Fernanda Espinosa to be a Smithsonian Fellow in Washington, DC

Fernanda is spending her Summer at the Smithsonian Institution in America’s Capitol

Ecuador native, New York based, Fernanda Espinosa is off to do a Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s Latino Museum Studies Program (LMSP). She will be working with Ranald Woodaman, Director of Exhibits and Public Programs (and LMSP alumn) – Smithsonian Latino Center, on the Latino DC History Project: Muralism project research.

The Latino DC History Project is a multi-year initiative to document, preserve, and share the stories of Latino/as in the institutions, culture, economy and daily life of the nation's capital. Working with the Smithsonian Latino Center (SLC) Exhibitions and Public Program Director, Fernanda will explore the feasibility of a long-term muralism project in DC as a component of the Latino DC History Project.

Fernanda Espinosa is an Andean immigrant based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a cultural organizer, language justice advocate, and oral history artist.  She is currently a Master of Arts candidate at Columbia University’s Oral History Program and holds a BA in Anthropology as well as in Latin American Literature.

Fernanda is a steward and co-founder of the People’s Climate Arts group, a diverse network of artists and cultural organizers that uses art and culture to help support, mobilize and amplify social movements, while simultaneously creating space for local, long-term projects. The group was a recipient of the 2015 Rauschenberg Foundation Artists as Activists fund. She also co-founded and is a project coordinator of Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero (CC 1/19), an art and oral history collective working with interviews, murals, and other visual and audio tools. CC 1/19 received The Laundromat Project’s 2015 Create Change commission award.

As part of her thesis at Columbia Oral History MA, Fernanda is working on Hogar de la Distancia (Home of Distance), a sound and visual art project documenting stories of immigrants from Ecuador, one of the largest migrant populations in New York metropolitan area. The interviews and participatory efforts serve as points of departure that inspire audio-visual portraits put together in conjunction with the CC 1/19 collective. In addition to documenting the voices, the project seeks to make visible, honor and recognize the memory and experience of people who migrate and must navigate complex relationships with their loved ones and their homeland from a distance.

With the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program Fernanda hopes to expand her experience in intentional cultural work and continue to create bridges between institutions and Latinx communities by making visible their histories in the United States.  She is also excited to learn more about these communities in Washington through her practicum in muralism research.

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum and research complex, with 19 museums and galleries and the National Zoological Park. On July 1, 1836, Congress accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation by James Smithson and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust. The total number of objects, works of art and specimens at the Smithsonian is estimated at nearly 138 million, including more than 127 million specimens and artifacts at the National Museum of Natural History.

If you would like more information about this Smithsonian Internships, Fellowships, and Research Associates, please contact the Office of Fellowships and Internships at 202-633-7070 or check out their website smithsonianofi.com

“You Can’t Just Create a Beautiful Space. It Also Has to Feel Safe to Be There.”

A Q&A with How We Go Home editor Sara Sinclair

Voice of Witness shares an inside look into one of the newest oral history projects from Voice of Witness: How We Go Home. Sara is an OHMA alum and is currently Project Coordinator for the Columbia Center for Oral History Research's Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project.

We’re excited to share an inside look into one of the newest oral history projects from Voice of Witness: How We Go Home.

How We Go Home will illuminate the experiences of Native peoples living on reservations in the U.S. and Canada. Narrators will describe the impacts of forced assimilation, displacement, and the human rights violations emerging from institutional problems within the reservation system, while revealing Native society’s incredible capacity for resistance, healing, and survival.

How We Go Home is one of six projects Voice of Witness is currently incubating through the VOW Story Fund, which provides oral history training, editorial guidance, and project funding to human rights storytellers in need of institutional support.

Farther Afield: A Series of Workshops on Anthropology Beyond Academia

This series of workshops has been organized by PhD students concerned about landing fulfilling jobs in academia and interested in thinking seriously and practically about alternatives to traditional academic positions. The workshops will explore satisfying careers for anthropologists outside, or at an angle to, academia by looking beyond what is traditionally offered by "alt-ac" databases and by focusing on careers that call upon the skills we are trained in as anthropologists: in-depth research, analytic thinking and writing, instruction. We will hear from people who have found—or created—satisfying careers about what they do, how they came to it, and why they enjoy it. 

Please join us for our second workshop, focused on public anthropology, broadly construed:

Anthropology in the Public 

Friday, April 8, 2-4 pm
Scheps Library - 457 Schermerhorn Ext., Columbia University

with
Sarah Kendzior (Writer)
and
Amy Starecheski (Associate Director of the Oral History MA, Columbia University) 

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Anthropology Graduate Students Association. Contact the organizers with any questions: Amiel Bize (abm37@columbia.edu) and Soo-Young Kim (csk2140@columbia.edu)

Participant bios

Sarah Kendzior is a writer and researcher who focuses on politics, the economy and media. She is a columnist for the Globe and Mail, a former columnist for Al Jazeera English, and a frequent contributor to the Guardian, Politico, Foreign Policy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications. In 2012, Kendzior received her PhD in anthropology from Washington University, where she studied the effect of digital media on social movements in former Soviet Central Asia. Kendzior lives in St. Louis and is the author of the essay collection “The View from Flyover Country”.

Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian. Since 2012, she has been the Associate Director of the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University. She was a lead interviewer on Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, for which she interviewed Afghans, Muslims, Sikhs, activists, low-income people, and the unemployed. In 2015 she won the Oral History Association’s article award for “Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice.” She received a PhD in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center and her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Website coming soon at fartherafield.org

Exciting Updates from OHMA

OHMA is pleased to provide updates as it continues to strengthen engagement in the program from a variety of oral history community members.

One-Day Workshops and Alumni Short Courses Help Build New Cohorts

OHMA is proud to announce that the overwhelming interest in our one-day oral history workshops held earlier this month - attended by nearly 200 people! - has allowed us to increase in our annual merit scholarship from $4000 to $6500, with the support of matching funds from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. We are grateful for your engagement and hope that you may be interested in continuing the conversation through our Alumni Short Course Series this spring, hosted by the Columbia Oral History History Alumni Association and taught by graduates of our program. 

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Celebrating our Ten-Year Anniversary with a Digital Thesis Collection

Leading up to OHMA's ten-year anniversary in 2018, we are in the final stages of a project to preserve of our oral history thesis collection. Our students' work will be fully printed, digitized, and archived for internal use by our faculty and student/alumni communities. Access to these projects will help deepen essential discussions on oral history pedagogy, methodology, and analysis within our program. 

We will also soon be premiering a public collection of selected thesis material, with a multimedia website and abstracts of our students' work. We hope that this resource will highlight the hard work of our graduates and crucial stories of their narrators. In the meantime, please enjoy our recently updated list of students theses through which you can view the projects already publicly accessible on Columbia's Academic Commons.

LV Communications: Stories that Make a Difference

Looking for an experienced communications professional and oral historian to help your campaign, organization, or family to tell your story? 

OHMA alum Leyla Vural has lauched a new venture, LV Communications: Stories that Make a Difference. Check it out.

And read about Leyla's vision:

I am most interested in our shared efforts to make the world a more just place. I studied oral history (and in May 2015 earned an M.A. in it from Columbia University) because I wanted to learn the newest methods in the oldest of traditions: listening to people share their experience. Life stories are about understanding the past, to be sure, but they're also about shaping the future. Oral history helps ordinary people (Studs Terkel called us the "etceteras") put ourselves directly on the record. That by itself is important, but listening to life stories also is a way to imagine a brighter day and sharing those stories is a way to push for change.

One of the things I love about oral history is that it’s communal. By definition, you can’t work alone if your work is about listening to people. In this way, oral history mirrors all efforts at social change and, of course, life itself. It’s not only better with other people, it’s impossible without them. Social justice may be a forever project, but together we can keep bending that arc of history while we find strength in one another and have some fun as we go.