Join us online or in person for a seminar with Deborah Lee-Talbot, Mia Martin Hobbs, Fiona Gatt, Timothy Jones, Kathleen McPhillips, and Charlotte Feakins

Toward a trauma-informed historical practice

Over the past 50 years, there has been increasing academic and public interest in understanding traumatic pasts. In this seminar, we bring together academic and professional historians with scholars who have developed trauma-informed approaches in heritage, sociology, and history, to begin a conversation about developing guidelines for best practices for historians working on traumatic material.

Each of our presenters will speak to their experiences working with traumatic histories. Drawing on her oral history work with Vietnam veterans, Mia will discuss some of the challenges she faced in responding to and researching testimonies of war crimes during her PhD. Kath will share the challenges involved for researchers in interviewing victim/survivors and family members with particular regard to hearing distressing accounts of sexual harm, and how to manage this in the set-up of the research process. Deborah will brief you about her experience as a professional historian in a private school archive and the unexpected, incidental exposure to trauma that occurred. Tim will discuss individual, team and institutional strategies developed to mitigate risks of vicarious trauma during his ten year investigation of LGBTQA+ conversion practices in Australia. Fiona will share her experience working outside academia with primary source material relating to First Nations history, including the challenge of protecting the cultural safety of the community. Drawing on collaborative work with and for First Nations communities, Charlotte will discuss the use of trauma-informed approaches in the heritage sector. We then invite the CCH audience to reflect and contribute with their experiences of researching traumatic histories. Our goal is to gather a comprehensive understanding of the various issues faced by historians, in order to develop guidelines to support our community of researchers.

21st May 2025, 11am AEDT

Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here