Allowing the past to speak

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Engaging with history at #OHA2017

For most Americans, Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks for all of the best things in life: family, friends, football, and, of course, heaps of delectable food. Few care to spend any time thinking about the myths that underlie American perceptions of the holiday, and even fewer can appreciate how and why this holiday is frequently observed as a day of mourning among many Native Americans. Protests at Standing Rock and throughout the football world have made it much more difficult to sweep the histories of historically marginalized groups under the rug this holiday season. This year, Thanksgiving and its commonly espoused “theology of divine abundance” will not be enough to obscure the histories of inequality and violence America was founded upon.

Like these protests, the presentations I attended during the Oral History Association’s 2017 annual meeting delivered critical historical narratives and resources that can help us to further challenge some of the nationalist myths that obscure the experiences and perspectives of various marginalized communities in American history. These presentations helped to illuminate important lessons we can learn from an engagement with the histories and contemporary concerns of marginalized peoples in the US. In honor of the holiday season, I have put together a short list of what I was most thankful for during OHA2017.

1. OHA 2017 Keynote Address: Jill Lepore, “Joe Gould, Augusta Savage, and Oral History’s Dark Past”

I think most OHA2017 attendees would agree that the real star of Jill Lepore’s keynote address, in addition to Lepore herself, was Augusta Savage. Though Lepore’s talk (and the book it draws on) focused largely on Joe Gould, the ostensible father of oral history, conversations during the Q&A that followed her lecture focused almost exclusively on Augusta Savage and Lepore’s allusions to the years of physical and sexual violence she suffered at the hands of Joe Gould. And, perhaps even more significant was Lepore’s assertion that there were a number of important men involved in protecting Gould from facing any legal consequences for his violent acts against Savage. This story has begun to ring loudly in my ears as a number of influential men in Hollywood–long protected by their status and associations with other prominent men in the business–tumble down from their pedestals in the face of women who have been inspired to tell their stories by campaigns like #MeToo. Serendipitously timely, Lepore’s, address helps to advance our knowledge on the subject of women, sexism, and (sexual) violence in American history just as we–as a nation–are finally beginning to grapple with the knowledge that women are subjected to wide-spread and largely accepted forms of sexual harassment and sexual violence on a daily basis. As we begin to deal more fully with this reality and all of its (un)intended e/affects, it will be important to earnestly reflect on how race plays a role in shaping women’s (and men’s) experiences with sexism and sexual violence, and stories like Savages’ will provide us with a critical starting place to do this work.

2. Roundtable 065. Documenting Activism in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter and Standing Rock

Everything about this roundtable was superb, however, what I want to share with readers here are links to some of the oral history focused resources roundtable participants have played key roles in establishing for public consumption. These resources would be great sources of information for teachers and researchers alike:

The Documenting the Now project works to ethically collect and preserve “the public’s use of social media for chronicling historically significant events,” and is supported jointly by the University of Maryland, University of California, Riverside (UCR), and Washington University in St. Louis.

Inside the Activists Studio (IAS) is a web-based series that is easily accessible via YouTube and takes inspiration for the interview-styles of the popular television series “Inside the Actors Studio.” Each episode features an interview with activists about their own “political awakening and biography of activism” and is posted online for free and easy access (at least for those with access to a computer and internet).

Invisible to Invincible: Asian Activism in MN, a short documentary film available on YouTube, works to unpack the model minority stereotype while also exploring the history of Asian activism in Minnesota and the US more broadly.

3. Panel 091. Oral History and Critical Pedagogies

Each of the papers presented during this panel were extremely different in their content and subject matter, some presenters sharing insights from their university based institutional ethnographic work and others discussing the use of family oral histories to destabilize neoliberal pedagogies; however, these presentations were tied together by a few underlying ‘truths’ about the significance of oral history to developing critical pedagogies. First, the theme of lost knowledge and/or obscured stories came through in all three papers, as did the real ways that oral history can be used as a tool to bring light to ‘lost’ knowledge or stories of the past. Perhaps more significant, however, are the ways in which each presenter showed us exactly how and why it is so important for teachers, academics, and activists to learn from the communities they work within. In bringing the methods, theories and tools of oral history research into the classroom and other educational spaces, these presenters were able to show us how giving students and teachers the opportunity to bring parts of themselves into their learning environments can enable them to work together to build solidarity and new forms of identity. Thus, the most important truth to be gleaned from the presenters on this panel: When learning is a two-way street, oral history stories have the power to change the present.

What are you thankful for this year? Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: ‘Demilitarize the Police, Black Lives Matter’ by Johnny Silvercloud, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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On burnout, trauma, and self-care with Erin Jessee

Last week, Erin Jessee gave us a list of critical questions to ask to mitigate risk in oral history fieldwork. Today, we’ve invited Jessee back to the blog to talk more in-depth about her recently published article, “Managing Danger in Oral Historical Fieldwork,” spotting signs of trauma during interviews, and dealing with the sensitive nature of oral history.

You note that discussion of dangerous or distressing research encounters are common in “corridor talks” among oral historians, yet rarely make it into the scholarly literature. What kind of feedback or reactions have you had from colleagues as you make these conversations more public?  

Since the article went online, I’ve had a handful of emails thanking me for taking the time to write it, as it’s helping oral historians think through the dangers they’ve faced in past projects, and begin assessing potential future dangers. I also presented a few key points from the article at the Oral History Association meeting in Minneapolis, and the responses were entirely positive and supportive of the idea that—particularly given the recent deregulation of oral history in the United States—we can and should be doing more to assess danger in our work. Most oral historians seem to at least recognize the need to be more open about the potential for danger or emotional distress resulting either directly from the difficult narratives to which they’re exposed or from the personal wounds that these narratives reopen. The few resistant individuals tend to come from other fields, and object on the grounds that it wrongly detracts attention away from our participants. I understand this concern, but I think we need to find a balance between acknowledging the potentially negative impact our research can have on our mental and physical health—ideally, to create an environment that offers practitioners who are struggling more support—while still privileging participants’ narratives.

How can oral historians do a better job of spotting signs of trauma in each other, and responding positively?  

This is important, because I get the impression that many oral historians feel embarrassed or ashamed to admit when their physical and mental health has been negatively impacted by their research. Many of us are navigating heavy workloads, and it doesn’t seem practical to suggest that we all undertake formal training in counselling. Likewise, we may not all be in positions where we’re able or willing to take on the often-unpaid emotional labor that is demanded of us in helping our colleagues process personal or work-related crises, particularly when it extends beyond a momentary bad mood or emergency. But there are things we can do in our professional lives that can make it easier for us to support our colleagues when they’re in distress or minimize the potential for that distress to occur in the first place. For example, Beth Hudnall Stamm’s tips for self-care are helpful for resilience-planning in advance of fieldwork but also include small acts that people can incorporate into their everyday lives. Over time they can help to make them not only more aware of the sources of stress and harm they navigate in their work, research, and personal lives, but also make us more supportive and empathetic colleagues and coworkers.

Because of the sensitive nature of your work, some of the life histories you record must ultimately be destroyed. Have you had any difficulty navigating that reality with narrators who want to have their full story told, or institutions and scholars that want access to the primary data?   

Because I’ve incorporated a very thorough informed consent process throughout my fieldwork, and most of the people I’ve interviewed are intimately familiar with the potential risks they face in participating in the research project, I haven’t encountered any resistance from participants to destroying the interviews we’ve conducted in the past. I should note, however, that the destruction of these interviews was a requirement of the ethics committee at the university where I conducted my doctoral studies, the underlying research design for which underwent review in 2007. I haven’t heard of any researchers in recent years being required to destroy their fieldwork data. Indeed, current best practices seem to allow for the anonymization of any materials that contain personally identifying information, and limited archiving—usually closed to the public and future researchers unless permission is given by the original researcher and/or participants.

That said, with the push to demonstrate positive public impact in academic research, I have noticed some tensions between researchers, and university administration and funding agencies. In the UK, universities often maintain online repositories in which oral historians are expected to deposit their interviews, as well as associated publications, to comply with open access requirements. Funding agencies can, as a starting point, require researchers to make use of these repositories as a condition for applying for funding. The tensions emerge around researchers’ concerns that while these repositories include options for closing sensitive materials to the public, they’re still held online and, as such, are hackable. Researchers’ efforts to remove any personally identifying information prior to depositing data in these repositories doesn’t eliminate the possibility of someone’s face or voice being recognized in the event these materials do find their way into the outside world. As such, researchers who are conducting research on potentially sensitive subject matter often feel they are inappropriate for archiving their data, particularly for older projects in which these online repositories were not discussed as a potential means of archiving or dissemination for the interviews entrusted to us.

Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here? 

The US Oral History Association (OHA) has formed a Task Force charged with revisiting the organization’s Principles and Best Practices in light of deregulation and the increasingly authoritarian political climate in the US. The Task Force will be presenting the revised best practices for discussion at the OHA meeting in Montréal in October 2018. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Oral History Society and the Oral History Network of Ireland are organizing what will undoubtedly be an important conference in June 2018 on Dangerous Oral Histories: Risks, Responsibilities, and Rewards. This means there will be lots of opportunities for oral historians to publically discuss the challenges they face in their research, as well as strategies for more effectively anticipating and managing danger, regardless of where and with whom they are conducting interviews.

What self-care strategies do you utilize? Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Exhaustion” by Jessica Cross. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

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Six questions to ask before you hit record

Erin Jessee’s article “Managing Danger in Oral Historical Fieldwork” in the most recent issue of the OHR provides a litany of practical advice about mitigating risk and promoting security. The entire article is well worth a read, but for the blog we’ve asked Jessee to provide us a list of some of the most important questions for oral historians to think about in evaluating and limiting exposure to risk. Enjoy the response below, and make sure to check out the complete article, where Jessee dives more deeply into the problem and offers an important perspective on the relationship between danger and oral history fieldwork. And make sure to come back to the blog in a couple of weeks for part two of our conversation with Jessee, where we talk about best practices, spotting signs of trauma, the ethics of open access, and more!

The most important thing that oral historians can do is network to establish a community of scholars/practitioners who have experience working in the communities or areas where you plan to conduct your research and who might be more keenly aware of the potential dangers you’ll need to address. It’s particularly important to speak with people who share at least some facets of your identity in terms of gender identity, class background, ethnic heritage, religious beliefs, sexuality, and so on, to better determine how your identity—as perceived by the people you’ll be working closely with—might shape or limit your research and the kinds of questions you can ask. Similarly, in my experience it’s important to evaluate the information that is freely revealed in the course of conversations with experienced scholars/practitioners, but also to consider the silences that might be emerging. Not all scholars/practitioners are comfortable speaking openly about the problems they’ve encountered in their research—particularly if it stems from some real or perceived error on their part—and so these areas of silence can be crucial for anticipating where you might experience potential pitfalls.

To help oral historians anticipate risk, I’d suggest asking the following:

1. Who are the ideal people within and beyond academia to speak to about my intended research project? In drawing up your list, be sure to consider not only who might constitute ‘experts’ in terms of their overall publication record in relevant fields, but in terms of recent on-the-ground experience conducting qualitative research within and beyond academia. Additionally, consider what is the most appropriate way to approach them for advice.
2. How might different facets of my identity be perceived by the people I intend to work with? These can shape how people respond to you in interviews and more generally.
3. Where am I encountering silences? Listen closely during the background research and early conversations you conduct, and consider the extent to which any emergent silences might indicate additional areas of risk or danger that are important to evaluate further prior to starting my fieldwork.

Oral historians should also take the time to consider the various ways that they might be vulnerable within their research projects, and identify the resources available to them in their immediate surroundings aimed at helping them maintain positive mental and physical health. I’d suggest the following questions as starting points:

4. In what ways might this research project negatively impact my mental and physical health? Think not only about the obvious stressors related to workload and deadlines, but also ways in which your personal experiences and deeply held values might render you vulnerable to transference/countertransference, vicarious trauma, and burn-out, for example, as well as physical danger.
5. What resources are available to me in my community that I can draw upon to help maintain positive mental and physical health? It’s important to consider not only health services associated with the universities and organizations that you’re working with, but also options external to our places of work, such as 24-hour help lines, community support groups, and so on.
6. What are some everyday activities that I find enjoyable and relaxing, and that take my mind off my work/research? Focus on arranging your day/week/month to include these activities frequently enough to maximize your potential for resilience throughout the project.

As researchers, it’s important that we incorporate self-care strategies into our everyday lives throughout research projects—not just once we begin to experience poor mental or physical health.

What risks have you encountered in fieldwork, and what strategies have you developed to mitigate them? Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Risk Word Letters Boggle Game” by Wokandapix. CC0 via Pixabay. 

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Beyond the cold fact: The WPA narratives, Brazil’s black peasants, and the conduct of oral history

Last month the latest issue of the OHR hit the streets, bringing a litany of groundbreaking oral history content. Today we hear from Oscar de la Torre, author of a piece in OHR 44.2 that explored the place of narratives of good masters in the oral memories of Afro-Brazilians. Below, he asks what “layers of meaning” emerge through these recordings that perhaps fall outside the bounds of either purely factual information or oral traditions.

When the 1988 Constitution recognized and gave lands to black rural communities descending from slaves, the black peasants of Brazil made a sudden entrance into the country’s political realm. As they began to embrace their African ancestry and made it to the news all over the country, a number of scholars and journalists scrambled for some research funding, grabbed their recorders, and headed to the remotest corners of the country’s gigantic wilderness to interview these apparently unknown black peasants. It was an endeavor comparable to the famous WPA slave narratives from the Great Depression.

The process of recognizing and titling the black communities started in the 1990s with a technical report clarifying the community’s past ties to slavery, so the first wave of scholars that studied them had the goal of unearthing memories about life under this institution, just as in the case of the WPA narratives. Both sets of interviews tried to rescue experiences from a time when most interviewees were only children, and in the case of Brazil, from an era in which most interviewees had not even been born. In fact, a number of anthropologists from the states of Pará, São Paulo, or Rio de Janeiro, often collected “oral traditions,” more than personal experiences or memories. As we know, oral traditions can under certain premises be used to accompany and complement historical studies, but they need to be carefully managed, and cross-examined with other sources. Instead, a number of the early reports on the Brazilian black communities took oral traditions just as factual evidence, dismissing the rich but often ignored symbolic load that they carried. A recent PhD thesis written in Amazonia, for example, took the stories about a well where the former slaves were buried without proper rituals as factual evidence, when it is highly likely that this story symbolizes a shared past marked by collective trauma and abuse, more so than indicating a specific place where this happened.

The Brazilian scholars who collected oral histories during the 1990s and 2000s also worked under tight schedules, because some black communities started the process of official recognition as a way of stopping the land grabs of landowners and agribusiness during those years. Working to meet tight deadlines meant that some early studies lacked a deeper consideration of the type of evidence they had in their hands. In the Trombetas River (Amazonia), for example, the report published in 1991 relied on a number of oral myths and stories understood as quasi-factual evidence from the time of slavery. For example, an oral narrative about an elderly woman who was also a powerful spiritual leader at the time some maroon communities were created was interpreted as a signpost that this woman was already old during the early 1800s. Shortly afterwards, a historian found a travelogue featuring a photograph of the same woman taken in 1902. The narrative, in other words, had been used as factual evidence in a somewhat careless manner. Like this, other reports written in the provinces of Maranhão, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, or Bahia, gave a somewhat superficial treatment to the oral traditions conveyed by the black peasants, especially at the beginning.

Cases such as these point to the fact that there are still numerous stories and layers of meaning waiting to be probed in studies about black oral traditions in Brazil. The Oral History and Image Laboratory from Rio de Janeiro’s Federal Fluminense University or UFF, or the Federal University of Maranhão, are repositories of a large number of interviews with slave-descendants from the 1980s and beyond waiting to be interrogated with new questions in mind. If researchers can approach them formulating imaginative questions that point not to slavery, but to events experienced after it was abolished, and if they can approach them with new conceptual tools drawn from cultural and media studies, such collections can bear a number of valuable lessons and relate a number of interesting stories. My Oral History Review article, “Sites of Memory and Time Slips,” points to two of these concepts, but there are more. Why are there no literary studies of the figure of the patriarchal slaveowner, for example? Why has no one investigated yet the relationships between discourses about slaveowners and post-emancipation landowners? Why has no one interrogated the gender roles and representations of both black peasant women and affluent white women embedded in these sets of memories? To the best of my knowledge, there is also little to nothing published on the racial categories and representations that rural Brazilians employ in their daily life.

Oral histories about black peasants in Brazil, in sum, are newer than in the U.S. They have not experienced as many waves of scholarship as the WPA narratives, which have been alternatively embraced and rebutted by scholars like Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Leon Litwack, Eugene Genovese, Ira Berlin, Sharon Musher, or Michael Gomez, ever since they were published in the 1940s. That is why there is still substantial room to tackle them with new questions, new concepts, and new approaches. Our beloved oral histories constitute a kind of evidence that will yield rich and nuanced responses about the history of rural Brazilians–and about the history of American ones as well, once someone starts a comparative study. But in order to do so, they demand to be treated with a sensitive eye, an open-minded ear, and an imaginative tackle.

Featured image: “Vallée de l’Amazone de Faro a Alemquer, Rio Trombetas – Rio Ariramba” by Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Listening to ‘all our stories’: An insider’s guide to #OHA2017 in the Twin Cities

A few weeks ago we began counting down to the OHA Annual Meeting, which is now just around the corner. Today, as promised, we bring you an insider’s look at Twin Cities from Gabriale Payne, who will be our correspondent on the ground throughout the conference. Enjoy her tips, and add your own suggestions in the comments below or on Twitter using the hashtag #OHA2017.

“Bridging the gulf between us is hard… But what alternative do we have? The demographic makeup of Minnesota, like the rest of the country, is changing rapidly and radically…. If we are to sort ourselves out and make good lives for ourselves in this ever-more-multicultural landscape, we’ve got to start by talking less and listening more.

We can listen—really listen—to one another’s stories and learn from them. Collectively, we can learn to tell a story that includes all our stories… fashion a mosaic-like group portrait from those stories that we all can agree truly does resemble people like us.”

–David Lawrence Grant, “People Like Us,” in A Good Time for the Truth: Race in America, edited by Sun Yung Shin

Over the past year, events in Minnesota’s Twin Cities have made national headlines more times than one can count – at least not without the use of fingers and toes. As much as the residents of Minnesota might appreciate gaining some national attention for something other than their state’s 10,000+ lakes, its famous Juicy Lucy burger, or its exceptionally frigid winter weather, recent news has rarely been good. From the death of Prince – beloved son of Minneapolis – in April 2016, to the July 2016 shooting of Philando Castile in the Saint Paul suburb of Falcon Heights, to the more recent August 4^th bombing at the Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center in the city of Bloomington – the states’ fourth largest city – it would seem that Minnesota is in urgent need of some good news. But Minnesota is far from alone in this need. If anything, the Twin Cities, and their suburbs are in good company with many other cities across the nation as Americans everywhere begin to brace themselves in the face of mounting international challenges. Fortunately for those attending OHA2017, the Twin Cities have much more than negative publicity to offer its visitors.

The Twin Cities are home to a variety of institutions which continually illustrate the difference oral history can make in expanding our understanding of the past, particularly with regards to the experiences of marginalized communities in Minnesota and abroad. The Minnesota Historical Society maintains the largest digitized Oral History Collection in the country, with a special focus on Voices of Minnesota, the US Dakota War of 1862, and Immigrant Oral Histories. In addition, in 2013, the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center launched the Immigrant Stories project which works to collect contemporary migration stories through digital storytelling, all preserved in their archives, a well-renowned archive and library for the study of immigration, ethnicity, and race. The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, at the University of Minnesota Libraries, maintains over 3,000 linear feet of material which helps to provide a record of GLBT thought, knowledge and culture for current and future generations. Each of these archives are available to students, researchers and members of the public, providing Minnesota’s diverse communities with the opportunity to hear “one another’s stories and learn from them,” to produce stories that truly “resemble people like us,” and to reconstruct our social values in ways that better reflect our states’ and our nation’s multiculturalism. All of these institutions are well worth a visit to anyone attending OHA2017.

There are also several exhibits at the Minnesota History Center that can provide a deeper understanding of our state’s multicultural history. The museum’s Then and Now exhibit provides visitors with a unique perspective on Dakota history and culture through a presentation of Bobby Wilson’s poetry and visual art. The exhibit also provides a concise but detailed glimpse into the history of one of St. Paul’s displaced African American communities, which was once situated close to Rondo Avenue before it was supplanted by Interstate 94 in the 1960s. Moving beyond the borders of Minnesota, the museum’s WWI America exhibit provides visitors with the opportunity to explore the histories of both remarkable people and social movements, including mass immigration, women’s suffrage, and racial politics, with the use of a variety of original artifacts. The Minneapolis Institute of Art will also have a number of exhibitions that can help visitors learn more about the histories and experiences of marginalized communities in the Twin Cities and beyond. Their “I Am Somali”: Three Visual Artists from the Twin Cities exhibition celebrates the work of three Somali visual artists from the Twin Cities: Hassan Nor, Aziz Osman, and Ifrah Mansour. These artists’ stories help us to examine and better understand experiences of exile as well as questions of memory and identity from multiple geographical, historical, and contemporary standpoints.

For anyone searching for a safe space to ponder some of the difficult questions that shape our contemporary international circumstances, try a stop in at the Walker Art Center to visit their I am you, you are too exhibition, which brings a diverse international and multi-generational group of artists together for critical reflection on how we memorialize the past and understand the social, geographic, and political structures that shape us. The Guthrie Theater’s production of Watch on the Rhine – a political thriller centered on a German anti-Nazi immigrant living in 1940’s Washington – is another great option here as well, presenting audiences with a timely opportunity to engage with questions of moral duty.

Last but not least, for those looking for a more basic tourists’ view of the Twin Cities, be sure not to miss an opportunity to peruse the shops at the Mall of America. And, though it may be a bit too chilly for most, outdoorsy types will enjoy some time on any one of Minnesota’s scenic byways; the Chain of Lakes is exceptionally picturesque. And, if at the end of the day you still have the energy to burn, visit a few well-known food spots on Eat Street for dinner, followed by drinks and live music at one of Minneapolis-Saint Paul’s hottest spots.

Whatever you decide to do while you are here, make sure to “listen—really listen” to the stories you hear so that when you return to your own communities, you can help us to spread “all our stories” in ways that “truly…resemble people like us.” Do this, and I can assure you that your time here will be more than just memorable…it will be worth remembering, too.

What are you most excited to see during #OHA2017 in the Twin Cities? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: We can fall in love with this city together by JFXie. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr. 

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Diving into the OHR Archive

One of my favorite tasks as the OHR’s Social Media Coordinator is interviewing people for the blog. I get to talk to authors of recent articles from the OHR, oral historians using the power of conversation to create change, and a whole lot more. As a narcissistic millennial, however, I am now turning the spotlight inward, interviewing myself about the OHR’s latest virtual issue, released this week, on Oral History and Public History.

What can readers expect to find in this virtual issue?

This issue has everything: short articles about the professionalization of oral history; longer articles about memory in Saskatoon and public attention to Mashapaug; representations of the past in museums and public space; and journeys of communal discovery through Spanish-language music and intergenerational housing activism. The introduction is pretty neat, too. The threads that connect these articles together explore the interactions between oral historians, oral histories, and the public – whether that public be the residents of an ethnic enclave, visitors to a museum, or the people whose lives are recorded through a particular project.

Why should people look through a virtual issue, when a brand new issue of the OHR just came out?

In one of the first email interviews I conducted for the OHR blog, Linda Shopes encouraged oral historians to “slow down a bit and consider the urge to collect.” She was making a case about the direction of the field, but her concern about work simply gathering dust on archival shelves has stuck with me. In a world where new scholarship is continually being produced, older work can easily be ignored and fall by the wayside. But these articles are often immensely valuable in prompting questions for current research, and for thinking through the ways the field has changed or shifted. These virtual issues are a chance to slow down a bit, to dive deeply into the journal’s archive, and to see what conversations emerge over time.

You did this all by yourself, right?

Wow, such astute questions! As much as I would like to claim I did this all single-handedly, much of the credit (and none of the blame) goes to the OHR’s Editor in Chief Kathy Nasstrom and Managing Editor Troy Reeves. Troy and I worked through decades of scholarship to select a handful articles that could reflect, as accurately as possible, the major themes and concerns raised in the journal around the interactions between oral history and public history. We both fell in love with articles that didn’t make the final cut, and together we killed each other’s darlings. Kathy’s keen editing eye guided our selection process throughout and turned a rambling introduction into a polished piece of writing that makes it much clearer how each article adds to the issue. Troy and Kathy have graciously allowed me to take credit for the virtual issue (and I agreed, see: narcissism, above), but their fingerprints are all over it. The issue’s copyeditor, Elinor Maze, and our friends at Oxford University Press – especially marketing whiz Alex Fulton – helped to turn this virtual issue into a reality.

Do you have plans to do similar projects in the future?

I don’t, but the OHR does! Virtual issues are a great way to highlight older content, and the journal is eager to hear what other ideas for themes you, the readers, have. If you’d like to pitch a virtual issue, reach out at ohreview[at]gmail[dot]com.

You can explore the virtual issue here, and let us know what you think in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

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Working class narratives in the twenty first century

With school getting back in session, today on the blog we are exploring how instructors are using oral history in the classroom. The piece below, from filmmaker and UCLA Lecturer Virginia Espino explores the power of oral history to connect students to their campus community, and to help them collaboratively rethink what working class identity means in the modern era.

What does it mean to be a member of the working class in the twenty first century? I posed this question to my students earlier this year when I taught a class in oral history methods for the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UCLA. I focused the course on the study and collection of working class stories as a way to uplift voices not often heard in an academic setting and to develop an archive of interviews that broadens our understanding of the working class as a diverse and multifaceted cross-section of our society.

On the first day of class I handed out index cards to each student and asked them to define working class in three words or statements. How we define terms such as “working class,” “middle class” and “upper class” exposes our belief system as well as how successful the media has been in constructing meanings for us. In order to teach working class history, I wanted to understand what the term meant to modern college students in one of the most ethnically and economically diverse cities in the country.

The responses were what I might have predicted because they were views that I shared myself:  Living paycheck-to-paycheck; struggling to survive; exploited. But as I re-read through my student’s definitions, I was reminded of my own oral history interviews with the Chicana activist, Lilia Aceves. She recalled that poverty meant something different to her growing up in 1940s East Los Angeles. She had a roof over her head and food on the table and imagined herself as well to do. “I didn’t know we were poor…I thought we had everything,” she recalled. Only as an adult did she understand that her family lacked the kind of material wealth one saw in popular magazines or on the big screen. “We always had a home, but in terms of the physical aspect of it you could see that we were the working poor.”

After the first session of class my primary teaching goal for the quarter evolved into using oral history methods to document the meaning working class individuals gave to their lives. I directed my students to enter the interviews with an open mind and to expect to have their assumptions challenged. In addition to capturing the life-history narrative I wanted them to focus on questions that explored how members of the working class understood their social and economic position. Did they view themselves as we did: poor, unskilled, and uneducated? What would they tell us about their lives if we took the time to listen? The results of their interviews were stunning, and several narratives stand out for how they help us to amplify our perception of U.S. “workers.”

Three students in the class chose to work together on an interview project that would explore the lives of three janitors in the University of California system. They developed an interview outline that would focus on the following research questions:

• What is class-consciousness?
• How is class structured in the United States?
• What are the intersections between class and ethnic identity, and do these intersections influence narrators’ lived experiences?
• What are the opportunities for, and barriers to, upward mobility?
• What role does unionism and labor organizing take among UC janitors?

Each student was required to interview the same person twice in order to gain an authentic experience of the work oral historians do when approaching the life history. Returning to an interviewee for follow-up questions is the crux of a quality interview and often leads to a deeper dig into meaning and personal agency.  And for the student interviewers, it proved essential in providing them with ample time to develop trust as well as time to step back from the process for self-reflection and self-critique. The students identified as members of the working class, but soon realized they were bringing their own biases to the interview process – specifically, the assumptions they had about the people who maintain the infrastructure of UC campuses. As stated in their project evaluation, they began their project with the belief that “janitors are poor and their job has low value…” They ended their project with a new awareness that janitors take pride in their work and want to be seen and appreciated by the students, faculty and staff who work alongside them.

As a class we learned the varied meanings of working class through the projects students executed. In a surprising revelation, the students learned that one of the janitors they interviewed held a college degree: Unable to find a job in her field she was forced to take a position cleaning the UCLA campus to support her young family. Over the course of the quarter we were introduced to an Asian American student struggling to balance work and school. Her narrative forced us to reject the “model minority” stereotype that presumes Asian Americans float easily through school; her identification with the working class stemmed from her need to support herself through school, while many of her classmates receive unlimited parental support. And through an interview with a white male, we learned that the absence of jobs in the humanities has forced white college educated men to seek jobs in restaurants and department stores while struggling to maintain the lifestyle they desire. Taken together, these important narratives help us complicate what it means to be working class in the twenty first century.

Featured image: UCLA’s Inverted Fountain by Andrew “FastLizard4” Adam. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Counting down to OHA2017

It’s no secret that we here at the Oral History Review are big fans of the OHA Annual Meeting. It’s our annual dose of sanity, a thoroughly enriching experience, a place to make connections, a great opportunity for young scholars, and the origin of some lively online debates. With nearly two months still to go before #OHA2017, we want to share a couple of reviews recently published in the OHR that we hope can help carry us all through until we are reunited in Minneapolis this October.

First, our very own Troy Reeves wrote an essay in which he reviewed two books about Joe Gould, including one by this year’s OHA Keynote Speaker, Jill Lepore. In it, Reeves traces his process of discovery and disillusionment with Joe Gould and his mythical book, An Oral History of Our Time. He asks how one can love an idea, and the possibilities it opens up, while acknowledging the complicated and problematic history of the man behind the idea.

Reeves’ review is a continuation of a line of thought Daniel Kerr raised in his 2016 article, “Allan Nevins Is Not My Grandfather: The Roots of Radical Oral History Practice in the United States.” Kerr’s piece asked what oral history family trees exist aside from the canonical version that imagines Allan Nevins as the progenitor of our discipline. This article has been a jumping off point for multiple recent posts on the OHR blog, including Allison Corbett’s oral history origin story, and Benji de la Piedra’s suggestion that the architects of the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project can provide a scholarly ancestry that prioritized shared authority and meaningful encounters between researchers and the public.

We will bring you an insider’s take on Minneapolis in a few weeks, but for now we’ll point you to a piece that touches on a bit of local history. Barbara W. Sommer reviewed Non-Stop: A Turbulent History of Northwest Airlines by Jack El-Hai, asking what role oral history played in creating the book. El-Hai traces the rise and fall of the airline, which was headquartered near Minneapolis, and provides a visually interesting introduction to the company and the region.

Both of these reviews are now up on Advance Access for OHR subscribers, as are the rest of the articles that will appear in the print issue. Check them out now, and make sure to keep an eye on the blog in the coming weeks for interviews with OHR 44.2 authors, a sneak peak of #OHA2017, and more!

What do you love about the OHA Annual Meeting? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Downtown Minneapolis” by m01229, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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That someone else: finding a new oral history ancestor

In April Allison Corbett shared her reaction to Dan Kerr’s article “Allen Nevins Is Not My Grandfather: The Roots of Radical Oral History Practice in the United States,” explaining the roots of her own radical oral history practice. Today we hear from Benji de la Piedra, as he shares another oral history origin story from his research on the Federal Writers’ Project. Enjoy his insights, and check out our call for submissions here, if you’d like to contribute your own reflections.

“Ever since the Federal Writers’ Project interviews with former slaves in the 1930s, oral history has been about the fact that there’s more to history than presidents and generals.” –Alessandro Portelli

Dan Kerr acknowledges in his article, “Allan Nevins Is Not My Grandfather,” that most historians of oral history tend to dismiss the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as a mere “prehistory” of the field, because the vast majority of FWP interviews were recorded with pen and paper rather than with machine. However, in the research that I conducted towards my M.A. thesis in oral history, I discovered for myself the untapped potency that the FWP holds for oral historians who seek an origin story more closely aligned with the field’s impulse towards effecting social change.

Started in 1935 as part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, the Federal Writers’ Project put thousands of unemployed writers to work on assignments that served the FWP’s ambitious cultural agenda: to foster a badly needed renewal of the United States’ self-image, and to forge a new American unity through celebration of unrecognized American diversity. As Jerrold Hirsch writes, the cohort of public intellectuals directing the Project—Henry Alsberg (national director), Sterling A. Brown (editor of Negro affairs), Morton Royse (social-ethnic studies editor) and Benjamin A. Botkin (folklore editor)—sought to imbue the nation’s public life with “a cosmopolitanism that encouraged Americans to value their own provincial traditions and to show an interest in the traditions of their fellow citizens.”

FWP writers pursued this pluralistic aim through a practice that I think of as proto-oral-history fieldwork. All across the country, the writers spent much of their workdays conducting interviews with people traditionally excluded from the process of history-writing: the working poor, immigrants, women, and people of color (including those who had been born slaves). The Project intended to use the testimony furnished by the interviews as fodder for both an American Guide Series—a set of guidebooks, one for each of the state in the Union—and Composite America, a series of cultural anthologies that would reveal overlooked strands and narratives of American culture to the wider public.

If you are an oral historian seeking a new grandfather—one with greater aesthetic concerns, democratic objectives, and community-based ethics than Allan Nevins—I recommend you check out the leading soul and intellect of the FWP’s interviewing program: B. A. Botkin (1901 – 1975). I first encountered Botkin in the introduction to Ann Banks’ First Person America, a book that curates about eighty extracts from the almost 10,000 interviews produced by FWP fieldworkers, and was the result of Banks’ own pioneering effort to survey and catalogue the entire collection of interviews, which had sat unexamined in a set of file cabinets at the Library of Congress for more than thirty years after the Project was disbanded.

In the introduction to her book, Banks celebrates Botkin’s “unconventional approach to the subject of folklore” as a crucial influence on the Federal Writers’ interview methodology. Botkin “wanted to explore the rough texture of everyday life,” Banks writes, “to collect what he called ‘living lore’…Again and again, he stressed the importance of the process of collecting narratives. The best results, he wrote, were obtained ‘when a good informant and a good interviewer got together and the narrative is the process of the conscious or unconscious collaboration of the two.’”

Banks goes on, “Benjamin Botkin called for an emphasis on ‘history from the bottom up,’ in which the people become their own historians. He believed that ‘history must study the inarticulate many as well as the articulate few.’ The advent of tape recorders in the years following the 1930s has refined the practice of what has come to be called oral history and made it possible for Botkin’s goals to be pursued more easily.”

In other words, Botkin instructed the Federal Writers to approach their interviews dialogically, as intersubjective exchanges built upon a shared authority, decades before these central concepts were so named in the field of oral history. Botkin saw the potential for this interview technique to drive a radically inclusive rehabilitation of American life, decades before the popular education and people’s history movements that Kerr recovers in his article.

Botkin deeply appreciated the pedagogical and integrative function of the work that we now call oral history. His desire to make the archive produced by FWP fieldworkers accessible to an “ever-widening public,” to “give back to the people what we have taken from them and what rightfully belongs to them in a form that they can understand and use,” led him to declare the FWP’s interview program “the greatest educational as well as social experiment of our time.” While the outcomes of this experiment varied in quality, social justice-oriented oral historians will continue to find Botkin’s impressive body of thought a particularly germane touchstone for their work. Why? Because Botkin’s method and theory of interviewing took relationships seriously. Botkin prized the meaningful encounter—the “mutual sighting,” to use Portelli’s phrase—as the foundation for not only a successful interview, but also a healthy democracy.

Botkin refined this ideology in the years following his tenure with the FWP, when he elaborated a public-facing research practice that he called “applied folklore.” Botkin used this term broadly, “to designate the use of folklore to some end beyond itself…into social or literary history, education, recreation, or the arts.” He identified the basic impulse of applied folklore as “the celebration of our ‘commonness’—the ‘each’ in all of us and the ‘all’ in each of us…an interchange between cultural groups or levels, between the folk and the student of folklore.” And anticipating the highest aims of contemporary historical dialogue work, Botkin writes, “The ultimate aim of applied folklore is the restoration to American life of the sense of community—a sense of thinking, feeling, and acting along similar, though not the same, lines—that is in danger of being lost today. Thus applied folklore goes beyond cultural history to cultural strategy.”

In my recent work as Project Trainer for the DC Oral History Collaborative, I have constantly recalled Botkin as a personal guide. I have encouraged my interviewers to be themselves in the encounter; to relax their impulse to control the dialogue and instead follow, as Botkin instructed his Federal Writers, “the natural association of ideas and memories”; and to practice framing their narrators as valuable witnesses of their neighborhood, school, and migration histories. I have done this in the spirit of fostering what the Federal Writers’ Project aimed for nationally—“an inter-regional synthesis”—within the densely diverse and still too segregated scope of our nation’s capital.

Featured image credit: “Federal Writers’ Project presentation of Who’s who at the zoo” by unknown, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Oral history and the importance of sharing at Pride in Washington D.C.

Back in March we heard from our friends at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the University of Florida, who had traveled to the Women’s March on Washington as part of an experiential learning project. Working with their colleagues at the UF Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, they returned to Washington, D.C., in June to document the city’s Pride Weekend, including the Equality March for Unity and Pride, the QT Night of Healing and Resistance, and more. They have graciously shared some of the fruits of their labor with us below, including some reflections and a podcast put together by Aliya Miranda. Together they provide a taste of the experiences they had and the stories they recorded. Their reflections highlight the importance of sharing stories – how listening to each other can help to humanize “the other” through shared experiences and why thinking about our intersecting identities is critical for both good organizing and good oral history.

Robert Baez:

Why have certain voices been silenced in the LGBTQ+ community? Why have trans folks and people of color not received full credit for the revolutionary ideas they have advanced? How do these messages numb cultural understandings of the LGBTQ+ experience? These are challenging but critical questions to be engaging with at a time when Pride events have become multi-million dollar events spanning multiple days.

Our first night in Washington, D.C. was spent at an event hosted by the Trans Women of Color Collective, organized to create a space of healing and resistance. There we met two best friends who we shadowed for the duration of the weekend: Aurora, a Black trans woman, and Strawberry, a Black gay man who is HIV+. They serve as systems of support not only for each other but the community around them.

After speaking with Aurora and Strawberry for some time, we came to understand the complex world of queer politics in the city. Pride has been divided over multiple weeks, each devoted to a particular identity. According to Aurora, there are Pride weekends devoted to Black communities, Latina/o communities, and so forth, all leading up to Capital Pride, the largest and arguably Whitest Pride event in the city. Aurora shared the problems she saw with this framework, but recognized how designated spaces are also important when pursuing solutions to social problems faced by that community.

These conversations, and this reflection, have posed more questions than answers, but I want to use this space as an opportunity to consider the utility of identity politics. I believe it is possible to acknowledge our varying experiences while also working to demand justice together, but to say we’ve reached that point would be a mistake. Understanding how experiences can be unique, and viewing oppression as inextricably linked, is the first step in working toward a more unified LGBTQ+ community.

Queer in the Capital 2017: Pride, Resistance, and Community from Drea Cornejo on Vimeo.

Holland Hall:

“We met across a crowded dance floor.” While in D.C. for the 2017 Pride weekend, I briefly met the uncles of one of our program volunteers. The couple had met in 1994 at Gainesville’s sole LGBTQ+ nightclub, University Club, while they were both students at the University of Florida. Their meeting over twenty years ago brought special memories of my own life to mind while in the midst of this historic weekend.

My best friend, Mireillee, and her partner gave me a rose quartz necklace as a Christmas present this past year. Believed to attract romantic love, their gift worked its magic in less than two weeks. Mireillee and I regularly encourage each other in our work lives, schoolwork, romantic pursuits, as well as sharing nights of barhopping and dancing—oftentimes leading us to the dance floor of that same University Club. In January, less than a week before I embarked with another research team to document the Women’s March on Washington, I met my first love and current partner across the crowded dance floor at the University Club.

On Thanksgiving 2015, I shared the holiday with Mireillee’s family in her hometown of Orlando because my family was away, and she didn’t want me to spend that time alone. That evening we went gallivanting around Orlando, ending up at Southern Nights, an LGBTQ+ nightclub. Across a crowded dance floor, a woman and I goofily started smiling at each other. We found ourselves within a couple of feet of each other, and spent the rest of the night dancing together. We exchanged numbers, and we spent the next few weeks getting to know each other through broken English and Spanish. We reconnected a few weeks later and spent a weekend together, but eventually fell out of contact, and our lives continued separately. Six months after the horrific massacre in Orlando, I was at Pride with Mireillee in her healing hometown, and reconnected with my old dancing partner, reigniting our friendship.

As I reflect on the LGBTQ+ history we record, I return to these chance encounters, to the spaces where we have found each other, and to the knots turning in my stomach as I looked at the list of victims from Pulse, hoping desperately not to see a familiar name. I am grateful to have coordinated this research trip with Robert Baez, who helped ensure that we approached our fieldwork with an intersectional lens. In an editorial in the Gainesville Sun, Robert asked, “What good are these rich oral histories if they just sit in an archive, stowed away from our consciousness? These stories need to be heard and understood, and people need to become familiar with experiences unlike their own. Only by humanizing the plethora of experiences we face in the United States can ‘the other’ become ‘the neighbor.’”

For more from the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP), find them on Facebook, Twitter, or their homepage. Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Marchers gather in front of the state capitol in Washington D.C. following the Equality March for Unity and Pride on June 11, 2017.” Photo Credit: Andrea Cornejo and the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.

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Hearing to heal

At the 2014 OHA Annual Meeting, the African American Oral History Program at Story For All received the prestigious Vox Populi Award, one of the highest honors in the oral history world. Today on the blog we hear from Angela Zusman, the project’s Founder and Executive Director, about the inspiration for her work, as well as successes and lessons learned. Story For All has achieved important victories, building coalitions with local partners and officials that promote shared understanding and meaningful change.

Can you describe what a typical Story For All project or workshop looks like? What is it about your approach that makes it unique?

At Story For All, our goal is to expose disenfranchised communities to the power of oral history for the purpose of healing, building skills, elevating an authentic narrative, and ultimately transforming communities and systems through policy reform. We do this by training community members in oral history methodology, then supporting them in recording, archiving, and reflecting on their own communities’ stories and wisdom through art, dialogue, policy recommendations, and public presentations. Our process was designed with the understanding that the sharing of stories through oral history has multiple beneficial impacts, especially for historically marginalized communities whose stories, values, and cultures have been subsumed by the often-negative narratives promoted by the dominant culture. As stories have been weaponized to use against such communities, our narrative change approach is literally a method for individuals and communities to take back their story, as well as their culture. Additionally, by supporting communities in documenting their own stories, we create a culture of storytellers, like the griots of West Africa. Instead of the stories and wisdom being extracted from the community, they reside within the hearts and minds of present and future community leaders.

Using storytelling to heal is a key part of your work. Can you talk about what that looks like in practice? How does your curriculum enable healing, and what kind of results have you seen?

We all know how powerful it can be when we are listened to. Think about it. Think about a time when you were really listened to. How did that make you feel? Empowered, important, relevant, cared about. For many of the people we work with, especially youth of color and immigrants, this respectful attention is revolutionary in and of itself. Too many young people tell us that this is the first time they have ever been asked what they think about anything. So, our storytelling programs, whether they last an hour or a year, always incorporate multiple levels of acknowledgement so people feel heard. Then there is the listening component. Oral historians are great listeners, and a lot of our projects’ skill building revolves around listening, asking questions, and reflecting on what was said. The healing power of listening might best be summed up by this experience of one our youth participants, who said, “It helped me so much to hear that other people have gone through similar things as me, or even worse. I don’t feel so alone.” On a community level, when we are able to share the oral histories and associated data through exhibits, videos, books and reports, the impact on the community can be equally healing. For example, we created a survey for people who visited our R.O.O.T.S. exhibit last month in the Mississippi Delta. 94% of people reported that the R.O.O.T.S. exhibit made them feel hopeful about the future of youth of color in their community. Especially in communities mired in multi-generational poverty, hope may be the most powerful healer and motivator of all.

The SHINE program takes your work into local communities, empowering young men of color to make their voices heard. How did the program begin, and what was especially attractive about the cities you’re currently working in?

In 2012, we were blessed to design and facilitate a Listening Campaign for African American young men in Oakland. This was a life-changing experience for me personally. When I started the project, I thought I had an idea about what life was like for these young men, many of whom lived within a few blocks of me. After listening to their stories, the bubble of white privilege that I had unconsciously existed within was officially burst. These brave young men, and their stories, forced me to see the world in a new way. I also watched them blossom as they were nudged to share their stories and get out there in the community to listen to, and then represent, their peers. Over the following months, the project data helped to inform a new Public Safety plan for the City of Oakland. We began getting calls and emails from young men, mothers, educators and others around the country, asking us to bring the project to their town so the voices of their young men could also be heard. This type of project was the reason I founded Story For All, so we have focused most of our resources on answering the call.

One of your goals in Sunflower County is to put young African-American men in contact with teachers, police officers, and those with legislative powers to involve everyone in on the conversation. How do you introduce these conversations and what kind of results have you seen from the program so far?

We have been blessed to partner with the ACLU of Mississippi, the Mississippi Center for Justice, and others in a coalition created to disrupt the school to prison pipeline in the Mississippi Delta. Our partners had done an excellent job of building and unifying this coalition of stakeholders around the common goal of supporting young men of color by instigating school discipline reform. All of the project partners had deep ties in the community, giving our oral history project credibility and community buy-in. So when our interview team showed up at the courthouse with their iPads and microphones, when we called the Police Chief to come over for an interview, when we stopped community members in the streets to ask if they would share their stories, they were generally amenable. Many of them already knew about the project, and those who didn’t were often genuinely happy to see the youth out in the community asking good questions. This in fact is a key component to the narrative change – it’s not just about telling a new story, it’s about these young men being seen in a new way.

Now, as the project moves from data collection to policy reform, the oral histories have lifted up so many community voices that it’s hard for the data to be ignored. One of my favorite impact stories involves a leader of the participating school district. She came to one of the community meetings and was given a copy of our R.O.O.T.S. data report. As my colleague described it, the leader took that report into the back corner and buried her face in it for over an hour. When she emerged, she was clearly very moved. She offered her full support for the reforms being recommended, some of which were quite controversial, because, as she said, “I really see the whole community being represented here.” Her experience encapsulates what we are trying to achieve – lifting up community voices in ways that are authentic and emotionally compelling to motivate and inform policy change.

In additional to policy change, we are also very interested in contributing to scholarly study and the collection of affirmative-based data around young men of color. The Griots of Oakland oral histories are archived at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, and the R.O.O.T.S. oral histories are being archived at Jackson State University’s prestigious Margaret Walker Center so that scholars and others around the world can learn from these communities.

And finally – the youth! I am inspired by the 19 young men who walked this R.O.O.T.S. journey, and came up with the name R.O.O.T.S., which stands for “Reclaiming Our Origins Through Story.” I watched them grow, literally and figuratively, as they formed friendships with each other, learned their history, branched out into the community, and became the spokespeople for the project, school discipline reform, and the greatness of our youth of color. They have emerged from this project more grounded, more confident, and more visionary than before. They have learned whose shoulders they stand upon, and how they can contribute to make this world a better place. This is what our work is all about.

Do you think recent political and social events have changed the project or its reception? 

Under Obama, there was an explicit, collective effort to improve health, academic and career outcomes for boys and young men of color. Importantly, there was increased recognition of the impact of systemic racism, as enacted through school discipline policies, mass incarceration, lack of educational opportunity, pervasive negative narratives, and other attributes of modern day slavery. The Black Lives Matter movement and mass protests around police brutality brought national awareness to racial inequities and the impact on our society. People were getting woke! And then came…the next administration. Immigrants, the environment, Muslims, women, etc., all came under attack. Resources disappeared or got scattered.  Racism exposed itself brutally and unapologetically. The hope I hold onto is that this administration is exposing the festering wounds of this nation. Only when a problem is exposed can it be solved. Racism and inequity are issues each of us must address, personally and in community, in order for our nation to live up to its promise and potential. As the late, great Viola Liuzzo said, “It’s everybody’s fight.” Are we up for it? Time will tell.

Have you had any particularly memorable successes or frustrations with the project?

We have had our share of successes and frustrations. When I see the light go on in a child’s eyes, I see success. When a shy young man evolves into a dynamic leader, I see success. When a group of teenagers crowds around an elder to hear his stories, I see success. When the stories and wisdom of historically oppressed peoples are celebrated and promoted, I see success. When policies are created that represent a community’s needs, I see success. All this success I have seen as a result of our work at Story For All, and it keeps us going. On the other hand, the greatest frustration comes not from those whom we oppose, but from our supposed partners. The non-profit business model is unsustainably competitive, funders change their priorities, and an unfortunate number of partners seem to be more invested in their own PR than in real change. Good people get bogged down. Innovation is underfunded. I could go on. Suffice it to say: when we talk about systemic issues, they really are systemic, and it’s going to take long-term collective action locally, regionally and nationally for there to be real change. I am incredibly humbled by the great people who have come before me and those I get to interact with every day. I believe that together we can make this change, and I will do my part.

For more about their work, check out Story For All on Facebook, Twitter, or on their website.  Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Griots of Oakland interview team, Oakland, 2013” by Mi Zhou

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Listening for change

In OHR 44.1 Susan McLeod reviewed Hear, Here a project of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse that utilizes innovative techniques to connect the public with oral history. We were excited to read about it and invited the project’s founder, Ariel Beaujot, to join us on the blog to discuss making oral history accessible, and the possibility for using the past to intervene in the present.

How might we, as oral historians, make the voices of those who have lived and live in our communities available to all? For the past 10 years oral history programs all over the country have been digitizing their collections and putting them online. This has allowed researchers easier access to their subjects, and family members and friends to hear the voices and stories of their loved ones. But what about making the work that we do as oral historians more accessible to the average person who lives in a town with strong oral history collections but may not have any immediate or obvious connection to the narrators?

This is the work that Hear, Here seeks to do. Hear, Here is a location-based project that allows anyone to access short oral histories on the street through a toll-free number. Throughout downtown La Crosse we put orange street signs with phone numbers so that people can call to hear a story about the exact location in which they stand! If visitors or townspeople want to leave their own stories they can stay on the line and leave a message. If their story fits our objectives, it is re-recorded and added to the larger project and to the Oral History Program. In this way the Hear, Here becomes user-generated.

We planned this project in conjunction with the longstanding Oral History Program at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Two researchers, Terry Holford-Talpe and Sue Hessel, went through the collection and choose those that tell a concise story about a specific location in the downtown area of La Crosse, Wisconsin. Some of our original stories are up to 6 minutes long, but we have found that people standing on the street listen to stories for an average of 2 minutes and 10 seconds, so as we add to the project we edit the stories to fit into the timeframe that people prefer. As well as stories from the Oral History Program, my team and I recorded stories specifically for this project. The combination of the two–original oral histories and new ones–has allowed for a long-term understanding of the downtown area in a new way. There are stories that help us understand issues such as homelessness, racial prejudice, built environment, gentrification, red-light districts, and experiences of foreign nationals and LGBTQ*. Hear, Here maps the city in a new way, allowing us to see the experiences of everyone, not just the privileged few. Beyond knowing and hearing these stories we have found that the project can help to create a more ideal city by generating social and policy changes.

In our modern times, oral history/public history projects like this one can not only generate knowledge but create real and lasting changes. Some of the stories in the project indicate that our city, like all cities in our complicated and nuanced world, has its racial prejudices and injustices. The pushback that the project had from some local politicians and business people led our team to research the longer history of racial prejudice in the town. Through this research we found that La Crosse qualifies as a sundown town, or a town that has purposely kept itself White. We can see this from the 1980 census that indicates that La Crosse was 99% White – the fifth Whitest city in the entire country. With this knowledge we worked with the Office of Multicultural Student Services at UW-La Crosse and the city’s Human Rights Commission to bring in James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, who spoke at an open meeting at city hall confirming La Crosse as a sundown town. This resulted in the Mayor writing a public apology for historical and current injustices, and has given the Human Rights Commission more power within city government.

The idea of helping to create a more ideal city through our work is a compelling one. I think it’s time for us in the oral history world to not only think about documenting the voices of the underprivileged but to think about how these stories can generate understanding in more privileged community members leading to real change. In these neoliberalist times we need to remember that the systems of oppression cannot be fixed by telling peoples’ stories, having speakers come in, or apologizing. We must recognize the long-term historical factors that create inequity and work to develop policy with teeth that actively works against racist tendencies that have made La Crosse, and many other cities in the Midwest, into sundown towns. One step towards this goal is sharing all stories, but it is only a step in what will be a marathon.

For more information about Hear, Here you can like us on Facebook or visit our website.

Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Hear, Here street sign in downtown La Crosse, Wisconsin.” Photo courtesy of Ariel Beaujot.

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Getting in on the joke

Last month we brought you a short interview with Katie Holmes, about her article, Does It Matter If She Cried? Recording Emotion and the Australian Generations Oral History Project, asking how to read and make sense of emotion in oral history. Today we continue this conversation in an interview with Julian Simpson, one of the authors of another piece in OHR 44.1, Why We Should Try to Get the Joke: Humor, Laughter, and the History of Healthcare. Along with his co-author, Stephanie Snow, Simpson argued that making sense of humor is critical for understanding the history of healthcare and that oral historians need to do a better job of listening for and analyzing humor. In our conversation, we discussed the importance of paying to jokes, what they can reveal, and some of the particularities of humor in British culture.

How did this project begin? Did you go into it with the expectation of studying the use of humor, or did that emerge as you conducted your research?

The initial aim of the study was not at all to explore the role of humor in healthcare. My colleague at the University of Manchester, Stephanie Snow, was commissioned by a group of people connected to Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals to research the recent past of the hospitals and their associated institutions (medical schools, staff organizations etc.). We are both interested in the recent history of British healthcare and in how it can inform the present. The initial idea, both for us and those who initiated the project, was to look at the impact of recent change in British healthcare on those institutions, with a view to producing a history that would also speak to the present. The research was funded by the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity, and we are currently working on a book which is to published by Bloomsbury with the title At the frontline of British Healthcare: Guy’s, St Thomas’ and NHS reform since the 1970s.

It gradually became apparent however in the course of our research that the importance of humor as a part of medical culture had been underexplored by historians and that we had a wealth of evidence that it would make sense to share. Possibly because the interviews we were conducting touched upon issues that affected participants quite profoundly (for instance, the merger of Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospitals or neoliberal reform of the British healthcare system) and could be difficult to discuss, humor and laughter ended up featuring quite regularly in interviews. Humor seemed to be a key dimension of the materials we had gathered in archives as well. It was therefore more a case of humor suggesting itself to us as an important dimension of this research, both as a part of the history we were researching and as a key to understanding other aspects of it.

You argue that humor is an understudied aspect of both oral history and the medical field. What pointers can you give to people interested in addressing this lack of serious consideration?

When it comes to oral history interviews, reflecting on the use of humor has taught me that when people laugh in interviews or resort to humor it is often worthwhile spending some time reflecting on why they chose to do so. It can be enjoyable in itself to hear someone tell an amusing story but in the context of understanding the past through oral history, it is also important to go beyond our initial emotional response to what we have been told and reflect on what else is being communicated. Basically, we came to a slow realization that when a participant laughed or used humor in an interview, they were frequently signaling that the issue under discussion was a sensitive one or one that could be difficult to broach. Once you start thinking about humor in this way, it opens up new ways of analyzing materials. This applies as well to documents found in archives. So it is firstly a question of how we think about humor and laughter and the significance we attach to them.

In terms of exploring humor as a dimension of medical culture, I suspect that the fact we did joint interviews as part of the project contributed to bringing this to the fore. Humor in healthcare environments can involve transgressing some of our most fundamental taboos (in the article we quote a participant who spoke of laughing when dissecting corpses as a medical student) so it’s important to give participants the sense that they are ‘safe’ when sharing their memories. Being able to do this in the presence of others with an insider’s understanding of healthcare work can only help. If I were to focus exclusively on the subject of humor in medicine I’d be tempted to systematically make all interviews anonymous so that participants would not be concerned about how their anecdotes may be perceived. Transgressions that are understood in a particular profession may appear shocking to the general public – but then most members of the general public don’t have to deal with dying patients and dead bodies on a regular basis. It’s important as well to gain trust as in any oral history project. Especially with younger participants, there was at times the sense that they felt the need to be on their guard, in an age when any throwaway remark can be posted on the internet, resulting in the end of a medical career before it has properly started.

The article wonders how medical professionals might cope with stress if humor is becoming less tolerated in the medical field. Did your interviews give any indication of what medical professionals might be using in its place?

I think it would take a project exclusively focused on humor in medicine and its evolution to really get to the bottom of that question. The interviews that we did with medical students and some of the other materials we located lead me to believe that it still plays its part although people have become a lot more careful than they used to be about what they say and in what context they say it. That’s just an impression though. As I said, we didn’t set out to study humor specifically and therefore, our aim in this paper was more to point to the significance of a number of questions rather than necessarily seek to answer them. It would certainly be very interesting to explore the role of peer support and counselling to see if they are indeed in some ways substitutes for the sort of humor that would most probably result in staff being dismissed these days. One participant told me a story (interestingly in light of what I’ve just said about people being concerned about how anecdotes may be perceived, after we finished our interview) involving a serial male prankster who (successfully) impersonated a female member of staff on a ward and on another occasion caused a security incident when he gained access to the roof of the hospital. I’m not persuaded this sort of behavior would just be laughed off as a bit eccentric today. It is also possible though that humor like this has gone ‘underground’ and is simply less visible to the eyes of prying researchers…

In the second half of the article you connect particular humorous events (like the pantomime) to changes in UK healthcare happening simultaneously. Based on your findings, does it appear satire is more situation and distinct from the general coping usage of humor?

It’s hard to generalize in this respect – medical students also seemed to have a lot of fun satirizing their teachers and humanities students for instance. So, it can also be seen as a way of coping and dealing with pressure. It is maybe tempting to see medical students who for instance laugh at those studying other academic subjects as simply over-privileged and narrow-minded but maybe they are in fact looking for a way of justifying to themselves the sacrifices they are making as trainee professionals who take on a lot of responsibility at a young age? Whilst the satire that we describe that was directed at new management techniques in healthcare is clearly historically connected to the neoliberal reform of the NHS that gathered pace in the 1980s, it is also a coping mechanism. As we describe in the article, Betsy Morley, who initiated the Guys and St Thomas’ pantomime connected the satire it contained to the fact that she and her colleagues had been talking about how low staff morale was at the time. The thought of doing a pantomime and laughing at those shaping their professional experiences was described as cheering her and her colleagues up. Doctors who talked about the ‘mushroom’ technique of management (see our article for an explanation of what this involves!) were satirizing management culture but in so doing they probably also made themselves feel a bit better about the pressures they were under.

Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here?

Yes, on reflection, although we recognized that the importance of humor and laughter in our project may have been connected to the nature of the work that many of our participants were engaged in, we might have added that it is possibly also to do with the particular cultural place of humor in British life. It is telling for instance that the Chief Executive of Guy’s and St Thomas’ took on a leading role as a figure of fun in the pantomime that was set up after the institutions merged. And there are probably not too many countries in the world where a request from a conservative politician for the national broadcaster to play the country’s national anthem more often would lead to a major news program signing off with the Sex Pistols’ punk rock version of ‘God Save the Queen’ as BBC 2’s Newsnight did last year. Again, this points to the extent to which the global history of humor is in its infancy. The UK is certainly not unique in this respect but it would be interesting to know more about how the social role of humor has evolved across time and space. Oral historians can be at the heart of this project of writing the social history of humor– and we can enjoy the jokes while we work on it!

We hope you enjoyed this interview–and that you got a chuckle or two out of it. For more about oral history and emotion, check out the article in OHR 44.1, or our interview with Katie Holmes from May. Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Laugh” by Thom Chandler, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Remembering veterans

With Memorial Day in the U.S. right around the corner, we’re bringing you a glimpse into a handful of oral history projects focused on collecting and preserving the memories of military veterans. Check them out, and mention your favorite projects in the comments below.

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum Oral History Program

The Wisconsin Veterans Museum (WVM)’s mission is to affirm, commemorate, and acknowledge the achievements and sacrifices of Wisconsin veterans in America’s military past. The WVM Oral History Program, which I have had the privilege of coordinating for over three years, honors those who served by recording and preserving their stories and experiences. Since 1994 our staff members and volunteers have conducted and collected over 2,100 interviews with veterans from around the state. Our collection represents all branches and all conflicts and eras since World War I to the present day. The Oral History Program focuses not only on creating a record of our veteran-narrators’ stories, but also on the preservation and accessibility of these narratives for future generations. The interviews are housed in WVM’s Research Center, where they are easily available to teachers, students, researchers, the media, and veterans groups. In addition, great strides are being made to make the interviews, both the recordings and associated transcripts, more discoverable and accessible through WVM’s website. We also strive to promote these primary sources by using them for public programming, exhibits, and educational activities.

WVM recently opened a new temporary exhibit entitled “WWI Beyond the Trenches: Stories From The Front.” Throughout the next two years we will be offering programming and events that feature Wisconsin’s contribution to the Great War – in which 122,000 people from Wisconsin served. As part of these efforts, we have been working on ways to showcase our small but exciting collection of World War I oral history interviews:

• Eleven of our World War I interviews are accessible online via our website’s Featured Interviews page. We recently started using OHMS as an access tool and this is the third collection that we’ve featured through OHMS.
• Excerpts from several of the interviews are available to listen to in the new exhibit through an audio device that visitors can pick up before going into the gallery.
• We have partnered with the producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life to feature stories and audio from our collections on the show. We will be these airing stories through next November.

We are always looking for new ways to use and feature all of our interviews and to inspire others to do so as well. These narratives put a human, individual face on war and military service, so that visitors and researchers get an opportunity to meet these veterans and perhaps put themselves in their shoes.

Learn more about the WVM Oral History Program, and search the Collection.

–Ellen Brooks, Oral Historian, Wisconsin Veterans Museum

U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center’s Oral History Programs

In 1970 General William Westmoreland started the Senior Officer Oral History Program (SOOHP) to provide insights into the command and management techniques utilized by senior Army officers in key positions and to further scholarly research on the history of the U.S. Army. Today that program is spearheaded by the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center (USAHEC) in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and has since inspired the creation of three additional oral history programs, all of which capture the history of U.S. Army Soldiers in their own words.

The USAHEC is the Army’s preeminent archive, academic library, and research complex with expansive historical resources for Soldiers, researchers, and visitors. The organization, originally founded in 1969 as the U.S. Army Military History Institute (USAMHI), now includes that original organization as a subordinate division and is an important part of the U.S. Army War College (USAWC), which educates and develops leaders for service at the strategic level while advancing knowledge in the global application of Landpower. As the USAHEC aims to preserve the stories of all Soldiers, it makes sense that these oral history programs are an important focus of the institution. Once completed, all interview transcripts are placed in the archives of the USAMHI for use by USAWC students and faculty, researchers, headquarters, agencies, and the general public in accordance with interview access agreements and the USAHEC’s mission of making contemporary and historical materials available.

The purpose of the original oral history program, SOOHP, is three fold. First, to record the management and leadership techniques of senior Army officers and Department of the Army Civilians and their recollections and opinions on key persons, events, and decisions. Second, to provide a comprehensive biography of senior leaders for the historical record, or to record information about significant events, ideas, and decisions as seen from the perspectives of key participants. Lastly, to supplement written records, clarify obscure aspects of significant events and decisions, and provide material where manuscript or printed sources are inadequate or unavailable.

Learn more about the project, and how to get involved, through the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center’s website.

–LTC (R) Brent C. Bankus, Chief, Oral History Branch, U.S. Army Military History Institute

University of Oregon Veterans Oral History Project

The University of Oregon Veterans Oral History Project began about a decade ago when I realized that our university archive had virtually nothing documenting the experience of our students who had served in the military. This was at a time when the numbers of veterans at the university was increasing quite substantially. Because most of my teaching is in the field of military history, I have always had significant numbers of veterans in my classes. My thinking was quite simple: why not try to document the experiences of an important part of our student body?

I had read somewhere (probably Donald Ritchie’s handbook) that oral histories that are not transcribed almost always go unused. I knew that I could not pay for transcriptions, so I decided that I would offer a class that would serve as a platform for the project. Students would do the work of both interviewing our veterans and, equally important, transcribing those interviews. What started in my mind primarily as a documentary project thus developed both documentary and pedagogical aims. Over the last six years we have interviewed about one hundred twenty-five servicemen and women; as of this writing about fifty of those interviews are available via the university library’s website.

Probably the biggest practical difficulty I have faced with the project is the recruitment of veterans, either to participate in the class or to be interviewed. When I talk to people about interviewing, one of objections I often get is, “You don’t want to interview me; I didn’t do anything interesting.” What they usually mean by “not interesting” is “I didn’t see combat.” Even soldiers who served in combat zones but whose job was in a support capacity will sometimes tell me that.

The entire point of the project, however, is to document the full range of experience in the services. Our motto is “anytime, anyplace, anywhere, any job.” Many veterans appreciate the fact that the project offers public recognition of military service, not just the service of those who happened to serve in places of danger, but of anyone who served: any rank, anytime, anyplace. The rank, I think, is especially important. Most of those we interview were enlisted. They are used to what we might think of as generic recognition of their service – in the way that, say, we “honor” those who served and sometimes give them special benefits and recognition. What I think those who participate especially like about this project is the way it personalizes the service of those whose service might otherwise fade into anonymity.

As a result, how I view the project has changed. I originally saw it primarily as a documentary project; today I also regard it as a kind of online memorial that allows veterans to present their service as they want it presented to and recognized by the wider public.

Read more about the project, and explore the archive.

–Alex Dracobly, Senior Instructor II, Department of History, University of Oregon

Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Remember” by Ian Sane CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Learning to read emotions in oral history

The most recent issue of the OHR featured two stories on understanding emotion in oral history interviews. In one piece, Julian Simpson and Stephanie Snow asked what role humor plays in healthcare, and how to locate it in oral history. In another piece, Katie Holmes asks how to locate historical emotion during an interview and how to interpret these feelings. Today on the blog we bring you a short interview with Holmes where we ask about her interest in studying emotions, explore the experience of listening for emotion, and hear more about how she uses this investigation in her historical analysis. Enjoy the interview below, and check out the full piece in the OHR 44.1.

What prompted your interest in reading emotion in oral histories?

Many of us have had the experience of interviewing someone who can become quite unexpectedly distressed or “emotional” during an interview and it’s not always clear what is going on for them. I’d conducted a number of interviews for the Australian Generations project where this had happened, or where the interview had dealt with some highly emotional memories, including one where the participant seemed to spend much of the time in tears but seemed quite happy to keep recording. I was struck in my interviews by the different ways in which different generations responded to their emotional distress. Older interviewees usually wanted to turn the recorder off whereas younger ones seemed happy to emote all over the place! This in itself suggested different ways in which emotions had been “managed” historically. So I started to read more of the history of emotions literature, very little of which dealt with oral history or memory and emotions. That which did seemed very inadequate, and dismissive of the idea that the expression of emotion in an interview–and I guess I’m talking here about painful emotions rather than joyful ones–could really tell us anything about past emotion. This seemed quite contrary to the albeit limited psychoanalytic understanding that I had, and so I wanted to explore it further.

You invite oral historians to try to locate “historical emotion” by paying attention both to the content and the context of the interview–the bodily movements, setting, and even your own emotional state. Can you talk more about what this looks like in practice?

It means being very attentive to the non-verbal clues that your interviewee gives. So you need to listen beyond the words and pick up on what else is happening. It’s like operating on a number of different channels. There’s the information that the interviewee is sharing with you, then there’s the non-verbal communication that is going on–how they are sitting, how does that change, the pace and volume of their voice, what they are not talking about–and then there’s what you as an interviewer are feeling. This last one can be tricky but sometimes we can have quite strong reactions to our interviewees, or to the information they are sharing. What I suggest in the article is that we need to be attentive to our own responses because they can give us clues about what is happening for the interviewee. Maybe you are reminded of something or someone in your own life. Maybe you suddenly start to feel very uncomfortable or sad or want to move the narrator along when they want to linger on a topic–all these responses can be helpful in trying to work out what is going on for the interviewee and then gently asking further questions about it. So one of the channels we have to tune into is our own, and while not letting our own responses get in the way of the narrator’s recollection, use them as a possible insight into what might be happening for our interviewee. Our role is not to play therapist, but to learn as much as our interviewees are willing to share about their past life in all its complexities.

You note that you “re-experienced” some of your narrator’s trauma alongside her, as she shared her personal history. What is that experience like as an interviewer?

It can be pretty intense! And the challenge is to maintain the professional boundaries at the same time as attending to what is going on for the narrator. In the interview I discuss, I really could sense her fear and distress as she recalled a very difficult and confusing time in her childhood. Her projection of those emotions was palpable. And that’s when the listening on all channels comes in because I was suddenly struck by how young she would have been–the same age as my daughter during a very difficult time in my family–and I could see the way my daughter watched me so closely during that time. I write in the article about being pulled out of being an interviewer into being a person and a mother and, drawing on that experience, I asked a question about watching her mother. It seems like a really odd question to ask, and I asked it a bit too quickly, but at that moment I was responding from my own subjectivity.

When our interviewees are disclosing difficult or painful emotions that affect us, it’s really important that we can sit with that discomfort and not try and steer the interview away because of our need. That does mean being both aware of how we are responding and being able to manage our own emotional response. It requires a level of self-awareness and good intuition. As I said, it can be both intense and exhausting, but it can also be very satisfying and rewarding as an interviewer to feel that you’ve facilitated a rich and complex life narration.

Part of your ability to read the emotions your narrator is expressing comes from being physically in the room during the interview. How can you do similar work when listening to an interview recorded by someone else, or when there is only a transcript available?

This can be very difficult. I have listened to a number of the Australian Generations interviews where the interviewer has noted that the narrator became distressed or emotional at times, and have found it really hard to hear it. Sometimes the recorder has just suddenly been switched off, at other times you have to assume that the narrator is still talking while tears are falling, but you can’t hear those silent drops. At other times the distress is really evident–it can depend on how much the narrator is trying to control their emotional responses. Joyful emotions can be easier to hear in the tone of voice and pace of narration. For more painful emotions, you can listen for the faltering voice, the long pauses, the sniffles, but even then they can be hard to pick up and you have to listen really carefully. Visual clues tell us so much! A transcript can be even harder, unless someone has usefully annotated it to indicate changes in volume and pace, or long pauses etc. A transcript has other benefits of course and they are much easier to work with, and help you pick up the silences and the repetitions more readily. With the Australian Generations project we decided that listening to an interview and having a transcript was the best way to work with an interview. Of course you still don’t get the visual clues but if you are working with oral rather than video interview, that is the trade off.

What role does emotion play in your current projects?

Once you start getting interested in the history of emotions, you start to see them everywhere! I’m currently working on an environmental history of an area known in Victoria and South Australia as the “Mallee.” It’s pretty marginal farming country which has been a wheat and sheep growing area since Europeans first began settling it in the late 19^th century. I’ve been really struck by the emotional cycles that have driven first the settlement of the area, and then the periods of drought and extreme hardship that periodically afflict it. These emotional cycles can be affected by national developments or by the invention of a new strain of wheat or a new method of sowing and harvesting, and climate plays an important role as well – periods of extended drought are remembered as times of great strain and hardship. So there are historical periods that are marked by particular emotions. Then depending on the season when you might be visiting and interviewing a farmer from the area, the emotional tone of the interview will be very different. If you are visiting in autumn and the start to the sowing season has been good, the mood will be positive and hopes high. Return in spring after the rains have failed to deliver, and it’s a completely different scenario. And then there are the emotional connections that people have for their land or the area itself, or maybe a particular paddock or place on their property. For me what is fascinating about all this is not so much that these emotional responses are there, but that they drive the decisions people make. With farmers who are farming land that has been in their family for generations, the emotional legacy of that land and history is huge and it can often shape the ways people farm, sometimes preventing them from making decisions that might be in the best economic interests of the farm. And it’s really interesting to explore the connections between personal and community emotional fluctuations. In times of optimism people behave differently and make different decisions–maybe they will buy that land next door after all because the future is looking brighter. Climate change is now influencing emotional responses as well–uncertainty about the future is now apparent in conversations, and fear about what that will mean for the Mallee area. In my next project I am planning to bring together my interests in oral history and environmental history even more directly, interviewing people about living with environmental change. I am looking forward to exploring the issues around emotion and memory more fully in that work.

Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here?

I think if anything I could have made my argument about the possibility of accessing historical emotions through oral history even more strongly, but I was being cautious. I chose not to include links to the audio of the interview in order to protect the anonymity of my narrator, but some of what I try to describe in the article in terms of the sound of her voice, its cadences and pauses etc, is even more evident when you can hear it.

I’d also reinforce my point that this kind of interviewing is hard work! It’s emotionally demanding, it requires self-reflection and knowledge, and honesty. And not every interview, or even every interview where there is a lot of emotion expressed, is going to generate the kind of transference and counter-transference that I think happened between myself and Jana. But being quietly alert to the possibility is important.

How did you feel reading this interview, or the article in the OHR? Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Headphones” by Nickolai Kashirin, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Challenges of a hometown oral history performance

One of my first oral history performance experiences was watching E. Patrick Johnson perform Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales, the readers theater version of his oral history collection, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, at Texas A&M University. I was an undergraduate studying English and Theatre, and I was mesmerized by the histories Dr. Johnson shared. Learning about his research, the relationships he developed with interlocutors, and the performances he created was the push I needed to pursue graduate degrees that would teach me the skills to become a critical ethnographer committed to oral history performance.

Fast forward to last October when you may have passed me in the halls of OHA’s Annual Meeting, or joined me in the audience of Saturday’s Plenary where once again I witnessed the power of Dr. Johnson’s work. I was a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate attending OHA for the first time, spinning from my recent exams and prospectus defense, and preparing for my first oral history performance that was scheduled to take place in November. I was grappling with two big questions: Is what I’m doing actually oral history? How do I present these histories in a way that is ethical, engaging, and critically contextualized?

Simple questions, right?

I am happy to report that my first question was embraced, addressed, and debated the entire weekend. I came away with a strong sense of my position as a critical performance ethnographer who is committed to an oral history methodology. My second question is one that continues to morph and shift as I pursue my research, but I want to share some of what I’ve learned about performance and oral histories.

My dissertation is a hometown ethnography about public school desegregation in Longview, Texas. Thus far I have interviewed ten interlocutors who were present during desegregation as teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Their stories are powerful and offer insight into the experiences of both white and black Longview residents. One of the biggest challenges of this work is my relationship with my hometown. My sisters and I completed our K-12 education in the school district I am studying, as did our parents. All of my grandparents and my mom taught in the school district, and my father served on the school board for many years. After my father passed away in 2010, the school district named the new performing arts center at the high school after him. My position is undoubtedly privileged, and my understanding of my hometown, my family’s legacy, and my education experience is distinctly informed by my whiteness.

Wrestling with all of these complexities is really challenging and I often find myself questioning what actually needs to be part of my dissertation. All of it is important and this web of relations undoubtedly informs my research… but where does it all fit?

Enter: Unpacking Longview, my solo performance-as-research play. I have found that performance is an amazing place to work out the connection between all of these histories. Before I began writing my play I knew that the voices and stories of my interlocutors would be present throughout the piece, but I didn’t know how to incorporate my own story or how to capture the distinct history and culture of East Texas without simply telling story after story after story. I was worried that there would be no dramatic action if I just sat there and explained everything to the audience. Eventually, I settled on a combination of three performance styles: autobiography, oral history performance, and camp.

The performance begins with Elizabeth-the-researcher-and-hometown-girl (that’s me!) searching and digging through boxes, trying to make sense of everything that has been left behind.

This autobiographic part introduces the importance of my family’s history in East Texas and the way my father’s life and death inspires my research. I also acknowledge that much of my father’s success is reliant on his whiteness, and the advantages afforded to him as the grandson of a successful cotton gin owner.

After this reasonably somber foundation is laid, Elizabeth-the-researcher exits in search of a family memento that is lost amongst all the boxes. A radical shift occurs in the lighting and projections on-stage, a booming voice comes over the loud-speaker introducing the one and only–TEXAS MELT.

That’s right. I have my very own all East Texas, all the time, alter-ego. Unsurprisingly, Texas Melt is BIGGER than life, loves to dance and yodel with the skeletons she unpacks throughout the show, and really loves giving the audience a piece of her East Texas mind. Quite simply, she’s a hoot and a half, y’all. What I love about Texas Melt is that she not only provides some much needed comic relief, but she can say things Elizabeth-the-researcher-and-hometown-girl can’t. Texas Melt is the wise(ish) fool who explains how things “really” work in East Texas.

The autobiographic moments and Texas Melt’s interruptions are interspersed with oral history performances. These oral histories dialogically present histories from one white school administrator, one parent who graduated from Longview Negro High School and had two daughters in school during desegregation, one current high school Spanish teacher who was one of the only Latinas in the district during desegregation, and another current teacher who chose to attend the white school during desegregation by choice.

For these scenes, the audience hears a snippet of the interview with the interlocutor’s voice before I step into their story and continue performing it for the audience.

I performed Unpacking Longview last November at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and will take it to Longview this fall. Now, you might notice I’m not telling you much about the ending or other details of the play. Honestly, that’s because I’m not sure it’s really done yet. It’s a work in progress that keeps shifting and revealing new things to me. Oral history performance is the spine of this work, and I had no idea what would happen when I combined campy Texas Melt and my personal story with a performance style that often stands alone. Fortunately, mixing three styles enriches the overall telling of the story and enhances the critical voice of the piece overall. And who knows, maybe Texas Melt is an oral historian, after all.

Featured image and images included in the post are by Headen Photography, used with permission.

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Tending the roots: a response to Daniel Kerr

Here at the OHR blog we love a good origin story, where we get to hear firsthand how one of our colleagues fell in love with oral history, and how they use their own backgrounds and experiences to inform their practice. Sometimes, the people we hear from are drawn to oral history because it’s a place “where history really matters.” Sometimes oral history sits at an interesting intersection, a good place from which to hope. Other times, oral history is a way to build something meaningful from a disaster.  Today we hear from Allison Corbett, who explains her own radical roots and why it’s important to acknowledge the diverse experiences that enable us to listen to each other.

As a young person, I spent several hours a week learning with a group of immigrants who did maintenance work at a local golf course in Virginia. Supposedly, I was helping them learn English. I did do some of that. A lot of what I did, though, was learn. Their lives, which transpired alongside my own upper middle class white existence in my hometown, were composed of realities about which I had no idea before.

Shortly after I started to get to know these workers the local professor who was facilitating this experience introduced me to the work of Paulo Freire. Freire’s work shifted my understanding of the work that I was doing, and transformed my understanding of exchange across power differences. It taught me that any sound analysis of social in/justice and vision for lasting change must come from those directly affected.

When I went to college I continued to run adult English classes, and also began to volunteer as a community interpreter.  Years later, when I began to do oral history work, I did so with these foundational experiences in mind. Freire’s approach to popular education, which I contemplated through my weekly sessions in college, and later as a facilitator at a neighborhood community center in Chicago, greatly influenced my framework for working with people in oppressed communities. It helped fuel my own curiosity about what other people made of their lives and realities, and it gave me a critical lens with which to view so much of the “helping work” I saw around me.

The popular education center where I worked in Chicago had roots in Freirian philosophy, but was also founded by Myles Horton’s daughter, Amy Horton, and so was infused by the learning circles of the Highlander Folk School. I eventually left the world of adult education, but I did so to pursue the same principles and ethics that grounded my work there: a belief that people’s stories matter, and that when people are given space and encouraged to tell their stories and analyze them together, community transformation can be possible.

My work now straddles the worlds of interpreting and oral history. Both are specialized forms of listening and transmitting stories across difference. Both have the power to support self-determination and societal transformation. The current incarnation of this dual practice for me is The Language of Justice, an oral history project documenting the stories of interpreters who facilitate multilingual movement building across the country, a practice and ethic known as “language justice.”

These interviews have also brought me full circle back to popular education. One of the first places in the US to intentionally create multilingual grassroots spaces and train social justice interpreters was in fact the Highlander Center for Research and Education, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School.

While conducting interviews for the Language of Justice, I traveled to Highlander for the first time and met with others who now facilitate language justice circles in Western North Carolina. I was humbled and honored to be reminded of the traditions that originally sent me off in the direction of oral history as well as the deep listening that these practitioners were engaging in as part of their work.

Shortly after returning from my visit to Highlander, I sat down to read Daniel Kerr’s article: “Allan Nevins is Not My Grandfather: Radical Roots of Oral History Practice in the United States.” I was already pondering the roots of popular education in my own oral history work, but the article helped demonstrate that these roots were critical to the development of the radical oral history practice that I aspire to.

Kerr affirmed what I felt to be true in my own path to oral history. He also reminded me that as I and others seek to engage with communities beyond the archive, and often wring our hands about what good it can do to “just” stimulate dialogue in the pursuit of some abstract embodiment of “empathy,” there are generations of folks out there who have been using storytelling and listening as the basis for deep-rooted community change, to whom we can turn to for example.

By acknowledging this history, we allow ourselves to make connections with valuable alternatives to the archival, university-focused model that Nevins embodies.

Featured image credit: Photo by Allison Corbett, unidentified artist, La Estación Vieja, La Plata, Argentina, 2014.

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Where we rise: LGBT oral history in the Midwest and beyond

In early March, ABC released a much-anticipated mini-series that followed a group of activists who played important roles in the emergence of LGBTQ political movements. The show, When We Rise, was based in large part on a memoir by veteran activist Cleve Jones. While the series tells a compelling story, it is necessarily limited by its 8 hour runtime, focusing predominantly on the work of people in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Yet, as we have noted on the blog before, queer history happens everywhere, and oral historians are working to make this history visible. Today we continue our series on oral history and social change by highlighting the diversity of queer life and activism, exploring oral history projects from around the U.S.

The Midwest may not have had moments that grabbed national headlines like Stonewall or the rise of Harvey Milk, but it is home to pioneering moments of activism and community building. When Kathy Kozachenko was elected to Ann Arbor’s city council in 1974, she became the first out LGBTQ person elected to public office in the United States. The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor holds oral histories and archival collections of local queer life throughout the 20^th century, as well as the records of the Human Rights Party, the organization that sponsored Kozachenko’s historic candidacy.

In Madison, Judy Greenspan ran for school board in 1973, the same year as Harvey Milk first began his political career. Neither Greenspan nor Milk won their campaign, but both would help to shape the progression of LGBTQ politics. The University of Wisconsin-Madison holds interviews with and ephemera from Greenspan, as well as an archival collection that spans nearly a century of queer life. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Transgender Oral History Project and the Milwaukee LGBT History Project document even more of Wisconsin’s LGBTQ past.

The Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, at the University of Minnesota, used its recordings to produce a book that explores a wide variety of queer histories. The book calls into question many assumptions about the story of LGBTQ activism as it has been told on the coasts, asking what this history looks like when it adopts an alternative geographic focus. Last year we spoke with Jason Ruiz, one of the project’s collaborators, about both the project and an article he had co-written for the OHR which asked what makes queer oral history different.

Chicago has its own unique queer history, and the Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles project holds more than 90 interviews on LGBTQ life at the University of Chicago. Both the Leather Archives & Museum and Chicago Gay History provide additional oral histories, along with videos, that document the lives of a wide variety of LGBTQ Chicagoans.

Outside of these northern cities, universities and community groups have mapped out an even more complicated landscape of queer life. The Ozarks Lesbian and Gay Archives at Missouri State contains both oral histories and archival collections. The Queer Appalachia Oral History Project at the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas’ Under the Rainbow: Oral Histories of Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Intersex and Queer People in Kansas, and the Queer Oral History Project at the University of Illinois all provide invaluable oral history collections that depict the lives and struggles of queer people around the South and Midwest. The Brooks Fund History Project, at the Nashville Public Library, focuses on Middle Tennessee, exploring the contours of queer life before the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The geographically disparate Country Queers project includes stories from rural communities across the country, from the deep south to the mountain west.

AIDS activism dominates one entire episode of ABC’s miniseries, and is a major focus of many LGBTQ oral history projects. The New York City focused ACT UP Oral History Project provides a rich history of an organization that has been at the forefront of HIV/AIDS activism, and its recordings were the basis for the 2012 documentary, United in Anger. Both the National Institutes of Health and the University of California San Francisco have documented the experiences of medical professionals who played key roles, especially in the beginning of the epidemic. The oH Project: Oral Histories of HIV/AIDS in Houston, Harris County, and Southeast Texas has a growing collection of recordings about the local response to AIDS and the experiences of Texans. The African American AIDS History Project includes an oral history project on AIDS activism, as well as a sprawling collection of materials about AIDS in African American communities.

Moving outside the U.S., the LGBT Oral History Digital Collaboratory, located at the University of Toronto, is working to create a hub for queer oral history collections across the world, providing researchers and community members easy access to a wealth of information. In 2015 we spoke to Elspeth Brown from the Collaboratory, on the importance of working together in preserving queer history.

This short list is by no means a comprehensive overview of LGBTQ oral history projects, but it provides a taste of the diversity of stories that define this history. Queer history continues to happen everywhere, and the growing number of projects that document and preserve this history will enable the creation of new, more complex version of the vast queer past.

Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

People from Madison, WI at the 1979 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Image courtesy of the UW-Madison Archives.

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Down at the crossroads: the intersection of organizing and oral history

In the last few weeks, we have explored the possibilities oral historians have for using their work to create and promote changes in the world around us. Joshua Burford explained how listening to activists of the past helps locate hope and direction in the present. Holland Hall and Alexandra Weis shared their experiences at the Women’s March on Washington, and the power of listening for creating change. Today, Daniel Horowitz Garcia asks where oral history and organizing come together, and how focusing on public engagement can change the structure and value of oral history.

The crossroads, in Southern folklore, represents a place where worlds meet. It is a place where realities collide and deals can be made. Since the 2016 election I have experienced colliding realities on an almost daily basis. Until then my 20 years’ experience as an organizer and my 10 years’ experience in oral history overlapped in areas and at times but for the most part seemed separate. After the November election that is no longer the case.

Within weeks of the election I was interviewing members Project South, a southern-based, movement-building organization I worked for 12 years ago. By the end November 2016 I launched Feeling Political, a podcast about politics, emotions, and action. My original plan was to produce five or six episodes by talking to thinkers and organizers about how they felt about politics and what we should be doing. Instead I produced 11 shows, one bonus episode, and will start the second season this summer.

The premise of the podcast is that not everyone gave up hope because Trump won. In fact, there are many people who did not fundamentally change their basic political strategy because of the presidential election. These people’s optimism and hope about the future is not connected to the electoral process. Of course work adjusts based on different election results, but a Democrat’s loss or a Republican’s win does not alter how marginalized people must approach politics to survive. A fish swims even though there are sharks about, but she learns to swim well. I thought the shock of a Trump presidency was a good time to talk to some of these folks. I asked them three questions: how do they wish to be identified, how do they feel in this political moment, and what’s their advice to someone about what should be done. In addition, I asked anyone who wished to use their phone and email me a voice memo answering the same questions.

Asking people how they felt after the election was a powerful question. Through the podcast I found that talking with people affiliated with an organization, such as Project South, was an efficient way to gather interviews but also a collective learning process. I asked past and present board members and staff of Project South my three questions. The audio, ranging from five to eight minutes, will form the basis for a collaboration on political education curriculum incorporating emotions and politics. The goal is to help participants analyze and strategize about their work. This type of partnership will be, hopefully, the frame of the podcast in each season. I am not pretending that a podcast is an organizing or an oral history project. But I have learned from this experience that there is overlap in the skill sets.

Dan Kerr’s 2016 article for the Oral History Review, as well as the accompanying presentation at the OHA 2016 conference, argued there are methods of oral history that do not owe allegiance to Allan Nevins and the Columbia School. Furthermore, Kerr argued that oral history of or in service to an activist project does and should pursue a different methodology than the Nevins school. I thought about that argument when I heard a participant at the OHA conference argue that oral history and organizing do not share a skill set. I believe the participant is objectively wrong, and I think Kerr’s observation about different methodologies explains why someone would make that mistake. Simply put, oral history aimed at improving organizing or facilitating a victory may no longer look like oral history, at least not the academic kind. This doesn’t necessarily make things easier. If the organizing centered, then what happens to oral history standards? The field has spent decades struggling to develop guidelines that protect participants. Protections must exist whether or not Nevins can recognize the project. This is just a single example of complications of combining scholarship with activism. At the crossroads the future is uncertain, so if you show up be ready to make a deal.

Society is changing all the time. Making social change a goal, therefore, does not seem useful. How are people engaging, or not, in change? To what end? These are good questions for the organizer or the oral historian. How do we engage with people and to what end are even better. I haven’t identified as an organizer for years, but the goal of the podcast is to move people to action. The deal I’ve made is that oral history skills, like listening and amplifying people’s voices, is enough to make that happen.

Forgive the Hegelian overtones, but when two realities collide don’t they make something new? Presently, I sit at the crossroads. My realities are colliding, and I am making deals.

Featured image credit: “2017.02.04 No Muslim Ban 2, Washington, DC USA 00521” by Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Oral history and empathy at the Women’s March on Washington

Today we continue our series on oral history and social change by turning to our friends at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the University of Florida. In collaboration with colleagues at the UF Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, a group of SPOHP students A group of SPOHP students and staff traveled to the Women’s March on Washington this January as part of an experiential learning project. Their recordings captured a snapshot of a divided America, and the project aims to use oral history to encourage empathy. Check out the reflections from two members of the project below, and enjoy their special podcast from the march, put together by Aliya Miranda.

Holland Hall:

One of the most spontaneous interactions I experienced during our three-day fieldwork trip to Washington, D.C., to document the Women’s March on Washington occurred in the lobby of our hotel in Arlington, Virginia. On the night of President Trump’s inauguration, while we were discussing our fieldwork strategies for the following day in our hotel lobby, a woman stuck her head in our circle to ask, “Are you all protesting tomorrow?” Enthused by her interest in our group and feeling her excitement for the Women’s March on Washington the following day, I greeted the woman, Alyson Aleman, and informed her that we were a research group from the University of Florida. After hearing that we were in Washington to document the inauguration and Women’s March, she told me about her family and how extraordinary of a moment this was for her parents specifically.

Her parents had been divorced for over two decades, and her family’s trip to the Women’s March on Washington was the first time they were coming together as a family for an extended period since separating. Meeting this family and hearing their story not only hinted at how momentous of an event the march was going to be, but this introduction also beautifully displayed the oftentimes whimsical nature of oral history research. We were able to sit with three generations of this Connecticut family to gather their thoughts regarding the overall 2016-election cycle and why they were compelled to attend the Women’s March on Washington in response to the election of Donald Trump.

What made this interview so enjoyable for me to conduct as a researcher was creating this recording with a family during such a momentous time for not only the nation, but for their family. Ms. Aleman also brought her young daughter along to the march to instill in her that she is able to own her voice and to express her opinions freely. Another striking point Ms. Aleman brought up during our interview was the importance of the work we were doing as a research team, and how such material can be used to inspire the primary ingredient for social change: empathy.

While the family discussed the many ways empathy can be encouraged, Ms. Aleman’s husband, Karl Odden, actually highlighted where oral history comes in to play in the process of building empathy for others. Mr. Odden spoke about needing to walk in someone else’s shoes in order to gain authentic empathy for others from different walks of life. He noted that self-educating on the lived experiences of others is the most effective way to gain the understanding necessary to be able to empathize with others. Our research team sought to collect diverse perspectives from a broad spectrum of identities in the hopes that this digital material can be used to educate and inspire, as well as assist in the collective goal to build more empathy for one another as a nation.

It was 19 January, and my group had just finished our first day of fieldwork in Washington, DC. As the streets began to darken, we stumbled, sore and tired, into a food court next to the National Press Club. We’d passed a few people dressed up in prom attire – “They’re celebrating the inauguration, they’re holding parties,” my colleague Marcela explained – but hadn’t quite realized that we were directly next to the largest inaugural ball event in the city. When we emerged from the food court, we stepped into the protest burgeoning outside of the “DeploraBall.”

Alexandra Weis:

Frantically, we sprang into action, trying to capture as much footage as possible. We filmed as protesters used a floodlight to project the words: “Impeach the Predatory President! Bragging About Grabbing a Woman’s Genitals” on the otherwise pristine and sculpted face of the National Press Club. Nearby, someone inflated a giant white elephant labeled “RACISM.” The energy in the crowd of hundreds was urgent – people were palpably frightened, outraged, and desperate. We spoke to several members of an anti-fascist group shouting ill omens of the inauguration day to come. We interviewed a queer transgender woman who defiantly held up a trans pride flag against religious extremist counter-protesters. Amid the chaos, the interviewees made their concerns known: Trump and Pence are illegitimate, they emphasized over and over. Protect marginalized folks, they insisted. They were people for whom these issues were undeniably real; their lives were political not because they sought out politics, but because for them, there was no alternative to social justice.

For me, this was not only the first day of fieldwork for our trip, but the first day of fieldwork ever. As a graduate student in Gender Studies with a background in psychology, I had little experience doing hands-on research. I was passionate about social justice in my everyday life, but struggled to incorporate it into my academic practice. This first day threw me headfirst into the oral history process. People were struggling to be heard, crying out about the ways they were hurting. When I asked what brought them to the protests, people told me repeatedly and almost unanimously: they were scared for themselves, but also for their neighbors and their country. Given a platform, they were eager to explain their perspectives. As Audre Lorde wrote in her poem A Litany For Survival: “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard, nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid.” The act of speaking out can be revolutionary, but it is our job as scholars to openly listen and welcome the raw honesty, turmoil, and complexity that accompanies the moment in social movement history.

These reflections and recordings are part of the larger Women’s March on Washington Archives project, run by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and others at the University of Florida. For more from SPOHP, find them on Facebook, Twitter, or their homepage. To submit your own piece on oral history and social change, check out our CFP.

Featured image credit: “Alex and Celina” by Holland Hall, from the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, used with permission.

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Planting the seeds of resistance

Today we’re starting a new series on the blog where we explore the intersections of oral history and social change. Throughout 2017 we’ll bring you origin stories from activist historians, updates from the front lines, methodological approaches, and more from people who are using oral history to change their world. We begin with Joshua Burford, who first appeared on the blog last June to share his experiences preserving the history of queer people in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I have been working on preservation of Southern Queer history for ten years, and I have never felt the urgency that I feel at this moment to make certain it is safe and available. I think many archivists would agree that urgency is an undercurrent of most of the work that we do since so much information is lost when people die or move or leave their work. When the Charlotte Queer Oral History project began in late 2015 the urgency that we felt was based not on fear but on the excitement that a project like this would give us access to information that didn’t exist anywhere else. I would describe our group as a family that is looking to support each other, but also support the people whose stories we are attempting to capture. Every time we meet it feels like the possibilities are endless and the urgency to get this project moving has created a set of siblings that represent generations of experience, desires, and the need to be connected to something that feels so important.

When HB2 happened in North Carolina and Charlotte was put under a microscope, the project took on a new feel for us. We had been so focused on the stories that were at risk (several people on our list were in bad health) that we didn’t really sit down and discuss how this project could be a locus for resistance to a growing anti-Queer and Trans sentiment from our state capitol. The decision had been made that each of us would follow our own interests and create micro-oral history projects within the larger scope of the project. Almost immediately we drifted towards the stories that highlighted the political work of Charlotte and the people that made the community what it is today. My first large scale project was to interview Sue Henry, a local business owner and political organizer who was most visible in Charlotte in the 1990s. I completed three interviews with her and realized right away that, although I wanted to know about her running a LGBT bookstore and her time as the first openly lesbian identified candidate for mayor, I really wanted to know how she had accomplished all she had in the face of very organized discrimination. I knew that her history would help to shed light on the processes by which this community organized politically and that her words (which have always inspired me) could light a fire under others. What I didn’t understand when I talked with her is that I needed so badly for her to tell me that we would survive HB2 and whatever came after it.

Sue had been a part of the LGBT group that first fought for a comprehensive anti-discrimination policy for Charlotte back in 1992. They ultimately lost that fight but the waves they created galvanized the community in a way that it had not felt before. I needed her story for my own survival as a Queer person organizing in 2016. I had always imagined that the audience for these stories would be people not directly involved in the work of the committee. I had seen students, our community elders, and future generations as the consumers of this knowledge but I had not really thought about what it could do for me. These feelings of urgency were indeed growing from my own sense of fear about where we are headed as a community and a nation. Preserving history is an act of resistance, but it’s also an act of survival. I tend to think of oral histories as the fire that lights the way to manuscript collections and all they contain. People love stories, but these stories give guidance as much as the create inspiration.

The Charlotte Queer Oral History project is a social justice endeavor. The committee struggles each month to make certain that we have room for all the voices that are overlooked. We began the project with a mandate to collect women’s history and the history of Queer people of color because we know how often these voices are silenced. Each story and its connection of the growing local King-Henry-Brockington community archive are an attempt to create a blueprint of our history so we can fight in the present. These stories shed light on what is possible and out of each comes the antidote to HB2. Our government can pass a law but our stories are the seeds of resistance because now that we know where we have been, we know where it is possible to go from here.

Featured image credit: “HB2 Protest” by Selena N. B. H., CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Guaranteeing free speech

In a blog post heard ’round the oral history world, Zachary Schrag broke the news that the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects was finally amended to deregulate oral history. This new regulation, the result of decades of work by a determined group of scholars, is as exciting as it is complicated, so today on the blog we’re offering a meta-summary of some reflections on this change.

A post on the Oral History Association’s blog succinctly clarified the rule change.

The most critical component of the new protocols for oral historians explicitly removes oral history and journalism from the regulations…The new protocols will take effect on January 19, 2018.

Schrag’s blog post offered a detailed explanation of the technical language, and the differences between the early Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and the final regulation.

The final rule preserves and clarifies the NPRM’s deregulation of oral history. This is a great victory for freedom of speech and for historical research.

The NPRM somewhat confusingly listed a number of activities “deemed not to be research” in §__.101, then presented the definition of research itself in §__.102. The final policy more logically defines research, then lists “activities…deemed not to be research.”

Whereas the NPRM excluded “Oral history, journalism, biography, and historical scholarship activities that focus directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected,” the final rule offers a broader exclusion:

For purposes of this part, the following activities are deemed not to be research: (1) Scholarly and journalistic activities (e.g., oral history, journalism, biography, literary criticism, legal research, and historical scholarship), including the collection and use of information, that focus directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected. [§__.102(l)(1)]

So freedom depends on the activity, not the discipline, with literary critics, law professors, and others who interview individuals benefiting. Another section of the announcement notes that this provision will also apply to political scientists and others who hope “to hold specific elected or appointed officials up for public scrutiny, and not keep the information confidential.”

The post went on to explain the reasoning, and another post on the blog details the consequences of the change for social scientists.

The National Coalition for History weighed in with some background on both the change and the contentious relationship between historians and IRB procedures.

[The regulation] was originally promulgated as the “Common Rule” in 1991. The historical community, collaborating through the National Coalition for History, has long argued that scholarly history projects should not be subject to standard IRB procedures since they are designed for the research practices of the sciences…

Beginning in the mid-1990s, college and university students, faculty, and staff who conducted oral history interviews increasingly found their interviewing protocols subject to review by their local Institutional Review Board (IRB), a body formed at every research institution, and charged by the federal government with the protection of human subjects in research. Human subject risk regulation had its roots in the explosion of government-funded medical research after World War II as well as with the revelation of glaring medical abuses, including Nazi doctors’ experiments on Holocaust victims and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. History and other humanities disciplines were never originally intended to fall within the purview of the regulation, generally known as the “Common Rule,” which addressed biomedical and behavioral research.

The growing inclusion of oral history under IRB review began an often contentious, confusing, and chaotic process. Was oral history—or historical studies more generally—the type of “generalizable” research covered by the Common Rule?

The post drew on an article written by Linda Shopes that clarified the process and what was at stake before the rule had passed.

Finally, Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, offered some perspective for the change, focusing on the motivation driving those who sought it.

The technical arguments we made will not stand out in the historical record; the spirit that actually motivated so many arguments regarding the application of the policy was our resolute determination to remind the board that oral history is part of protecting the right to free speech and free inquiry.

In that sense, we were not thinking of protecting narrators as potential victims, but protecting their right to speak freely and openly as citizens and agents in a democracy that guarantees free speech.

While the change will not take effect until 2018, we are excited at the opportunities this change will create for recording and preserving the voices of people who might otherwise be denied a space to speak. We welcome additional analysis, summaries, and guides, so please add to this collection in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image: “Liberty” by Mobilus In Mobili, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Learning from disaster

As part of our 50^th anniversary issue of the OHR, Abigail Perkiss explored the impact of oral history in the aftermath of a Hurricane Sandy in her article Staring Out to Sea and the Transformative Power of Oral History for Undergraduate Interviewers. The article is a timely look at how doing and presenting oral history changes the way practitioners interact with both their interviewees and the broader world. Below, we hear more about how the project moved from recording to presenting in only a few months and how Perkiss helped to foster commitment and transformation. If you are interested in contributing your own pedagogical experiences and insights email our blog editor, Andrew Shaffer, or Abigail Perkiss, Pedagogy Editor at the Review.

The article shows how the Staring Out To Sea project transformed the students involved. Have you seen similar effects with other projects or do you think this was unique to the traumatic beginnings or the intimate connections the students shared to the events?

I’ve used oral history in my teaching before, but the semester during which we developed Staring out to Sea was the first time I’d ever taught a seminar specifically focused around oral history, and specifically centered on the development of one collaborative project. So, it’s hard to know what made the difference – was it spending the entire term concentrating on oral history? Was it the nature of the work and the immediacy of the experience for the students? Was it the project-based approach that allowed the students to feel some ownership over the work they were doing, some agency in the process?

My hunch at the time was that it was a combination of all of those things, and in subsequence semesters, I got to see that transformative power translate to other classroom experiences, where students had the same level of creative agency and responsibility for the direction of the work.

For example, in my spring 2016 black history survey, my students and I spent the entire semester examining the history and memory of black life at Kean University, where I teach. Using the school’s special collections as well as primary sources from other local archives, and conducting select oral history interviews themselves, students in this class worked to build an institutional history of race relations at Kean, telling the story of the dynamics of race and power at the school and on its grounds over the past 250 years. The course culminated with the development of The BlacKeaning: Illuminating Black Lives at Kean University, a campus tour highlighting this racial history of the school. I would say that that experience was similarly transformative for the students involved, and it made a comparable impact on me as well.

The project developed incredibly quickly, from conceiving of the idea to presenting the findings in only a few months. What lessons did you learn that helped move it along so swiftly?

Yes, “incredibly quickly” is a good way to put it. It was an unbelievably packed semester. I’ve never experienced a class so energizing and enervating at the same time. And it wouldn’t have been possible without the generous guidance and support of so many seasoned oral historians (Don Ritchie, Stephen Sloan, Linda Shopes, among others), and of the regional oral history association – Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region – and Kean University. Knowing that these various institutions and individuals had our backs gave me the confidence to undertake such a project, and showed my students that people were taking them and their work seriously.

I think the biggest takeaways from that spring, for me, were about preparedness, communication, and vision. I won’t rehash the things that went well in our development of the project – they’re in the OHR essay – but there are two critical things that I wish I’d approached differently.

First, equipment and technology – our mics and recorders arrived just hours before the first student was to conduct her first interview. I had used the equipment before and knew it well enough that I assumed it was relatively intuitive, and so – because of the time crunch – I forewent the proper training with the students in the limited amount of time we had for it. They all figured it out, but not without a few blips and a fair amount of anxiety for them. If I could do it over, I would have built in a technology workshop so that we could have gone through it more deliberately and collaboratively, and they could have tested everything ahead of time.

Second, the nature of the project was such that once the students graduated at the end of the semester, there was no built-in mechanism for completing the work. Such is the nature of the academic rhythms. While the project continued, through independent study and internship credit and collaborations with a neighboring institution, Stockton University, if I were to do it again, I would have thought more proactively about the longitudinal nature of the project and set up an infrastructure to develop that.

You noted that the project facilitated “a level of agency, autonomy, and affirmation that undergraduates…rarely get to experience.” Do you have any advice for educators that hope to foster similar kinds of transformation and camaraderie in the classroom?

I think developing a rapport among students is incredibly important. Before they can begin a meaningful collaboration, they need to understand where everyone is coming from, what their relationship is to the subject matter, what their work styles are, even what kind of music they like to listen to. They need to know each other, in order to trust each other, to be able to rely on each other.

From my experience, I’ve also found that it’s a careful balance for the instructor, wanting to encourage and affirm the work, but also providing critical feedback and – as I said in the OHR essay – “tough love.” Because sometimes the students need to step up, and the instructor needs to be able to tell them that in a way that they can hear and respond to, without feeling marginalized or silenced. I don’t think I did this perfectly, and at times I think I leaned too much toward the encouragement side, at the expense of the quality of the interviews. It was a learning process for me, too, in that way.

What is the future of the project? Are you still gathering interviews?

We collected the last of the interviews in the summer of 2015, and I’m currently at work on a book based on the stories of the narrators, which is due out with Cornell University Press in 2018. As I’m working on the book, I’ve had conversations with a number of the narrators, specifically about their social media representation of the storm as it was happening. That’s created for me a powerful parallel narrative about their experiences of Hurricane Sandy and an interesting way to contextualize and make sense of some of their recollections in the oral history interviews.

At the same time, I’m in the early stages of working with an oral history repository, transferring the interviews over to them so that people around the world can access and use them.

How has the project changed your approach to teaching, or doing oral history?

I think the biggest impact of the project for me has been in seeing the power of a project-based approach. I knew that in the abstract, prior to Staring out to Sea, but seeing the impact of this work on my students had a profound effect on how I approach the classroom more broadly, as I discussed above in working with students on The BlacKeaning.

I haven’t had the opportunity since Staring out to Sea to conduct oral history interviews myself or work with students on an oral history project, but I very much look forward to that opportunity. I’m so proud of the work that my students did over those two years, and feel tremendously indebted to them for their willingness to take on such high-stakes work. At the same time, as I’ve noted, there are certainly things that I would do differently, and so I look forward to having the chance to apply the lessons I learned from that project, to do it better next time.

Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here?

I’d just like to take this opportunity to highlight the Pedagogy Section of the Oral History Review and to encourage your readers – those in both secondary and higher ed institutions – to consider how their work might contribute to our broader understanding of how to teach oral history. When Glenn Whitman first conceived of the section in 2009, he envisioned it as a space to highlight the growing scholarship on educational methodology, specifically as it relates to oral history. For Glenn and the rest of the OHR editorial board, one of the central missions of our field is to train the next generation of oral historians. The Pedagogy Section of the journal affords us the opportunity to think collectively about how to do that.

Where have you seen the transformative potential of oral history? Add your voice to the conversation in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image: “Hurricane Sandy . The Aftermath” by Hypnotica Studios Infinite, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Learning from each other

Here on the blog we have talked about the value of oral history in preserving spaces and memories, its importance in social change, and the work that goes into producing and presenting quality oral history projects. Throughout January we are focusing on educators who are using oral history in the classroom, and its transformative potential. Below we hear from our own Troy Reeves and students from his First-Year Interest Group (FIG) class on oral history and food production in Wisconsin. Make sure to check back in two weeks when Abigail Perkiss will join us to talk about her article in the most recent OHR and the profound changes she saw in students. If you are interested in contributing your own pedagogical experiences and insights email our blog editor, Andrew Shaffer, or Abigail Perkiss, Pedagogy Editor at the Review.

Fate intervened this summer, giving me the opportunity to teach a History 201 class this fall at UW-Madison. Over the course of fifteen weeks I instructed 15 first-year undergraduates about oral history. They all conducted a recorded audio interview and wrote a “Labor Portrait” – think Studs Terkel’s Working. In the end, as I hoped, I learned as much from them as they did from me.

At the end of the class I asked the students to think back on what they had learned. Below are a handful of excerpts from their reflections that give a glimpse into the transformative potential of oral history. They are as diverse and distinct as the students themselves, and I am grateful for the opportunity to have met and worked with such a fantastic group of human beings.

For one student, the class helped to forge connections between his disparate identities, connecting his childhood to his life as a college student.

It’s tough to say who I am, because I have always been constantly changing as a person. I have different accents, mannerisms, and even beliefs based on who I am surrounded by. Sometimes I am Mario Carrillo, the goofy nerd who enjoys reading old political books and drawing cartoons. Sometimes I am “Mah-yo Carreeyo,” a strong-willed Mexican kid who would rather see change out in the streets rather than in a classroom. I found that my time here at UW-Madison has challenged these two identities of mine. I am from the Illinois Rust Belt, a place where the atmosphere tastes like aluminum and ash. A place where hard work was valued more than your brain, which is something I’ve always struggled with.

I was a little afraid of what my parents would say about my choice of this FIG. After all, I was here to learn skills necessary to never again experience poverty, and a political science degree itself isn’t exactly a competitive degree. But taking this class reminded me of issues I faced as a kid. Even the narrator I chose reminded me of my own father: they both were Mexican immigrants who got their first jobs as low paid restaurant workers. I feel he has a story that is more common than it should, but it is the cultural barrier that stops American society from truly empathizing.

– Mario Carrillo

Some students latched onto the ability of oral history to amplify voices that rarely get an audience.

The woman I chose to interview is a type of worker that doesn’t often get a lot of credit. She works in the dining hall and is a student so her position is often overlooked and gone un-thanked. So I thought it would be nice to give her a voice.

– Annika Hendrickson

I chose my narrator because we had previously had conversations about work, and he seemed very opinionated on issues of workplace climate and the tipped wage. I also knew a bit about his life before coming to Madison and thought he had a story worth telling.

– AJ Hirschboeck

For some students, the class helped them see how history is constructed, and to see their own lives as a part of history.

The class certainly expanded my perspectives on a variety of topics, from destroying any misconceptions about history to all the social movements occurring today and the complicated commodity chains that put food on shelves.

– David Chen

I wanted to have some information before choosing a person to interview so I went to the UW Archives to look at materials. I kept stumbling upon one person’s name over and over again, so I shot him an email and he was very willing to meet with me. At the time of the interview, I was in my first semester as a freshman at UW Madison. I absolutely love this school and I am very excited for next semester, next year, and all of the education I will get until I graduate. I want to get more involved on campus to be a part of something and I hope that one day, a student will interview me and I will be in the UW Archives.

– Stephanie Hoff

I never realized how much more there was to history besides multiple choice tests on wars. Although the interview was stressful, it was easily my most fun assignment that I had all semester. This class has even made me consider working for my local newspaper over the summer where I could conduct interviews with people and write articles.

– Madeline Kallgren

Some students saw the potential of the interview to make and improve relationships, building meaningful connections with people inside and outside of their communities.

I chose my narrator because Slow Food was a place that I really wanted to visit, but I could never muster up the courage to go alone and volunteer. So, I used this project as a way to get to know the people of slow food. I’m glad I did that because I was able to meet some really awesome and welcoming people. I’m also glad that I chose to be a part of this FIG because I got to meet some really cool people out of it.

– Yesha Shah

I chose my narrator because I had developed a good rapport with him before I even knew I was going to interview him. We are from the same country originally and I was interested in his story about his life in Madison as a fellow Indian. Oral history was the best to find out.

– Tanvi Tilloo

I may be a bit biased, but I agree – oral history is the best way for us to find out about each other, and to build connections. Teaching is exhausting, and grueling, and occasionally monotonous, and so damn worth it because it has allowed me to connect with some incredible people and to continue preaching the good word of oral history.

Want to contribute your own pedagogical insights or inquiries? Contact our social media coordinator, Andrew Shaffer, at ohreview@gmail.com to talk about writing for the blog. Add your voice to the conversation in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image: “Classroom.” by MIKI Yoshihito, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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