Decolonising Oral History: A Conversation

Abstract

In late 2019, a team of researchers and activists from Ecuador and the UK began a new oral history project, accompanying Afro‐Ecuadorian women living in the province of Esmeraldas, as they interrogated and articulated their history and heritage. The impact of coronavirus, which has hit Ecuador particularly hard, delayed the workshops and oral history interviews we had planned, but also created the space for an extended exploration of the ethics of the project. Over email and video calls, the research team debated how to ensure that our work was truly led by its Afro‐Ecuadorian participants. How would we secure recognition for their creative and intellectual work and avoid appropriation of their ideas? And how would we facilitate a collective, community‐based methodology when most eurocentric oral history is so rooted in individualist approaches? The result of this process is a collectively authored document, which stands as our ethical agreement and baseline, and a record of our joint commitment to decolonise the research process. This wide‐ranging conversation between community activists and scholars explores the complex, painstaking negotiations required to create a truly decolonial and feminist practice in transnational oral history work.

Between Hope and Loss: Peruvian Women Activists’ Visual Contestations of Extractive-led Development

“…11 Thus, the women’s selected images represent deliberately evocative interventions into debates around extractive-led development, drawing on their own visual literacy and experiences of being involved in anti-extractive struggles. Taken together, their photos provide an emotive counterpoint to (more commonplace) images of destruction and devastation wrought by mining, instead speaking to McKinnon’s (2016) articulation of development as a ‘project of finding and creating hope in the world we live in, the here and now’ (p. 268) and to moving beyond narratives of suffering, deficiency and despair (Francis et al, 2021; Wright, 2008, 2012), in order to create the world otherwise. The women’s photos communicate a strong sense of the community resilience, natural abundance and cultural richness that they perceive as providing the foundations for a development model that is not predicated on resource extraction, whilst also providing a stark and visually compelling insight into what is at stake for Andean communities impacted by extractive-led development.…”

“…Without hope—for different futures, alternative presents—development ceases to have any meaning. Indeed, we should situate hope as central to the project of decolonizing development (Smith, 2016, p. 4; see also Gibson-Graham, 2005; McKinnon, 2016), alongside also recognizing the importance of not reducing the experiences of people living in the global South to suffering and pain (Francis et al, 2021; Wright, 2012). Scholars emphasize that hopeful development is about ‘making visible the diversity of social and political and economic realities [that] gives them a presence in the here and now and generates new possibilities in the present that are otherwise obscured by the dominance of hegemonic discourses’ (McKinnon, 2016, p. 268), rather than chasing a utopian ideal future.…”

Questioning development from Black feminisms in Ecuador and moving towards a Black feminist political ecology in the Americas

“…It is in this challenging context that we have co-developed research that aims to centre the voices and experiences of Black and Afro-Ecuadorian women, and to foreground their rich cultural heritage as a means of promoting more equitable development futures in the province. In the discussion that follows, we draw on the extensive knowledge of Black and Afro women who participated in the project, including over 60 oral history interviews, social-cartography activities undertaken during participatory workshops and stakeholder interviews, as well as ongoing discussions and work within the team (see Francis et al, 2021). To ensure non-extractive research processes and support intergenerational knowledge sharing and discussion, the RECLAMA project team trained 16 young Afro-Ecuadorian women as peer researchers, and they returned to their respective cantons in teams to collect interviews with women in their communities who they themselves had identified as key figures in preserving ancestral knowledge.…”

História oral e Migrações do Nordeste para o Sudeste: Um estudo sobre a produção brasileira

“…Na longa convivência com os entrevistados e 24 A ideia de devolutiva do trabalho de história oral é defendida no Brasil por diversos autores, incluindo Olga Von Simson (Von Simson;Giglio, 2001). Se considerarmos, por outro lado, o viés da história oral decolonial, o sentido da produção de histórias e do próprio conhecimento não está na devolução, mas na produção de saberes compartilhados (Francis et al, 2021).…”