Dr. Brudney’s recent article, “Individual Life Histories and Emblematic Memories: Conducting Oral Histories in Post-Conflict Argentina” (2025) received Honorable Mention for the Oral History Association‘s best article award.
Dr. Brudney’s article, which appeared in Vol. 52, No. 2 of the Oral History Review last year, was nominated for the Oral History Association’s annual article prize. The prize committee awarded the article an “Honorable Mention,” and highlighted the article’s success “examin[ing] the ways that a narrator recast his own life story to suit the contemporary political context and caused him to rethink questions related to power relationships within interviews.”
Dr. Brudney describes the article as follows:
This article interrogates the relationship between individual memories and frameworks for collective remembering in Argentina since the most recent civic-military dictatorship (1976–83). Drawing on long-form, semistructured interviews with the former secretary general of one of Argentina’s largest unions, I analyze a moment of conflict in which the narrator confronted archival evidence that contradicted a key claim within his life story: namely, that he had not interacted with regime authorities. The narrator responded to these documents by explicitly claiming that they had been falsified. What I only partially understood at that moment was that the discrepancy between the narrator’s claims and the documentary evidence echoed long-standing accusations that he had either been complicit or actively collaborated with the dictatorship in the 1970s. The article is an attempt to make sense of his reaction along two axes. First, I situate the narrator’s denial of the evidence within the sociopolitical context of Argentina in 2015, analyzing how that denial fits alongside broader shifts in collective memory frameworks. I suggest that the thematic scaffolding of the narrator’s life story can help illuminate a more general response to the dominant emblematic memory of the time. Second, I interrogate our interpersonal relationship and look at the power dynamics that enabled the narrator to feel confident in asserting that the evidence was counterfeit. I argue that our interaction sheds light on problems within oral history methodologies related to assumptions about truth, clashes of personality, and differing levels of linguistic comfort. By considering the narrator’s life story, the accusations against him, and his refutation of evidence that ran counter to his interpretation of the past, I suggest that this incident helps illuminate how narrators remember, and forget, specific aspects of their lives to better fit post-conflict emblematic memories.
If you’d like to read the article, you can find it here. Congratulations, Dr. Brudney!