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In interview: Dr Stéphanie Panichelli-Batalla on laughter in oral histories of displacement

Cuban Health Specialists arrive in South Africa to support efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Image credit: GovernmentZA/flickr

Dr Stéphanie Panichelli-Batalla, Head of the School for Cross-faculty Studies, was recently interviewed by the Oral History Review about the role of laughter in oral history interviews. You can read the interview here. This interview is directly linked to Stéphanie's paper, "Laughter in Oral Histories of Displacement: 'One Goes on a Mission to Solve Their Problems'", published in the Oral History Review.

Both the interview and paper are based on a wider project started by Stéphanie in 2014, entitled “Life Stories of Cuban internationalist healthcare professionals”. The project aims to fill the gap in the existing literature on Cuban internationalist healthcare professionals, allowing the professionals themselves to "share their stories and help us gain a better understanding of what it meant for them to join these missions, how the work impacted their lives and those of their families, and the challenges they faced as Cuban internationalists."

You might also be interested in the following news items on Stéphanie's recent work: