Every week in the summer The duty takes you on the side roads of university life. A proposal that is both scholarly and intimate, to be picked up like a postcard during the summer season. Fourth stopover: the podcast One night storywith Éloïse Venne, who is a master’s student in history at UQAM.
History plays an important role in Quebec. Taught in compulsory education in primary and secondary schools, it is also present in political speeches, in language expressions, in the media, and so on. Historical knowledge is used by various social actors, and it travels between the different spheres that make up our community.
Faced with this circulation of ideas and the many questions that arise from it, professional historians are regularly called upon to speak out in the public arena. These specialists are invited to expose the historical roots of a topical subject, to present their most recent work, to publish scientific popularization works or to give conferences on a specific subject. In short, these researchers are regularly approached to discuss their scholarly and scientific production, or more specifically the content of their research.
In the podcast One night story, the historian is rather led to answer very simple questions relating to his intellectual stimulations, his personality, his relationship with knowledge, his professional network, his university career or even his teaching methods. The objective is to create a space conducive to reflections on several levels on the nature of the discipline and the exercise of the profession.
Between September and December 2021, I produced a first series of eight episodes of this podcast, which was broadcast on various international platforms. In each of these episodes, a historian or historian specializing in the history of Quebec and Canada came to meet me, in Montreal, at Studio SF, for an interview ranging from 40 to 50 minutes. Overall, the series aims to disseminate informal conversations about the historical profession and its various components. Thus, although the episodes have historical content, the spotlight is first and foremost on the person who produced this new knowledge.
“History depends on the social and institutional position of the person who writes it”, points out Antoine Prost in Twelve lessons in history (1996). In One night story, it is not considered as an exact, obvious and cumulative science, where the scholar is simply called upon to know as many historical facts as possible. On the contrary, the knowledge of the different currents of thought and the debates that cross this discipline is put forward, and the commitment of the researcher, the researcher to understand the different mechanisms that influence his anchoring and his intellectual choices is valued.
” [Ma génération et moi], we were too young to do the Quiet Revolution, but we benefited a lot from it. And so when you get to university, you want to understand this new Quebec that is emerging, and [l’idée] a course on the history of Quebec since Confederation [nous] lit. And most, many in any case, people of my class have chosen to go in that direction”, says Paul-André Linteau, in episode 8: “Becoming a historian at the time of the Quiet Revolution”.
By listening to multiple historians discuss their life journeys and the development of their careers in history, the listener of the podcast will be able to understand that different divisions and debates cross this discipline, which, seen from the outside, can often seem uniform and difficult to question.
“In CEGEP, I had a teacher [qui] gave us a course in historiography. [Il] explained to us that [la] how we evaluate [l’histoire diffère] from one generation to another. [Je] remember the kind of cognitive shock I had. […] I found it extraordinary, and I remember that many of my classmates found it deadly boring. But I was fascinated by it, and I think that’s where I got hooked on history,” says Denyse Baillargeon in episode 2: “Retrospective of a career in social history.”
A forum for intellectuals
At the time of starting this podcast project, I was thrilled by the idea of giving, however humbly, a forum to Quebec intellectuals. Personally, I have been experimenting since I was 17 with what the philosopher Alain Kerlan calls “philosophical companionship”. Indeed, like many of my contemporaries, I see that my thinking is evolving, accompanied by certain intellectual figures who have marked me at one time or another in my career.
Thus, I am grateful to have bathed in the philosophical thought of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir even before I was 20, to have viewed the archives of interviews with sociologist Fernand Dumont in the local student newspaper at Cégep Limoilou by being amazed, intrigued and completely disconcerted by his remarks, and having trained at the UQAR gym while listening to the historian Gérard Bouchard explain his conception of the notion of “identity”.
It is, in my opinion, fundamental that intellectuals have the media space necessary for them to speak out, in order to freely express their critical discourse on society. On the other hand, I think it is just as essential that citizens be exposed to a multitude of points of view on the same subject, however complex it may be, so that everyone is able to develop their critical thinking and their own with doubt. From this perspective, the free and accessible format of the podcast as a new digital medium is more than relevant.
If everything goes as I wish, One night story will be back this fall. A new series of interviews with historians associated with different institutional homeports is being developed and, spoiler beware, notions of the nature and social function of history should be given even greater prominence. -plan. Good listening !