‘In Between?’, an educational project running since April 2016, aims to explore the history of the 20th century and its legacy in border regions. The participants are given the opportunity to conduct oral history research in European borderlands. Gaining theoretical knowledge and interdisciplinary and practical skills, they record history’s witnesses, local activists and representatives from local institutions, in order to create a podcast about the specificities of the border region they visit.
The participating students (aged 18–26), selected in an international two-stage recruitment process, represent various fields of interest, including history, cultural anthropology, sociology, linguistics, journalism and the arts. First they take part in interdisciplinary workshops, learning the basics of how to conduct interviews, make audio recordings and acquire the necessary information about historical contexts. Later on, having been split into smaller groups, they travel to the borderland regions in order to speak with representatives of the local communities.
Since 2016, 26 regions or cities in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe have been visited, including Silesia in the German-Polish border region; Transylvania and Bukovina in Romania; the city of Pécs in the Hungarian-Croatian border region; Southern Styria in the Polish-Lithuanian border region; the Slovak-Czech border; Catalonia; Alsace; and border regions in the Western Balkans. The project received a special mention in Europa Nostra Awards 2018.
