In the summer of 2020, OHMA launched a public workshop series exploring anti-oppression and decolonial approaches to oral history. The instructors from that series collaborated with us to curate the next round of workshops, which begins March 20th.

Oral history has a strong tradition as a progressive practice, focused on amplifying marginalized voices not typically given powerful platforms to speak in public. Oral historians have documented the stories of struggles for justice around the world, and at times have participated in those struggles. At the same time, as a field oral history has excluded Indigenous people and practices from the legitimacy we have so laboriously built. Leadership in our organizations and institutions has been predominantly white, even while people of color have played key roles and invested their time and energy in building these institutions.

In this series, we share visions for oral history in which people of color - their knowledge, skills, practices and voices - are at the center of our practice. This is not a diversity approach, in which our field remains white-led but invites some people of color in. It is an anti-oppression approach, in which we reorient our work to challenge structural oppression actively, expecting that that will change our work and our field in deep ways. We invite you to learn, grow, imagine and be challenged.

This series is co-sponsored by OHMA and the Oral History Association.

We have shifted the way we pay instructors for this series and how we charge participants. This shift was influenced by Sarah Dziedzic and Jess Lamar Reece Holler's work on equity budgeting for oral historians, and building on the broader legacy of oral history economic justice organizing & praxis developed by the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program, the Oral History Undercommons working group, Danielle Dulken, the OHA’s Independent Practitioner Task Force, and informal and candid conversations initiated by students and graduates of the OHMA program -- all inspired by decades of BIPOC-led movement work advocating for fair pay for labor

 In the past we paid $500/workshop, as an honorarium. We are now asking instructors to self identify as either a full-time salaried employee who should receive an honorarium or a freelancer who should be paid a fee for service, and we are offering each freelance instructor $1200. This reflects the fact that freelancers have additional expenses (health insurance, equipment, office space, self-employment taxes) to do the same work as salaried employees. 

We are also committed to making these workshops as broadly accessible as possible, so we are offering an option of free registration for those who could not otherwise attend, with a sliding scale suggested donation of $20-$100 per workshop. We encourage you to pay what you can to support fair pay for our instructors as well as free registration for those who need it. 

In the past we have used these workshops to raise money for financial aid for OHMA students. In order to pay instructors fairly, we have committed to finding other ways to raise these funds. Any money we make from this series beyond that required to pay instructors will be used to continue to build and deepen this work through, for example, paying for interpretation for workshops.

SERIES AT A GLANCE

April 23rd, 2021, 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Oral History: A Working Praxis of Critical Care and Relationship-Building Pt. 1
Crystal Mun-Hye Baik 백문혜

April 30th, 2021, 3:00 - 5:00 PM
Oral History: A Working Praxis of Critical Care and Relationship-Building Pt. 2
Crystal Mun-Hye Baik 백문혜

May 2nd, 2021, 1:00 - 4:00 PM
Placing the Narrator at the Center: Design Co-Created Oral History Projects
Nairy AbdElShafy

May 13th, 2021, 2:00 - 3:30 PM
A Public Interview with Brent Stonefish
conducted by Francine D. Spang-Willis

May 27th, 2021, 1:00 - 4:00 PM
Equity Budgeting: Budgets for Economic Justice
Sarah Dziedzic and Jess Lamar Reece Holler

*All times are listed in Eastern Standard Time

WORKSHOPS

Saturday, March 20th
1:00-4:00 PM
Placing the Narrator at the Center: Design Co-Created Oral History Projects
Nairy AbdElShafy

This workshop introduces participants to concepts of: co-creation, shared authority and reciprocity in oral history. It will discuss co-creation as a tool for anti-oppression in interviewing and oral history production; helping narrators express their identities and break-free of traditional narratives providing them with a space to be heard when sharing their stories.

The workshop will draw on examples from different co-created projects and their designs, guiding participants to develop their own understanding of the different aforementioned concepts.

It will focus on two layers:

- Placing the narrator at the center, challenging stereotyped narratives

- Engaging with the narrator in the design and production of the project

Workshop goals:
Attitudes: the willingness to be flexible and responsive to changes
Skills: the ability to design a co-created oral history project, the ability to manage project expectations
Knowledge: understanding concepts of co-creation, shared authority and reciprocity within the scope of oral history

Nairy AbdElShafy is an Egyptian educator, oral historian and social researcher. She draws from her experience in volunteering and working with refugees through different local NGOs in Egypt and international humanitarian organizations to attempt at a documentation of identity and movement narratives for social change. She has worked on documenting personal stories within different communities: Nubians, Palestinian, and Syrian refugees in Egypt; Nepalis, Salvadorans and Puerto Ricans in the U.S. She appreciates food, enjoys travel, and believes one has to be laid back to be able to take on life and take in its beauty. She holds an MA in Oral History from Columbia University and a BSc. of Political Science from Cairo University. She’s currently the Oral History Coordinator at the Education 2.0 Research and Documentation Project; documenting the current Egyptian educational reforms.

Friday, April 23 and April 30th
3:00-5:00 PM
Oral History: A Working Praxis of Critical Care and Relationship-Building Part 1 & Part 2
Crystal Mun-Hye Baik 백문혜

In this workshop series, we will question and experiment with what it means to teach oral history as site-specific approaches that center deep care and relationship-building. What exactly do we mean by care and relationship-building, and why are these concepts central to our pedagogical spaces-- ranging from the classroom to grassroot organizations and activist spaces? What does it look and feel like to create an oral history process that privileges the emergent questions, expertise, and specific needs of a memory community, rather than beginning with a universalized set of best practices? Lastly, what does it mean to teach and practice oral history in ways that are feminist, anti-racist, and anti-extractive? While this workshop series honors the importance of oral history archives linked to recordings and transcripts, we will also expand our understanding of the archive given that relationships, too, are embodied forms of memory archiving.

This is a two-part workshop series open to educators, activists, artists, and others who are already teaching, or are interested in teaching, oral history through a feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial lens. While the first workshop will be open to the general public, the second session will take on a more hands-on approach and be capped at 25 participants (limited to those who participated in the first workshop). Participants of the second workshop will be selected from a brief application process to ensure that a plurality of projects and teaching contexts are included. One of the goals of the second workshop is to collaboratively create an open-ended archive of working syllabi, readings, and pedagogical materials, including sounds and images, that can be shared with participants beyond the workshop series.

Crystal Mun-hye Baik is Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies (GSST) at the University of California, Riverside, a feminist memory worker, and a graduate of the OHMA Program (2010). Her first book, Reencounters: On the Korean War & Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press) examines the everydayness of the Korean War and its consequences through a diasporic feminist archive of memory works, including oral history projects. Facilitating jolting moments of opening or reencounters with the mundane, these cultural memory works reckon with the Korean War's ramifications, even as they underscore de-imperializing possibilities that challenge the 70-year US militarized occupation of Korea. Crystal is also an active member of several collectives and shared spaces, including GYOPO, Migratory Times, the Ending the Korean War Collective, and the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project.

Thursday, May 13
2:00-3:30pm
Public Interview with Brent Stonefish
conducted by Francine D. Spang-Willis

In this public interview, Francine Spang-Willis, of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and Columbia University Oral History Master of Arts candidate, will have a conversation with educator Brent Stonefish of the Lunaapeew Nation. Their discussion will highlight the Lenape origin story. It will also focus on Brent’s journey to learn living oral history from his and neighboring nations’ elders and to learn the history from a Lenape lens.

Brent Stonefish, turtle clan, is Lunaapeew and a member of Eelūnaapèewi Lahkèewiit (Delaware Nation) in Ontario Canada. Brent is married and is the father of two children. Brent holds a BA in Native Studies from Trent University and a MES from York University. Brent has work extensively in western educational institutions, urban Indigenous communities and for various First Nations communities.
Brent actively uses the skills and knowledge acquired through his mother, valued Elders, ceremony and western education in all aspects of his personal and professional life. Brent has been an education administrator, educator, lecturer, drummer/singer, counsellor, elected First Nations councillor, ceremonialist, policy analyst, manager, an author and is an all-around good guy.

Francine D. Spang-Willis is of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. She is also of settler descent. While she was raised on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, she resides in Bozeman, Montana and an off-grid cabin in the Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains.
Francine currently serves as the Listening to Harlem and Rethinking Community Engagement Project Manager in the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program and an audit-edit reviewer for the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University. She has also served as an Obama Presidency Oral History Fellow. Francine co-owns a business with her husband.
Francine is an OHMA candidate at Columbia University. She also graduated with a Master of Arts in Native American Studies from Montana State University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Rocky Mountain College.

Thursday, May 27
1:00-4:00 PM
Equity Budgeting: Budgets for Economic Justice
Jess Lamar Reece Holler and Sarah Dziedzic

Equity Budgeting: Budgets for Economic Justice will introduce participants to a transformative praxis & ethics in oral history work that challenges cultural workers to put economic justice at the center of other modes of justice work -- racial justice, environmental justice, social justice, health or housing justice -- that our projects imagine themselves to engage. Our workshop will frame equity budgeting as a “dual systems” approach -- one growing out of legacies of narrator/community rights, politics of refusal, & expectations for pay (developed in conversation with the Oral History Undercommons collective, and especially reproductive justice activist & scholar Danielle Dulken, and out of labor organizing movements for cultural workers, including in the oral history field). Along with these critical legacies, we will share as a concrete example the story of piloting the equity budgeting model at the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program, a community-based oral-history-and-folklife-for-social-justice program based at the Marion County Historical Society in Marion, Ohio, and founded by facilitator Jess Lamar Reece Holler.

The workshop will be structured to provide time for participants to closely examine the underlying cultural and economic assumptions that may undergird their oral history (or allied cultural work) practices, from systematic underpayment of contract laborers to assumptions about what sort of work -- narrators’ story-sharing, community collaborators’ relationship-building, or student or intern labor, to name just a few -- routinely goes unpaid or underpaid in cultural work budgets. We’ll use guided exercises to enable participants to identify areas for improvement in their own budgeting practice, and will hold space for attendees to create a personal Equity Budgeting Statement to use in contracts & grant applications as an accompaniment to budget narratives. Participants will also take away a toolkit of resources that can be cited when developing future budgets, building power for equity budgeting as a transformative movement across the field.

The workshop’s overall takeaway should be a simple but powerful lesson in expanded solidarity: we win -- and build cultural work movements that are accessible, equitable, and sustainable -- when we pay everybody more.

Jess Lamar Reece Holler is a community-based cultural worker, non-profit consultant, public folklorist // oral historian // public historian, exhibit co-curator, & multi-media documentary artist based between Columbus & Caledonia, Ohio. She is founder and principal at the Marion County, Ohio-based cultural arts & justice capacity-building consultancy Caledonia Northern Folk Studios; and is founding Program Director of the Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Program at the Marion County Historical Society — Marion County’s countywide folk & cultural arts program. Jess specializes in capacity-building & ethics training for small, grassroots, and community-based organizations using a hybrid arts, heritage, and social justice toolkit; and is passionate about labor organizing in the cultural work sector to help make these fields more equitable, accessible, & sustainable. Jess teaches a model called equity budgeting: a set of ethics & praxes for “dual-system” reforms that can make cultural arts & public humanities work less extractive for cultural workers and communities. With Sarah Dziedzic, Jess co-chairs the Oral History Association’s Independent Practitioners’ Task Force to build solidarity & promote more equitable payment, hiring, & ownership ethics for freelance & community-/movement-based cultural workers. Closer to home, Jess serves on the board of the Terradise Nature Center along the Whetstone River in Caledonia, and produces a (mostly) weekly ambient/environmental/mallwave show, NIGHTPLANT, on Columbus’ community radio station, WCRS-LP FM. Jess is also passionate about (the politics of) historic preservation & community-driven downtown revitalization efforts — including in her family’s hometown of Caledonia, where Jess is working to rehabilitate her grandparents’ 1950s grocery store, Reece’s Market, into a regional community cultural center & capacity builder for more just futures in North-Central Ohio. caledonianorthern.org || marionvoices.org || oldelectricity.medium.com || @reecesmarket

Sarah Dziedzic works as an oral historian, project consultant, grant advisor, researcher, and workshop facilitator in New York City. She has produced oral history projects with Storm King Art Center, New York Preservation Archive Project, Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, Wave Hill Public Garden and Cultural Center, and the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, among others. She has supported archival projects at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Lunder Institute for Contemporary Art, the Estate of Félix González-Torres, and the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum. She has also worked as a literary memoir editor with Seven Stories Press and Autonomedia, and served on the founding board of Word Up Community Bookshop, a volunteer-run, multilingual bookstore and cultural space. She has served on the Archival Best Practices Task Force of the Oral History Association, and is co-chair of the Independent Practitioner Task Force, where she works to establish fair labor standards and build solidarity among oral historians and other cultural workers. She lives in Queens with her partner and many houseplants.

These events are open to all. For more information or if we can make any of these events more accessible to you please contact Rebecca McGilveray at rlm2203@columbia.edu.

Some events will be recorded, however they may not be released to the public depending on the presenter’s preference. Attendance at the live event is the only guaranteed access to the presentation.