Diversity of Voices in Sources: Decentering Approaches to Researching and Teaching

On March 24, the Ludwig-Maximilian- University of Munich hosted a one-day workshop dedicated to archival sources and methodological approaches to working with them in an attempt to explore marginalized experiences of the past.

How can we overcome the "violence of the archive" and its silence about the past of certain groups of people about whom the preserved sources say nothing or say very little? How to talk about this silence and how to research it? During the workshop, the participants discussed archives and the sources of their research. On the eve of the event, each participant shared the most relevant source or sources from their own research that can serve as a telling example of researching underrepresented historical experiences (such as women slaves in the Ottoman Empire, orphans who became participants in the great nineteenth-century labor emigration from Britain to Canada and Australia, oilfield workers in Boryslav or domestic servants in Habsburg Galicia in the late nineteenth century, witnesses to the Holocaust in small Carpathian towns during World War II, etc.)

During the meeting, the participants discussed teaching and learning, decentralization and diversification of curricula with new topics and comparisons, as well as practices of working with sources in student classrooms.

The workshop was the result of cooperation between the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, the Center for Urban History, and the newly established Max Weber Foundation Research Center Ukraine.

Participants of the workshop:

• Natalia Aleksiun (University of Florida);
• Ivanna Cherchovych (Center for Urban History);
• Sofia Dyak (Center for Urban History);
• Iryna Klymenko (Ludwig Maximilian University);
• Vladyslava Moskalets (Center for Urban History / Ukrainian Catholic University);
• Susanne Quitmann (Ludwig Maximilian University);
• Iryna Sklokina (Center for Urban History);
• Sina Steglich (Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich);
• Verusсhka Wagner (University of Bonn);
• Yuriy Zazuliak (Ludwig Maximilian University / Ukrainian Catholic University).

Organizers of the workshop:

• Ivanna Cherchovych, Center for Urban History;
• Iryna Klymenko, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Credits

Cover Image: V. Stefanyk National Library of Ukraine, Manuscripts Department, 41/123, item 24

Gallery: photos by Sofia Dyak and Ivanna Cherchovych