“Researchers and their Research: A Seminar on Ego-Histoire”

Researchers and their Research: A Seminar on Ego-Histoire

15 November 2017 | 14h – 17h | Sala Mestrados, DEA

Vanessa Castejon and Oliver Haag are both researchers in Australian Indigenous studies, working in Europe (Paris and Berlin) on race and postcolonialism. They have long worked together on Egohistoire (since 2010). They have published together with Anna Cole and Karen Hughes with Australian National University Press a volume entitled: Ngapartji, Ngapartji: In turn in turn, Egohistoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia, in 2014.

During this seminar they will share their views on Egohistoire and their experience as publishers on the topic. Like Pierre Nora, who in 1987 had coined the term ‘ego-histoire’, they have asked researchers in Australian Indigenous issues to apply their methods to themselves, to link their story with the History they are writing. Pierra Nora in Essais d’egohistoire:

These are not phony literary autobiographies, nor pointless intimate confessions, nor abstracts professions of faith, nor attempts at basic psychoanalysis. The exercise was to clearly set down one’s own story [histoire] as one would write someone else’s; to try to apply to oneself, each with his or her own particular style and methods, the same cool, encompassing and explanatory gaze that one so often directs towards others. To explain, as an historian, the link between the history you have made and the history that has made you. (Nora at al 1987, p. 7)

Egohistoire stemmed from three decades of life-story writing in a variety of academic disciplines and contexts (anthropology, cultural studies, oral history, historical anthropology, queer studies and, more recently, auto-ethnographical studies). Among the writers who reflected on critical historiography, Pierre Bourdieu or Stuart Hall can be mentioned.

Vanessa Castejon and Oliver Haag will help you look at the reasons why you are doing the research you do, look at your own story, the skin around the ideas.

This seminar will help you cast a new light on your current research or future research.

+ info: e-mail // website