Studies in Oral History, Issue No. 46, 2024

Joint Editors: Skye Krichauff and Carla Pascoe Leahy

Working Lives & Workplaces

Peer-reviewed articles

Contributions are invited from Australia and overseas for the peer-reviewed articles section of the 2024 issue of Studies in Oral History, the journal of Oral History Australia (OHA).

This special issue will explore oral histories of working lives, workplaces and work, all broadly defined to incorporate histories of volunteering, military service and other types of service. Papers that employ or interrogate oral history methodologies and illuminate aspects of working life, workplaces, and workplace culture are invited.

Contributions are invited across the following themes (though are not limited to these):

• How the experience of work is mediated by gender, ethnicity, class, and generation
• How technological innovation changed the nature of work
• How workers have sought to protect their employment rights and conditions
• Migrants’ experience of the workplace
• Occupational health and safety
• Multi-generations of families working at the same workplace
• Unfree work
• Work and the environment
• Workplace closures, redundancies and lay-offs.

As all articles are subject to anonymous peer review, pleasure ensure your submission contains no identifying material. Articles submitted to the Oral History Australia Editorial Board for peer review will first be assessed for suitability by the Editorial Board. Please consult the Guidelines for Contributors and Journal Style Guide for further information.

Word limits and deadlines

To be considered for peer review, articles should be no more than 8000 words, including references. Publication of the issue is anticipated in late 2024.

Deadline for submissions: Friday 1 December 2023.

Submission

Send submissions to: Dr Alexandra Dellios, Chair, Oral History Australia Editorial Board, email editorialboard.journal@oralhistoryaustralia.org.au.

Reports

Submissions are also invited for the reports section of the 2024 issue of Studies in Oral History. Reports may describe oral history projects conducted by academic researchers, museum curators, heritage professionals, consulting historians, community historians and more. Projects may have resulted in public outcomes such as websites, exhibitions, podcasts, theses, articles or books. Please note the reports section is not peer-reviewed; notes from the field, updates on exciting new work, or reflections on the process and/or outcomes of oral history projects are encouraged. Reports which relate to the issue theme of ‘Working Lives and Workplaces’ are welcome but not mandatory.

Word limit: 1,500 words.

Deadline for report submissions: Monday 30 April 2023.

Please send reports to Alexandra Mountain, Reports Editor of Studies in Oral History, reports.journal@oralhistoryaustralia.org.au

Please note that while the reports are not peer-reviewed, we cannot accept all reports for publication and accepted reports will need to be edited for length, clarity and adherence to the Style Guide. Reports will be selected on the basis of quality of writing, the diversity of oral history perspectives showcased across the reports section and relevance to the special issue theme. Please consult the Guidelines for Contributors and Style Guide for further information.

Call for Papers

Culturally-Specific Museums and Archives: Between Diasporic Culture and Australian Heritage

To migrant communities in Australia and their descendants, dedicated archives and museums documenting culturally-specific material and experiences have been significant spaces for activism, integration, reflexion and community identity. These archives and museums first emerged in the 1950s and 60s, possibly fulfilling similar roles to community associations. Some may have been inspired by a growing interest in local Australian history at this time when many historical societies in regional areas were established; others adopted a more explicitly activist role, viewing their diaspora and its cultural maintenance as a form of opposition to homeland political developments. These early museums and archives include the Estonian Archives in Australia (Sydney, 1952), Lobethal Archives and Historical Museum (Loebethal, 1956), Lithuanian Museum (Adelaide, 1961), Jindera Pioneer Museum and Historical Society (Jindera, 1968), Latvian Museum, (Adelaide, 1970), Ukrainian Museum (Adelaide, 1979), and the Jewish Museum of Australia (Melbourne, 1982).

After the introduction of multicultural policies from the 1970s onwards—in response to grassroots activism emanating from the migrant rights movement and ethnic welfare societies—local and state governments have also funded culturally specific museums as a part of tourism initiatives, particularly in culturally specific precincts, including the Museum of Chinese Australian History (Melbourne, 1984) and the Museo Italiano (Melbourne, 2010), which grew from Co.As.It. Italian Historical Society. At other times, policies around social cohesion in the wake of major events like September 11, 2001 led to the funding of culturally specific museums by Federal and State governments, such as the Islamic Museum of Australia (Melbourne, 2014).

A great deal has been written on the question of community engagement and cultural diversity in museums, as well as diasporic heritage and memory in the Australian context (Szekeres 2011; Darian-Smith and Hamilton 2019; Dellios and Henrich 2021; Kornfeld 1997; Witcomb 2013). The special edition of Humanities Research edited by Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi in 2009, for example, was instrumental in thinking critically about the tensions between multiculturalism, pluralism, and the dictates of national cohesiveness in Australian museums. It was in this context of inquiry that further attention started to be paid to culturally-specific museums and archives, with seminal contributions documenting their history in Australia and the specific place they hold in the museum landscape (Viv Szekeres 2011; Light 2016). Conversations about migrant heritage, however, has remained primarily focused on state-funded museums, often overlooking how these dynamics unfold within community-operated, culturally-specific museums and archives.

We are seeking contributions about culturally-specific museums and archives in Australia, the social roles they have played for migrant and diasporic communities in Australia and beyond, the multilayered identities they promote, their relationship to multiculturalism (as a prescriptive policy framework and as a descriptor of the social milieu), as well as the opportunities and the challenges they represent for the communities that operate them. We are also interested in contributions that examine their relations to local government, state and national museums, libraries and archives dedicated to social history in Australia, exploring differences and similarities in terms of curatorial practices (collecting, preserving and exhibiting), community engagement and institutional features.

Questions underlying this special edition include:

• How and why did culturally-specific museums and archives emerge in Australia?
• What do museums or archives have to offer to migrant/diaspora communities in Australia that other means of representations do not?
• How can culturally-specific museums and archives act as both cultural repositories and dynamic spaces to continue national, transnational, and cross-cultural imagining?
• To what extent do culturally-specific museums and archives share in a common discourse of interculturality, or alternatively, respond to localised debates and frames of reference?
• How specific is museum and archival practice in a culturally-specific/community-operated museum?
• What engagement have culturally-specific museums and archives make with First Nations’ heritage and experiences?
• How have culturally-specific museums and archives handled relationships with the governments of their places of origin, which can include being involved with Australia’s diplomatic relations with those governments?

Interested participants, please submit your abstract by 20 December to Dr. Virginie Rey at virginie.rey@deakin.edu.au; cc Dr Alexandra Dellios alexandra.dellios@anu.edu.au and Dr Karen Schamberger at kschamberger@nla.gov.au

Contact Information

Contact Email: alexandra.dellios@anu.edu.au