Dr. Stacey Zembrzycki

Baba as Oral Historian: Lessons in Collaborative Practice

In February 2015, the Oral History Centre welcomed Dr. Stacey Zembrzycki from Concordia University. An accomplished Oral Historian, Dr. Zembrzycki lead an afternoon seminar on the challenges of oral history interviewing, and the next evening presented a lecture on her own research into the Depression-era experiences of the Ukrainian community in Sudbury, Ontario. Dr. Zembrzycki spoke in particular to the challenges and opportunities she encountered in “sharing authority” with her Baba, an insider to Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community who had initially helped to facilitate many of the interviews informing Zembrzycki’s research, who then became a fixture in Zembrzycki’s research method as well as research. This ultimately successful collaborative process led to Zembrzycki publishing According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community (UBC Press, 2014). 

For the audio link to the lecture click on the link below: Baba as Oral Historian