After an incredibly challenging period in which fieldwork was disrupted, many of us suffered losses, and everyone experienced upheaval, the 2021 Brodsky Prize Committee (Peter Bearman, Amy Starecheski, and Carlin Liu Zia) was particularly impressed with the quality of OHMA theses created over the past year. We would like to celebrate four theses of exceptional distinction as we announce the winner of this year’s prize.
Becoming Wild Again in America: The Restoration and Resurgence of the Pablo-Allard Bison Herd, by Francine D. Spang-Willis (advisor, Amy Starecheski). With this website and three-part podcast telling the incredible story of how the Pablo-Allard bison herd has been stewarded through generations of Indigenous and settler care, Spang-Willis makes an essential contribution to historical knowledge about the survival and resurgence of both bison and Indigenous peoples in the United States. She activates this knowledge in the service of a vision of a decolonial future in which humans, animals, plants, and land can be reconnected in healthy ways. Spang-Willis’s work is deeply grounded in practices of reciprocity and in relationship, contributing to an ongoing process of decolonizing research and producing decolonial knowledge.
How We Learn Who We Are: An Oral History of Storytelling in Alcoholics Anonymous, by Lily Doron (advisor, William McAllister). Telling and retelling one’s life story is a core part of defining who we are. Doron explores this iterative storytelling process using Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) as a case study. Through oral histories with four AA members, Doron examines how storytelling – repeatedly listening to others’ stories and telling one’s own – impacts program members’ understanding of what the alcoholic identity entails, and their adoption and acceptance of that identity for themselves. Doron shows how the common narrative structure in AA teaches members to frame their life story as a shift in identity from a drinking non-alcoholic to a drinking alcoholic, and then helps them develop and inhabit an identity as a sober alcoholic. In a clearly written, superbly organized thesis and skillfully-edited accompanying audio pieces, Doron shares the compelling personal stories of her narrators, weaving them together to create a collective biography in service of understanding the intersection of storytelling, identity formation, and the specific social context of AA. Her work beautifully highlights the ways in which social science insights and oral history enrich each other’s practice and discipline.
As the runner-up for the Brodsky Prize, we chose the tidal flats: a documentary-collage on east asian american queer kinship, by Liú Méi-Zhì Wén-Yuàn Bransfield Chen (advisors, Nicki Pombier Berger and Crystal Mun-hye Baik). Weaving together explorations of family history with Asian diaspora migration history, united by reflections on empire, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality, the tidal flats defies genre. In the vein of Maxine Hong-Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Nyssa Chow’s The Story of Her Skin, Liú sought to understand the life and experiences of their Hakka grandmother, whose perspective was rarely present in family stories. An underlying question with which Liú repeatedly found themselves wrestling was, “How do oral historians and archivists document silence in a way that indicates everything that these gaps signify?” Liú’s desire to understand their grandmother’s silences led them to slowly develop relationships and meandering oral histories with four other queer and trans East Asian Americans, three of whom are also Hakka. Deploying what they call “two-channel listening”—listening inwardly to one’s own intuition while also listening deeply to others—Liú found a queer kinship in a queer diaspora, allowing them to make sense of their own family history in conversation with others. In their exemplary methodological paper, Chen constructs a robust yet flexible theoretical apparatus using the work of Winona Wheeler, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, adrienne maree brown, Saidiya Hartman, David Eng, and Gayatri Gopinath. To share their thinking, Chen produced a pilot episode of a podcast documentary, the tidal flats, featuring music they composed and performed alongside their narration and the voices of their narrators. This work is theoretically rigorous, in critical dialogue with the field of oral history, deeply reflexive, and formally innovative, a celebration of the importance of humanist thought for oral history.
As the 2021 winner of the Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award, we selected “Tell Me About That World”: Speculative Archives + Black Feminist Listening Practices by Taylor Wilson Thompson (advisor, Carlin Liu Zia). Oral history has traditionally concerned itself primarily with the past and its meaning in the present. Thompson has created an oral history of the future, in which she invites current mutual aid and community care organizers to describe the worlds they envision, the future they are working for. What would it feel like to be free?, she asks. To share this speculative archive, Thompson invites her audience to experiment with a Black feminist listening practice, listening to ourselves and to the narrators, embodied and focused on our breathing, being both critical and open, letting these visions enter us and change us. Building on the work of Black feminists like Adrienne Maree Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Octavia Butler, June Jordan, and Saidiya Hartman, Thompson shares a radical oral history practice grounded in love. Her work is beautiful, sophisticated, generative, powerful. We are grateful for the opportunity to amplify this project which this award provides.