Regional Writing and Oral History, from China Clay to Eden

Promoting tangible and intangible hidden cultural heritage: local communities influencing civic decision-making and international cultural policy

“…The availability of more affordable technology, including mobile phones and tablets with integrated cameras, make it easier to use social networking sites incorporating video, audio and photography to tell stories, to the extent that it has changed 'how we visualize intimate cartographies though shifting camera phone practices' (Hjorth 2013, 113). Digital recording is a logical extension of storytelling and oral history, and is increasingly important for documenting intangible heritage, as evidenced in its usage by significant cultural agencies such as UNESCO (Trower 2011;Pietrobruno 2013).…”

Making a Town: Urbanity, Rurality, and the Politics of Place in Ebersbach (Fils), 1945-1989

“…11 While it is necessary to pay close attention to the different layers of meaning in the oral testimony and separate present-day nostalgia from past memories, oral history can thus function as a particularly valuable tool to trace processes of place-making in contemporary history. 12 The analysis proceeds chronologically in three parts. It begins by introducing Ebersbach and examining how the locals used notions of urbanity and rurality to place themselves in a modernizing West German nation in the first two postwar decades.…”