Fall 2018- Spring 2019 | Oral History and the Future: Archives and Embodied Memory
Oral history is a conversation about the past that takes place in the present and is oriented towards the future.
How is this future orientation made real?
Oral history as a research practice, particularly in the United States, has been defined by a focus on recording and archiving in institutional repositories. But people can be archives too, and oral history-telling practices more broadly often depend on embodied memory, on person-to-person transmission. And because people have been formally recording and archiving oral histories for over seventy years, we are now living in the futures imagined by earlier generations of oral historians. How do these voices from the past function in our present/their future? Looking at examples from digital archiving to indigenous oral history practices, in this series we will examine how the various ways that oral history is projected into the future work, and how they shape our practices as oral historians.
Thursday Evening Event Series
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Thursday Evening Event Series 〰️
Find more about speakers, individual events, and student reflections through the Learn More buttons.
Spring 2019
February 21, 2019, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
Dancing with THE MISSING GENERATION: centering trans oral histories
IN-PERSON with Sean Dorsey
Transgender lives, loves and histories often get left out of the “family album,” and fall between the pages of recorded history. What does this mean for the oral history field? Who are we missing? Without investing in trans leadership, the oral history field will replicate and perpetuate the exclusion and erasure of transgender and gender-nonconforming people committed by other fields and institutions. What does this mean for the future of the field?
February 28, 2019, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
The Sounds of Blackness: Space and Sound Preservation as Oral History Advocacy
IN-PERSON with Dr. Nishani Frazier
Oral historians have suggested that sight and sound are essential tools in crafting the memory landscape. As gentrification moves swiftly through black communities, documentation of these inmaterial notions become ever more imperative for the preservation of black or formerly black spaces. Dr. Frazier will lecture on the theoretical underpinnings of sound/space oral history and how this intangible concept finds application in the national gentrification project, a year long effort to document and preserve these disappearing communities.
March 7, 2019, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
The Mountain with Two Wives: Landscape and Embodied Memory in Kathmandu
IN-PERSON with Ellen Coon
Coon will share stories from and about these narrators and explore how Newars have carried memory in their bodies, through rituals and festivals, through deity possession, and by walking from one sacred place in the landscape to another, physically tracing and affirming webs of connection, relationship, and story. We will explore how her recorded and written oral history archive might be useful in decoding these bodily memories, and in nourishing our visions of the future.
March 14, 2019, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
Say It Forward: Art and Social Justice
IN-PERSON with Voice of Witness
One of the ways oral histories are projected into the future is by using them to create social change. What are the creative possibilities and ethical considerations in “amplifying unheard voices” for social change? In this interactive presentation, we will focus on the oral history methodology contained in Say It Forward: A Guide to Social Justice Storytelling, from Voice of Witness and Haymarket Books.
April 4, 2019, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
Oral History and Archives: Voice, Storytelling, and Narrative in Historical Research
IN-PERSON with Samuel J. Redman
When oral histories end up in an archival repository, they live alongside other sources. How do historians bring these different kinds of sources together when they write? This talk explores methods for blending oral history interviews and archival materials in developing narrative driven writing.
Kulka ‘to dance a corroboree’, by Brian Smith, 2018
April 11, 2019, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
‘Chasing Our Mob in the Archives’: the restorative process of reclaiming, reconnecting, re-storying, and reframing family and cultural materials in the archives
IN-PERSON with Lorina Barker
Lorina will share the reclamation of familial and cultural information and the inclusion of these memories, stories and experiences in the Looking Through Windows multimedia project. The project will take you on a journey of Aboriginal removal from Country to government-controlled places on the fringes of white Australian society. Listen to the oral histories that have been transformed into an array of multimedia: the spoken word, film, songs, art, sculptures and a theatre performance.
Fall 2018
September 13, 2018, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
Pan Dulce: Breaking Bread with the Past
IN-PERSON with Dr. Maria Cotera
In this presentation, Dr. Maria Cotera will share what she has learned in the process of collecting oral histories for Chicana por mi Raza, a digital humanities project that involves the collection, digitization, and display of archival materials and oral histories related to the development of Chicana Feminist thought and praxis over the long civil rights era.
October 4, 2018, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
The Uses of Narrative in Organizing for Social Justice
IN-PERSON with Sujatha Fernandes
While stories told to the media and at the legislature helped to bring migrant domestic workers a sense of visibility and recognition in broader society, I argue that these heavily curated narratives drew on longstanding tropes of bad masters, individual victims, and the home as a site of care, that have longer genealogies in slavery and colonialism. In the aftermath of the campaign, many domestic workers rejected this curated storytelling and sought to tell more critical, complex and contextualized stories about their transnational lives.
Photo Credit: Sara Burningham
October 18, 2018, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
Confessions of an Accidental Oral Historian, Archivist, and Podcaster
IN-PERSON with Eric Marcus
In a presentation that draws on his audio archive, Eric shares what he’s learned about the power of personal testimony and the value of harnessing a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the service of creating an accessible and versatile oral history archive that has stood the test of time. Now that we are living in a future for which these oral histories were archived, how do they continue to live on in the world?
November 1, 2018, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
Accelerating Change: Oral History, Innovation, and Impact
ONLINE with Doug Boyd
In this workshop, Doug Boyd will focus on the impact of innovative technologies on the practice and the purpose of oral history. In addition to focusing on oral history and access, Boyd will reflect on the emergence of technologies including 360-degree, automatic speech recognition, and the role of artificial intelligence in the archive, as well as reflect on the changing role of the oral history archive itself.
November 29, 2018, 6:10 - 7:30 PM
Words Transmitted; Worlds Apart
ONLINE with Fernanda Espinosa
By using oral history as a primary source and medium for the construction of these “Memory Transmission Containers,” Espinosa’s creative exploration challenges and expands traditional Western ideas of the archive. Her work asks how oral history can have a broader reach and, simultaneously, a more focused transmission through asking questions like: What might posterity mean for participants, considering their specific cultural history and present experience? How could narrators more easily access and even make use of the recording? And, can preservation happen through circulation?
Find more Events with OHMA
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Find more Events with OHMA 〰️