Adult Education and Oral History Contributing
to Armenian-Turkish Reconciliation
Press Release
Since the 1st of August 2009 dvv international (Institute for International Cooperation of the German Adult Education Association), in close cooperation with its national office in Yerevan, has been implementing a project with the aim of contributing to the Armenian-Turkish reconciliation process. The project is financed by the German Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt). In Turkey, Anadolu Kultur, a local NGO working in the sphere of culture and arts, and in Armenia the Center for Ethnological Studies “Hazarashen” are the main partners of the project.
This new project has the aim of building bridges between Turkish and Armenian societies through adult education, intercultural exchange and oral history research. Oral history is a newly popularized research method in Armenia and Turkey to study the experience of ordinary individuals on the basis of memory.
The activities of the project include a start-up meeting in Istanbul, a student camp in Dilijan, Armenia, and oral history research in Turkey and Armenia respectively. In the camp, university students from both countries were trained in oral history, and gained experience by conducting interviews with local families in the region. The training and the oral history research were directed by Professor Leyla Neyzi (Sabanci University, Istanbul) and Professor Hranush Kharatyan-Araqelyan (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia,Yerevan).
Since October 2009, the research groups have been conducting oral history interviews with individuals from a variety of regions, backgrounds, and generations in each country. The product of this research is a book which includes lifestory narratives of individuals based on memories transmitted through generations. We believe that by placing the stories of people from Armenia and Turkey together, we initiate a dialogue between our societies and our peoples concerning the past, the present and the future.
The materials of the project are available on project’s web site: www.learningtolisten.de.
For further information contact:
Matthias Klingenberg at dvv international Bonn: