The Center for Public History (CPH) at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology (SMI) is excited to announce its inaugural Spring School in Family History. It will be held online from Monday, March 1 to Wednesday, March 10, 2021.
The Spring School is the seventh edition of the two-week advanced workshop that CPH has been organising since 2013, with each edition being on a different theme relevant to Oral History or Public History. This year, we focus on Family History. We have been constrained by the pandemic to postpone our advanced workshop to March 2021. This edition is titled the Spring School in Family History.
Family History is the practice of researching, interpreting and presenting stories from the past of one’s own family or that of others or histories of families or family units in general. The practice, which uses methodologies of oral history, genealogy, material culture, visuality and, more recently, DNA analysis, has been gaining in popularity among amateur historians for years and, recently, among professional historians as well. Family History, which attempts to generate an understanding of the evolution of families, has become the fertile ground for the practice of oral history alongside the study of material culture through meaningful objects and heirlooms.
The fascination with Family History seems to lie in its ability to situate the self in a long line of ancestors and their lives. Beyond the self, it also has the potential to prepare the ground for a broader history of a community or society from the bottom up, based almost exclusively on the collective efforts of individual family historians.
The Spring School in Family History will focus on the following:
- The methods and processes of family historians
- The “audiences” of family historians
- The archives of family historians
- Family history and DNA technologies
- Social media, digital networks and family history
- The family historians and their academic counterparts
The Spring School will feature ten public talks, a film screening, and a panel discussion, all of which will be open to the public.
Monday, March 1, 2021
Title: Stories as Histories: Memories, Oral Narratives, and the Recasting of the Past
Speaker: Dr Tapti Roy, Independent Scholar and Writer, Cambridge, UK
Time: 03:00 pm IST
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Title: The Other Mohan: A Personal Journey into History
Speaker: Amrita Shah, Writer, Journalist and Independent Scholar, Bengaluru, India
Time: 10:00 am IST
Title: Unseen Landscapes and Geographies of Memory: What Family Memories Mean
Speaker: Dr Indira Chowdhury, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru, India
Time: 03:00 pm IST
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Title: The Naxalite at Home: Notes on a Family History of Revolutionary Communism in West Bengal, India
Speaker: Dr Srijan Sandip Mandal, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru, India
Time: 10:00 am IST
Title: The Public Life of DNA
Speaker: Professor Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester, UK
Time: 03:00 pm IST
Thursday, March 4, 2021
Title: The Reconstructive Nature of Family History
Speaker: Dr Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic
Time: 03:00 pm IST
Friday, March 5, 2021
Title: “I don’t want my life to mean nothing”: The Future of Family History
Speaker: Dr Tanya Evans, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia
Time: 10:00 am IST
Monday, March 8, 2021
Title: “Of Blood”: A Personal Rural Genealogy
Speaker: Dr Menelaos Gkartzios, Newcastle University, UK
Time: 10:00 am IST
Title: Family through the Lens of Women Chroniclers
Speaker: Dr Siddhi Bhandari, Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru, India
Time: 03:00 pm IST
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
Title: Family Secrets, National Silences: Intergenerational Memory in Settler Colonial Australia
Speaker: Dr Ashley Barnwell, University of Melbourne, Australia
Time: 10:00 am IST
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Screening: Beyond Barbed Wires: A Distant Dawn
Director: Rafeeq Ellias
Time: 09:00 am IST
Panel: Family History and Community Trauma
Panellists: Dilip D’Souza, Joy Ma, Rafeeq Ellias, and Yin Marsh
Time: 09:30 am IST
Beyond these public events, the Spring School will have sessions on each day dedicated to the teaching, reading, and discussion of texts recommended by the invited speakers along with other texts relevant to Family History. These sessions will be facilitated by the faculty of CPH and they will be open only to registered participants of the Spring School.
There is no fee for participation in the Spring School. However, registration is required for those who would like to participate in the sessions facilitated by the faculty at CPH. The registered participants will receive the readings and the full schedule of the Spring School including both the public events as well as the facilitated sessions.
To register for participation in the Spring School, please fill in this form: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=0jHYe6YFC02-mS55UMR3fEp_2mZuO3RGufrJm0rjue5URUlFQkpEWUlWWTJWRjdZQTgwVUYxNUtXNi4u.
And to attend any of the twelve public events mentioned above, please click on this link at the given hour: https://zoom.us/j/99121096776 (Meeting ID: 991 2109 6776).
If you have any questions about the Spring School, please do not hesitate to write to Dr Siddhi Bhandari at siddhi.bhandari@manipal.edu or to Dr Srijan Sandip Mandal at srijan.mandal@manipal.edu.
Dr Indira Chowdhury
Centre for Public History
Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology
Srishti (New-N5 campus),
C.A. site no. 21,
(Next to Yelahanka 5th phase Bus Terminal),
Karnataka Housing Board, 5th Phase,
Yelahanka New Town,Bangalore 560064.
Phone: +918049000802 ext 836
President, Oral History Association of India, 2013-2016
President, International Oral History Association, 2014-2016
Blog: https://theoralhistorian.com