I am an experienced oral history interviewer. Between 2011-2014 I led the NSW Government Printing Office Oral History Project as part of my PhD research, which resulted in the book Hot Metal: Material Culture and Tangible Labour. In 2016 I initiated the Reshaping Australian Manufacturing oral history project (2017-2019) in partnership with the National Library of Australia. My current project, Makers, Manufacturers & Designers: Connecting Histories, will also be collected in the National Library’s Oral History and Folklore Collection.
I am regularly involved in public forums and discussions regarding oral history methods and interpretation, with Oral History NSW and the Australian Centre for Public History.
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Relevant Publications, re: oral history theory & practice: (See Writing page for PDFs)
Stein, JA, 2022, ‘The Historian as Document Producer: A Critical Reflection on the Production of Oral History Timed Summaries’, in K. Biber, P. Vaughan & T. Luker (eds), Law’s Documents: Materiality, Authority, Aesthetics, Routledge, London.
Stein, JA 2021, Industrial Craft in Australia: Oral Histories of Creativity & Survival (Palgrave Macmillan).
Stein, JA, and Rowden, E, 2019, ‘Architecture from the Inside: Challenging the Myths of Architectural History through the Oral Histories of Maitland Gaol’, in Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research, in Janina Gosseye, Naomi Stead and Deborah van der Plaat (eds), Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 28-49.
Stein, JA 2014, ‘The co-construction of spatial memory: Enriching architectural histories of “ordinary” buildings’, Fabrications, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 178-97. DOI: 1080/10331867.2014.961222.
Stein, JA 2013, ‘“That was a posed photo”: Reflections on the process of combining oral histories with institutional photographs’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal, vol. 35, pp. 49–57.