Talking geography: on oral history and the practice of geography

Following the lead of the pioneering work of George Ewart Evans (1965) and others, oral history increased its influence as an academic approach in the 1970s and 1980s through the work of a small, but prolific, group of politically committed social historians (Perks and Thomson 1998). Perhaps surprisingly, however, there has been relatively little overt cross-pollination between oral history and geography in the intervening years. Indeed, Andrews, Kearns, Kontos and Wilson (2006: 158) have recently commented in Social & Cultural Geography that despite some emerging interest in the use of oral history within geography—discussed below, and of which this collection forms part—‘in comparison to the scope of historical geography as a sub-discipline, . . . the use of oral history is a relatively rare undertaking’. Based on an AHRC-sponsored symposium held in 2004, this short collection of papers extends the published work within the discipline of geography that engages with oral history approaches and sketches an agenda for how the two may proceed in a mutually beneficial fashion