In November of 2015, Jeffrey H. Brodsky, OHMA alum, announced a generous cash prize of $3000 for an outstanding capstone/thesis. The criteria for receiving the award is that the capstone/thesis must “make an important contribution to knowledge and exemplify the rigor, creativity and ethical integrity we teach our students.” For his own thesis Jeffrey conducted over 60 hours of videotaped interviews with politicians on their memories of their first campaigns. He created a video documentary based on his interviews, one of the first multimedia theses in our program, and was advised by OHMA co-founder Peter Bearman.
This year, our fourth awarding this prize, we had an exciting and varied pool of theses and capstones to consider. We are proud to announce the winner, Carlin Liu Zia, and three runners up, Kim-Hee Wong, Tomoko Hiramoto and Lynn Lewis. All three of these works have made unique and innovative contributions to oral history theory and practice. We are excited to share them with the world and honor the hard and important work of these emergent oral historians.
Winner
Uncertain Journeys. By Carlin Liu Zia.
Thesis Advisor: Mary Marshall Clark
Careful about every phrase, every pronoun, every silence and hesitation, Carlin Zia demonstrates how closely the acts of speaking and writing and visual memory intersect as she transcribes the story of her grandfather’s migration from China to the United States as told to her over two years. As Luisa Passerini has written, oral history is more than direct memory; it is in its deepest sense cultural memory: where poetry, visuality and narrative meet. In Uncertain Journeys, a title with great meaning for our world, Carlin invites us to join her in the journey from the past to the future by also writing about her own life. She is inspired by the oral history conversation with her grandfather and the literal journey she takes back to Changzhou, his home city in China, to encounter the palimpsests of memory that words alone cannot evoke. The journey, in the words of Luisa Passerini, is one from memory to utopia.
As Carlin writes the story of her journey, with questions that arise from the translation of her grandfather’s journey, she invokes the words of Italo Calvino, the Italian folklorist and author. I will reinvoke Calvino’s words here (because they belong with my own visual memory of Carlin carrying his well-worn book Invisible Cities into my office so many times).
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles or the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
And Carlin, in visiting her grandfather’s home in the midst of writing her thesis – the city of Changzhou – returns to us the palimpsest where visual, aural and written memory combine to produce an irreducible artifact of memory. This palimpsest is a library (a place of great meaning to Carlin and her grandfather).
We reach the big intersection at the southeast corner of the old Cultural Palace Park and this time stay straight to cross instead of making our way right. There have been pedestrians cued up at the inside corner, but when we get there we see there is really no walkway to speak of, just a long bike lane. We set out, single file. I am at the front again, which I am ambivalent about. I’d rather be at the back so that I am the buffer against oncoming bikes and protecting these kinds of relatives I have put in dangerous situations, but I also like the feeling of trailblazing! Of being the explorer. (Indiana F. Jones is back…)
Later in the story, after Carlin has fully told her grandfather’s story, well as much as he would tell her, and all the relatives were safely returned, Carlin’s own voice bursts forth to make sense of many hundred hours of scribing another’s.
The sky has set out the open window of this café. In all essays, it seems, there’s a reveal of a revelation, a Redcrosse falling into the water revelatory coincidence of meaning, a turn. After weeks and weeks or the equivalent energy of staring, sorting, resorting, analyzing, the storyteller suddenly, by a hair, sees/remembers - this seemingly irrelevant thing, element, conversation and it throws all that has been labored into transformative relief.
Because of Carlin’s willingness to take an uncertain journey, one in which the past is not quite clear and the future is still hazy, she makes it possible for us to glide along with her across the sea from the beginning of her grandfather’s journey through to her/our own. We ‘see’ the glistening of the oceans that connect her to him, as well as nooks and crevices in the durable brick house in Raleigh, North Carolina where her grandfather and grandmother landed and only recently left. We will not forget how both their hands touched the door of the Library in Changzhou, and each other’s, and then reached out …..perhaps towards us.
We read, hear, and see (in words) the material power of this migratory love, a story that might be the most important story for the world to hear now.
The pages of the book Carlin made, and handcrafted, burst with visuality, sound, and sight in a synesthesia of emotion, desire, and the burning desire to know. To explore the known in relation to the unknown. In doing so Carlin has reminded us that oral history is no less than poetry unbound. And as Audre Lorde’s work teaches us, poetry might just ignite a revolution of love where hope and desire meet to create a better future, of the kind the Zia family fought for.
It is for these reasons that we award Carlin Zia the 2019 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award.
Runner Up
He Lei Wāhine: Oral History Through a Hawaiian Lens. By Kim-Hee Wong.
Thesis Advisors: Amy Starecheski and Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart
Kim-Hee Wong interviewed Native Hawaiian female leaders - wāhine mana. To do this work, she developed a methodology and theoretical framework that integrates academic approaches to oral history with Hawaiian oral traditions and language, indigenizing the western practice of oral history. Kim-Hee’s work is deeply grounded in her knowledge and practice of Native Hawaiian oral history practices and epistemologies, such a “talk story” as a form of dialogic conversation, and hula as a language for embodied historical memory. In her thesis, she seamlessly weaves together the work of indigenous scholars, the literature of academic oral history, and her own subjectivity, embodied knowledge, and voice. The online version of the project allows us to hear narrators’ voices, and move in a less linear way through Kim-Hee’s ideas. Her is a critical contribution to an oral history practice that moves beyond an individualistic vision of personhood, a linear sense of time, and a disembodied imaginary of the interview.
Runner Up
Restoring Testimonies: Rediscovering the Individual & Unfolding Memory in Hibakusha Narratives. By Tomoko Hiramoto.
Thesis Advisor: Mary Marshall Clark
Tomoko Hiramoto interviewed Hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. By comparing the narratives co-produced through an oral history process with hibakusha’s pre-existing public testimonies, she shows the gaps between a public, collective memory and the more intimate, dialogic public memory of an oral history. She expertly situates her findings in the history of public memory about the atomic bomb, both in Japan and internationally, with a focus on American understandings of this event. She not only demonstrates what is obscured in ritualized collective memory, but shows us the specific historical contexts through which these narratives were produced and solidified. In order to get beyond the “restrictions” of public testimony, she develops innovative interviewing methodologies, including the use of colorized archival photos, long, iterative interviews, and a deep reflective process as an interviewer. She finds that anger, hopelessness, experiences that cannot be verbalized, and ongoing pain and trauma shape the hibakusha’s experiences as much as a desire for peace and a healing trajectory do. Tomoko’s work has important theoretical and methodological applications, but her larger aim is to keep these experiences alive and relevant, to maintain these memories of war as part of a long-term project of peace-making, as ritualized testimonies lose their power.
Runner Up
The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project: Don’t Talk About Us, Talk With Us! By Lynn Lewis
Thesis Advisors: Amy Starecheski and Bill McAllister
Lynn Lewis created an ongoing oral history project to document and activate the history of Picture the Homeless, a pioneering homeless-led grassroots organizing organization which she led for seventeen years. In her thesis, she shares and analyzes findings from the initial phases of work, and describes her innovative methodological approach, combining content analysis, participatory action research, and community organizing into what she calls “participatory oral history.” As an experienced community organizer, Lynn articulates and builds on the resonances between oral history practice, social science, and community organizing, as well as the differences. Like oral historians, organizers seek to identify themes and analyses that resonate across individuals’ stories. Like social scientists they seek powerful critical understandings of what makes the world work. Lynn developed innovative tools to involve diverse narrators in the ongoing and demanding process of analyzing and disseminating a collection of interviews, building on the process of analyzing and approving their own transcripts. Lynn’s thesis both provides the seeds for a much-needed critical history of Picture the Homeless, and analyzes how collective memory and storytelling have played a role in PTH’s successes.