Faculty 2024-2025 Collaborative Fellowship (Internal Funding)

Future Histories is a regional stakeholder group led by UNE, and the focus of a recent infrastructure funding bid under the Regional Precincts and Partnerships Program of the Australian Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts. The Future Histories initiative is developing partnerships between UNE and heritage and cultural groups, local government organisations and community groups, with a view to digitising and improving accessibility of extant regional historical artefacts and archives, and documenting contemporary narratives, experiences and events that will enable better understandings of the region for future generations. This oral history project, Contemporary Narratives of the Tablelands in Change, is the first empirical study conducted under the Future Histories initiative, and will collect a range of contemporary narratives about participants’ experience of environmental, cultural, socioeconomic and infrastructure change in the region.

The study will explore the ways that participants understand and construct their experiences through oral history interviews with people from the local precincts of Uralla and Guyra. These two towns, each of which is approximately 30 minutes from the regional centre of Armidale, offer interesting points of contrast and comparison. Uralla (population 2,728) and Guyra (population 2,077) Interviews will enable the research team to better understand how local experience is understood and narrated, and to explore ‘processes through which place is socially constructed with regard to extralocal factors: place comparison allows residents to highlight potential risks by contrasting their own places with others while place meta–narratives allow actors to draw on culturally available notions of types of places’ (Alkon et al., 2008, p. 97).

Funder: University of New England
Awarded amount: A$15,902.15