Research, Training & Collaboration : Lectures
Occasional Lecture Series
Journeys into ‘the heart of interpretation’: Narrative, culture and meaning
by Professor Molly Andrews (University of East London)
1pm - 2:15pm, 18 October, 2010
Seminar Room, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street
What are the implications of doing narrative research in communities of which one is not a member? Does this necessarily limit the quality of the data to be collected, or might there be some advantages in being considered an outsider, that is, one to whom entire stories must be explained as nothing can be taken as obvious? The paper will consider how our cultural positioning, as it is perceived by ourselves and by those who we include in our research, feeds into the very heart of the projects we undertake.
Molly Andrews is Professor of Sociology, and Co-director of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, in London, England. Her research interests include the psychological basis of political commitment, psychological challenges posed by societies in transition to democracy, patriotism, conversations between generations, gender and aging, and counter-narratives. She is the author of Lifetimes of Commitment: Aging, Politics, Psychology (Cambridge 1991/2008), and the co-editor of Lines of Narrative (Routledge 2001), Considering Counter-narratives (John Benjamins 2004) and Doing Narrative Research (Sage 2008). Her most recent monograph is Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change (2007) which won the 2008 Outstanding book of the year award of the American Education Research Association, Narrative and Research Special Interest Group.
Citing the spoken word: Adventures in language and cultural documentation
by Dr Nicholas Thieberger (University of Melbourne and University of Hawai'i at Mānoa)
1pm - 2:15pm, 7 May, 2010
South Lecture Room, Department of Archaeology, Downing Street
Digital tools are providing exciting new possibilities for linguists and ethnographers to collate and compile fieldwork data, and to share the results with communities of origin. In this lecture, Dr Thieberger will outline the methods he used in his work on South Efate (Vanuatu) which involved building a corpus at the same time as developing his linguistic analysis. He will then profile a more recent initiative to design an open-source method for hosting texts linked to streaming media online (EOPAS). Thieberger suggests that integrating such processes into fieldwork naturally results in better outcomes, both for speakers and for the research community, and reflects on the associated challenges and opportunities provided by these technologies.
Nicholas Thieberger is an Australian Research Council QEII Fellow at the University of Melbourne and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. He works on the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (www.paradisec.org.au) and is the technology editor for the journal Language Documentation and Conservation.
Information about this lecture has been archived to DSpace@Cambridge. Click here to download a PDF poster advertising Dr Thieberger's talk (older version here), click here to listen to to an MP3 audio stream of his lecture (57 MB), and click here to view his presentation as a PDF file (12 MB).
Land, Truth, Water: Finding the ≠Khomani Bushmen of the Southern Kalahari
by Professor Hugh Brody (Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies, University of the Fraser Valley)
1pm - 2:15pm, 16 March, 2010
Seminar Room, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street
In 1996, a small group of Bushmen, known as the ≠Khomani San, launched a claim to South Africa's second most important National Park. This was one of the first such land claims in Africa, and led to research, negotiation and, in 1999, a settlement.
A set of research projects - recording oral histories, mapping relationships to land and resources, filming with the community - put together the land claim, and then monitored its consequences. In this lecture, Hugh Brody, who co-ordinated the research projects with the ≠Khomani San from 1997-2008, will describe the process and invite discussion of how the results of such work can have maximum value, both for the people who told the stories and made the claim, and for those who wish to draw on and analyse the materials.
Professor Brody is the Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley and an Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. He has worked with governments and indigenous communities on land claims issues in Canada and South Africa since the 1970s. He was an adviser to the Mackenzie Pipeline Inquiry, a member of the World Bank's Morse Commission and chairman of the Snake River Independent Review, all of which involved encounters between large-scale development and indigenous communities.
Information about this lecture has been archived to DSpace@Cambridge. Click here to download a PDF poster advertising Professor Brody's talk, click here to listen to to an MP3 audio stream of his lecture (64 MB), and click here to watch the video (155 MB).
Ifugao oral epics: Reflections on living traditions and cultural heritage in the Philippines
by Dr Maria Vladimirovna Stanyukovich (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, St Petersburg, Russia)
1pm - 2:15pm, 13 October, 2009
Seminar Room, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street
Dr Maria Vladimirovna Stanyukovich is Chair of the Department of Australia, Oceania and Indonesia at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), Russian Academy of Science, St Petersburg, Russia. She has been working on the epic oral traditions of the Philippines for over 30 years, and has also conducted fieldwork in the Altai Republic, Uzbekistan, Dagestan, Cuba, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
Dr Stanyukovich was in Cambridge to work with Civilizations in Contact, a Research Project within the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, funded by the Golden Web Foundation.