This thesis explores women's emigration from Malta in the aftermath of the second world war. The work employs an analysis that draws upon a gendered critique which splits the work up into a three...Show moreThis thesis explores women's emigration from Malta in the aftermath of the second world war. The work employs an analysis that draws upon a gendered critique which splits the work up into a three-tiered analysis model. Beginning with a historiographical review, the work goes on to include and analyse women's oral histories, as well as the fictional-historical novels of the author Lou Drofenik whose perspective and narratives are informed by the interviews she conducted with first-generation Maltese-Australian female emigrants. In this way, Maltese women's gendered and colonial subjecthood is counter-opposed to their agency in working with and against these historical structures.Show less
This thesis examines how Belgians who fled the Congo in the wake of the Congolese independence (1960) experienced their return migration and reintegration into Belgian society. Long ignored in...Show moreThis thesis examines how Belgians who fled the Congo in the wake of the Congolese independence (1960) experienced their return migration and reintegration into Belgian society. Long ignored in public and academic debates, the narratives of postcolonial returnees provide insight into the demographic consequences of the end of empires on the one hand, and the effects of whiteness on migrant trajectories on the other hand. Through a unique combination of oral history, visual analysis, and media analysis, this thesis explores how returnees shaped their memories of colonial life and decolonization. It also examines how this narrative differs from the contemporary media and government narrative on the Anciens du Congo.Show less
Een onderzoek naar de invloed van berichtgeving op de betrokkenen bij interlandelijke adoptie. De interlandelijke adoptie tussen Sri Lanka en Nederland diende als casestudy.
If we want our institutional archives, as knowledge banks and houses of memory, to be democratic and reflect, to a much a greater degree than they currently do, the societies which they are meant...Show moreIf we want our institutional archives, as knowledge banks and houses of memory, to be democratic and reflect, to a much a greater degree than they currently do, the societies which they are meant to serve, then they will need to become more diverse: more diverse in their collections, in their processes, in their personnel and in their actions. Diversity is a complicated and nebulous term. Within the framework of the wider academic discourse about why and how to diversify institutional archives, this thesis focuses on BBC’s The Listening Project (TLP) in the context of the oral history movement. It analyses TLP’s aims, methods and the extent to which it can provide insights into increasing diversity in institutional archives.Show less
This thesis examines the role of the St. Eustatius' blue beads in both the colonial period and the modern days of the island. Many stories are known about these glass beads, and in this thesis...Show moreThis thesis examines the role of the St. Eustatius' blue beads in both the colonial period and the modern days of the island. Many stories are known about these glass beads, and in this thesis their veracity is tested by means of archival research, the results of archaeological studies and research in literature. Nowadays the beads have a significant meaning for the Statian community and have an almost cult status. Also for the archaeologists and tourists the beads are a intriguing phenomena and thus worth to research. Archaeology and maritime history are combined in this study in order to do a thoroughly research on these small objects with a comprehensive story.Show less
The first chapter, entitled “The Narrative”, will provide a short critique to the conventional relationship between word, fact and experience: here will firstly emerge the basilar dualistic frame...Show moreThe first chapter, entitled “The Narrative”, will provide a short critique to the conventional relationship between word, fact and experience: here will firstly emerge the basilar dualistic frame that governed the problem of narrative by separating the official, general, scientific claim of historiography from the personal, variable and subjective narrative of the individual. This reflection will depart from accounting a double crisis of narrative: the one of experience, which forbids any personal narration to become paradigmatic for other individuals, and the one of scientific discourses, differently carried out by several postmodernist thinkers, that argues the inherently interpretative and therefore subjective status of sciences (among which historiography), which prevents them to reach the claim for universality they pursuit. By trying to find a new configuration that would integrate and to rehabilitate these two narratives, our argument will approach the foucaultian idea of an “history of the present”, the only model that would simultaneously unify the formalization of the past with the constant interpretation promoted by the individuals in the present. The second chapter, named “The Voice”, will examine all the possible reasons according to which the materiality of voice would embody the best tool to carry on the claim for an history of the present: we should say that whereas the first chapter engages the problem of the message, the second discusses the problem of the medium. Accordingly, we will attempt to disentangle the human voice from Derrida’s popular critique of logocentrism, by comparing it with several different models that picture the voice as a collective connecter as well as the only medium capable to give the full dimensions of the human: his feelings, his imaginary, his activity into the real world. The last chapter, which takes the name of “The Community”, departs from the possibility for an heterogeneous group of ‘vocalized individuals’ to constitute a community, namely a group definable according to common parameters. For the voice turns out to be the element which transcends all the particular claims for identity, the essential experience of language will become the fundamental experience of a globalized word. What we will be stressing is that, in this plateau, the language is no longer separable from action: by being configured as an action-in-progress, the respective community cannot be completely defined once for allShow less
The aim of this research is to define how oral history can be used as a source of information for archaeological research, and how it can be complementary to an approach in which the local...Show moreThe aim of this research is to define how oral history can be used as a source of information for archaeological research, and how it can be complementary to an approach in which the local community is included. By using the information for practical as well as ethical research engagements through an extensive analysis of the local perspective by looking at historicity and multivocality, it is shown that much more can be achieved with oral history research when the local perspective is thoroughly understood and precisely described. Therefore, Oral history as part of archaeological research is placed in between archaeological ethnography and community archaeology. Analysis of oral history data supports knowledge of the local display of historicization and thus helps to understand the information as deriving from a local perspective, which improves its usefulness for archaeological research. By looking at the presentation of historicity through specific characteristics of oral history storylines, a new framework of reference is presented for further research on combining oral history and archaeology. When the perspective of the local community is understood, information from oral history interviews can be included in the archaeological research as part of a multivocal interpretation of the past. Including voices of the local community and therefore adjusting archaeological research to their perspective and valuation of heritage promotes the active involvement and inclusion of the local community.Show less
