Documenting lived experience, interpreting social change, and shaping digital memory.

At the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), oral history is more than a method—it’s a perspective. It serves as a critical lens through which we engage with the social, cultural, and political complexities of Luxembourg and the Greater Region. By tracing lived experience across linguistic borders and institutional landscapes, we explore how individuals and communities narrate migration, memory, inequality, and identity within—and beyond—national frames.

Situated at the intersection of historical inquiry, cultural anthropology, and digital humanities, our projects combine rigorous scholarship with innovative, ethically grounded digital practice. We go beyond testimony collection to develop reflexive methodologies that center narrative meaning-making, affective dynamics, and power asymmetries. Through AI-assisted transcription, structured metadata, and GDPR-compliant archival infrastructures, we create transparent and durable workflows for the curation, interpretation, and reuse of oral history data.

At its core, our work is collaborative and dialogical. We engage participants not merely as informants, but as co-producers of knowledge—acknowledging their interpretive agency in shaping the historical record. Through digital storytelling, public archiving, and contextualized dissemination, we strive to make oral histories intellectually accessible, socially resonant, and politically meaningful. In doing so, we open up new avenues for understanding how people remember, how they locate themselves in historical time, and how they envision the futures to which they aspire.