Oral History and Social Change

The Oral History Review blog is launching a new initiative to emphasize the work of people who use oral history to create social change. As part of this series, we are soliciting contributions for publication on the blog, which could be an overview of a particular project, a methodological consideration for bringing social change into the process of doing oral history, a story from the front lines, or something completely different.

We are looking for blog posts between 500-800 words, or 10-15 minutes of audio or video content. These are rough guidelines, however, so we are open to negotiation in terms of media and format. We should also stress that while we welcome posts that showcase a particular project, we can’t serve as landing page for kickstarter or similar funding sites.

Some questions we hope to address in this series include:

How does focusing on social change impact the process of engaging with oral history? Does it change the structure of interviews, or the questions asked? Does it shift positionality in the interview itself, or in how the interview is used after its completion?
What experiences or ideas lead to the development of a socially minded oral history practice?
How do projects take unheard voices out of the archive and use them to create social change?
Who are the target audiences for socially engaged oral history projects, and how can they best be reached?
What successful changes have come about because of oral history?
What lessons and best practices have oral historians developed from doing oral history for social change?

Additionally, our friends at Groundswell are hosting a class in using oral history to create social change, starting in just a few weeks. Registration closes on February 5^th, so make sure to sign up soon, and come back to the blog to hear from your friends and colleagues about the great work they’re doing.

Please direct any questions, pitches, or submissions to our Social Media Coordinator, Andrew Shaffer, at ohreview[at]gmail[dot]com. You can also message us on Twitter or Facebook.

Featured image: “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” by Jason Hargrove, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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A few of Troy’s favorite things

Now that Caitlin and Andrew have had their fun, Troy Reeves gets a turn to highlight some of his favorite posts from the OHR blog and make us feel nostalgic for all the time we’ve spent in our little corner of the internet.

As I’m neck deep in the Holidays and my final weeks as OHR’s managing editor, I’m coming back to the pop culture of my youth(-ish) and the DJ in my head is playing “It’s so Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday” while I look over what we’ve published.

First, (and my DJ has moved to Joe Cocker here) I leaned on my friends (and colleagues) to help us keeping the blog fires warm. Now that we’ve got our playlist set up for a trip down memory lane, I have to stop by our interview with audio transcriptionist Teresa Bergen. We still think all of our transcripting friends are beautiful.

The blog also gave us a chance to hear from #OralHistory colleagues from all over, including Sarah Milligan, Doug Boyd, and Stephen Sloan (to name just a few).

My Madison peeps also helped us get by (not high … hugs not drugs people) on several occasions. Sam Snyder’s review of voice recognition software was both fun and informative. And the interview we did with Scott Seyforth & Nichole Barnes about their piece in the #OHR helped to highlight the role Madison played in a story that often focuses only on coastal cities.

Dana Gerber contributed twice to the blog, and her love of podcasts and her interest in trying to actually preserve them for future generations comes through so clearly in her first post. On top of that, she has become a great friend.

Finally, I cannot sing Andrew Shaffer’s praises enough, and while not a Madisonian anymore – he went to San Francisco, perhaps with a flower in his hair?— since taking over the blog from Caitlin Tyler-Richards, he has excelled at keeping the posts on-time, tight and timely. While nearly impossible to choose from all the posts he wrote or co-authored, his November 2015 post, “Getting to the core of Story Corps, and other audio puns,” stands as my favorite. It shows off his writing skill, as well as his sense of humor.

I’m stopping now both because of space and because I have hit my pop culture reference quota. One last, short but sweet comment: I loved working with Andrew and Caitlin. You can find them online at @aw_shaffer and @ctredits.

The Oral History Review — Oral History and Social Change

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