More than thirty-five years after the end of the Lebanese civil war, what has been preserved of its memory remains confined to the major events: the massacres, the battles, the dates that entered the national vocabulary. What has not been preserved is the ordinary, the peripheral and the unspoken; the experience of displacement, coexistence, loss, survival and daily life, as lived by people whose accounts never entered any record.

UMAM Documentation and Research, in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme in Lebanon, is launching a programme to train twenty young people under the age of thirty-five in collecting, documenting and producing oral history testimonies. Participants are selected across the four regions “the North and Akkar, Baalbek-Hermel and the Bekaa, Jbeil-Keserwan and Mount Lebanon, Nabatieh and the South” and with a balance between women and men, so that the documentation reaches the areas memory projects rarely touch.

The training runs for twelve days in Beirut and covers the full lifecycle of a testimony: the foundations of oral history and how it differs from journalistic interviewing; identifying the witness and preparing for the interview; sensitive interviewing and the principle of do no harm; interview technique and question construction; audio and visual documentation; material management and metadata; transcription, editing and the responsible use of artificial intelligence; and finally preservation, cataloguing, indexing and access.

The training is followed by fieldwork under continuous methodological and editorial supervision, producing fifty documented testimonies that enter the UMAM archive and become available on the Kharita wa Zakira application.

The criterion governing selection is not the importance of the event, but the absence of its telling. The project does not seek a single narrative of the war, but the experiences of individuals in their contradictions and divergences, giving priority to testimonies not yet told over re-documenting what is already on record.

Applications are welcome from anyone concerned with memory, archiving and the collection of testimony: students, researchers, journalists, activists and artists. Basic experience in documentation, journalism or research is an advantage, not a condition.

Deadline for applications: 15 October 2026
To apply and for further details: [email protected]

This activity is supported by the United Nations Development Programme, in partnership with UN Women, and funded by the Government of Canada.

Image Credit: Black-and-white photographic print from the UMAM Documentation & Research collection: “Commemorating the first anniversary of Émile Bustani’s death, 15 March 1964.”