The interviews will manifest a specific intergenerational memory as well as the students’ multilingualism, since the students have to manage the transfer from the German world of education to their family’s (or community’s) sphere of language and translate small sections of the interviews into German.

The students are introduced to the issue of social representativeness of historical sources and to the methods of oral history. They develop the questionnaires and perform the audio interviews in small work groups. They cope productively with their own multilingualism and train practices of translation.

The project will make a considerable contribution to an Austrian “archive of migration” with sound recordings of around 70 biographical interviews in as many as 15 to 20 languages. The interviews will be archived with full translations in the Austrian Mediathek and presented there in a web exhibition.

A historical and narratological analysis focusses on concepts and motives of “migration biographies”, as to how migration shapes the biographical account in the intergenerational interview setting. Supported by participant observation, the students’ cognitive trajectories are explored throughout the project: from expectations and preconceptions up to the narrative evolvement of the interviews and their further editing, and in a personal reflection of the entire process. A sociolinguistic examination analyses moments of heteroglossia in the interviews’ recordings.