OHMAR (Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region) Conference – Apr.
20-21 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA)

Displacement and Community: Using Oral History to Document
Transitions, Evolutions, and Adaptations

Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR) announces its Spring
2011 Conference to be held April 20-21 at the Chemical Heritage
Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
How have oral history and personal narratives helped communities
document and deal with incidents of displacement and dislocation? How
have oral history and personal narratives helped communities build
connections and grow stronger?

These are two of the questions that guide the OHMAR program committee
as we prepare for our 2011 conference. We invite individual papers as
well as entire panels that address displacement and community building
in the context of environmental crises; regional, national and global
migrations; changes in the economy and workforce; social movements;
culture and the arts; the built environment; changing land use
patterns in countryside, suburb and city; politics and political
culture; and actions related to health and medicine. Topics may
include but are not limited to issues of pollution, gentrification,
modified political boundaries, gerrymandering, imminent domain, war or
civil unrest, and health, healthcare, and medicine. Presenters may
also want to address how new media and new technologies are
transforming how we conduct, preserve, and present oral histories.

The mid-Atlantic region, with its great variety of people and places,
is an ideal place to explore the themes of displacement and community.
The program committee invites participants to interpret the theme
expansively and to propose panels and roundtables that include voices
and images. OHMAR welcomes participants from a wide variety of
fields—history, anthropology, folklore, literature, political
science, and others—who work in the academic and public sectors.
OHMAR also welcomes submissions from archivists, librarians, web
designers, museum curators, and other oral history practitioners
engaged in work relevant to the 2011 conference theme.

For more information or questions about the call for papers, please
contact the conference co-chairs, LuAnn Jones (LuAnn_Jones@nps.gov
) or David J. Caruso
(dcaruso@chemheritage.org ). Details
about the call for papers, proposal submission guidelines, and the
conference location are available at OHMAR’s website,
http://www.ohmar.org/confercurrent.html
. *Proposals are due no later than
15 January 2011.*

Peter J. Wosh
Director, Archives/Public History Program
History Department
New York University
53 Washington Square South
Room 503
New York NY 10012
Phone: (212) 998-8601
Fax: (212) 995-4017
http://aphdigital.org
http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/history.gradprog.archivespublichistory.html