The Centre for Modern Thought

A number of scholars who first gathered together at the international Knowledge, Culture and the Transformation of Society conference in Vienna, in December 2007, will be gathering here for a remarkable afternoon continuing the discussion. The description of the panel follows, and you can download attachments below that include the full announcement with participant bios, and the Northern Scotland journal article which will act as the starting point of the conversation. The seminar will meet on Wednesday, 3 December, at 3 pm in New Kings 7 (the building right next to the Old Brewery and across the road from Taylor Block A).

“The panel will look at issues concerning both oral documentation and visual representation; concerning the archiving of both sorts of material and the ownership and accessibility of the archive; concerning the relationship of the archive to social agency and change; and concerning the mediation of memory in the material created and archived. The empirical bases of the discussion — though only its starting point — are the major, recently completed and archived, ‘Lives in the [North Sea] Oil Industry’ Oral History Project, and the Oil Lives Documentary Photography Project, at the University of Aberdeen.

“In the main social centres of the global economy today, an uncritical visual culture predominates, often to the detriment both of the voice and of critical thought about both visual and oral documentation. Crucial to overcoming this is a critical approach to how and why material is gathered, placed on permanent record and made available for use both within, and particularly outside, the academy.

“Oral history, over the past generation or two, has become an increasingly practised academic discipline and an internationally popular community activity. It has attracted some major theoretical discussion, but its methods and approaches have arguably not undergone the same rigorously critical debate that has attended the almost contemporaneous evolution of documentary photography.

“The panel will aim to promote discussion about what the practitioners of oral and photographic documentation can learn from each other, and about how archives can inform social criticism, and be more efficient in informing the agents of humanist and progressive social change.”