Abstract for paper to be presented by Caroline Künzle and Dr. Lorna Roth at the Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence conference, held in Montreal on March 22-25, 2012. A performative version of the paper was presented at the conference, the paper itself is still in progress and will be posted subsequently.
How does one disseminate life story and oral history research to the public via the medium of radio? What kind of radio is best suited to this objective? What does the negotiation process between the oral historian and the radio producer look like? And how can we create the best conditions possible for the dissemination of oral history on the radio?
Within the context of the Community University Research Alliance oral history project, Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations, the Radio Works! group has, for the past three years, produced both, an hour-length program on CIBL 101.5 FM community radio and short radio segments on Montreal’s CKUT 90.3 FM campus-community radio. The process of taking project-related conversations and stories and packaging them for the mediated and public forum of community radio has been a complex and enriching one, with many hard lessons learned along the way. These have been invaluable in understanding how to best take some of the “results” of careful, long-term community-university research and transform them into media “products” that a greater public will access.
As Ieuan Franklin discusses in her thesis, Folkways and Airwaves: Oral history, Community and Vernacular Radio, oral history and community radio are well-suited partners, being both “fields of activity or (social) ‘movements’ that share the related organizational philosophies of […] shared authorship.” Community radio practitioners seek to enfranchise the same “hidden voices” – those of the underprivileged and marginalized, the minorities neglected by mainstream media — which oral historians look to uncover and circulate. But while their aims may be similar, the working cultures and modes of communication and organization of these two sites (academia and community radio) differ greatly and for this reason, require extensive negotiations in their convergence and collaboration.
In addition to developing first-hand experience with these negotiations through its continued community radio production, in this final year of the CURA, Radio Works! is also in the process of developing programming pitches for the CBC. This anticipated negotiation with public/institutional radio will provide a point of comparison to our community radio experiences and further inform our thinking about the best medium and methodology for the dissemination of oral history on the radio.
The proposed paper will reflect on these experiences in the field in order to familiarize the oral history researcher with the working cultures, processes and communication modes of both community and public/institutional radio and offer insight and best-practice methodology for enabling the desired form of dissemination of oral history research on the radio.
The paper will visually and textually embody the intersection between the different worlds we are attempting to bridge through our radio production practice, by being written in two different columns: one column speaking from the radio practitioner’s point of view, the other from the academic researcher’s perspective.
