Documenting and Interpreting Conflict through Oral History - Incite at Columbia University

In summer 2012, Mary Marshall Clark of the Columbia University Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and Lucine Taminian of The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TAARII) received a small grant from the Hollings Center for International Dialogue to produce guidelines for the ethics and methodologies of collecting life histories in conflict and post-conflict situations. TAARII administered the grant.

These small grants were follow-up support from a Hollings Center for International Dialogue led by Dr. George Gavrilis, the director of the Hollings Center, with nearly 30 oral historians from the United States, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

The goal of the conference, and of the grants that followed, was to use oral history to explore new conversations and methodologies over borders not usually crossed.