Private Lives, Public History