Apr. 21: Big Prisons, Small Towns: Stories from the Prison Public Memory Project

WHEN: April 21, 2016, 6 - 8 PM

WHERE: Knox Hall, 606 W. 122nd Street, Room 509

The Prison Public Memory Project works with communities and collaborating scholars and artists to discover, preserve, interpret, and present the history of prisons, honor the memories of former prisoners and prison workers, and utilize the past to imagine a future without prisons. Since our beginnings in 2011 in our pilot site in Hudson, NY, oral history has played an important and evolving role in our mission to engage people from all walks of life in conversation and learning about the complex roles of prisons in society. This session will focus on the lessons we’ve learned in Hudson regarding 1) the challenges and benefits of gathering and using oral history in prison host communities that are often rural places and small towns characterized by factionalism and a ‘code of silence’ and 2) the use of the internet to engage a broader public with prison-related oral history interviews. The format for the session will be a combination of short presentations by panelists and interactive activities with session participants.

Tracy Huling has led successful social change efforts in the United States for over 30 years. Her focus for the last 15 years has been on the complex relationship between prisons and rural communities. Her documentary film, Yes, In My Backyard (1999), the first portrait of a rural prison town, was broadcast on public television and screened in community venues across the country, catalyzing numerous other initiatives addressing the dependence of rural areas on prison jobs. In 2001, with the Open Society Institute, she convened a think tank on prisons and rural communities. In 2002, she directed an experimental initiative deploying lawyers and community organizers to support citizen groups across the country opposing the siting of new prisons in their towns. Between 2000 and 2004, she authored five key publications on rural communities and prisons, including "Building a Prison Economy in Rural America” in the book Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Incarceration. In 2012, she was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship to study prison closure and re-purposing and created a national web-based clearinghouse of information on this subject, yesinmybackyard.org. Today, Ms. Huling directs the Prison Public Memory Project creating 'sites of prison memory in prison host communities.

Quintin Cross guides the Prison Public Memory Project's activities with the African-American community in Hudson, New York. Quintin has a long history of service to the community of Hudson, including as Vice-President of his local NAACP chapter, founder of the Hudson African-American Leadership Alliance, and Majority Leader of the Hudson Common Council. Formerly incarcerated, Quintin is now President and CEO of the Staley B. Keith Social Justice Center, an organization that engages Hudson’s diverse population in the common mission to empower marginalized black men in the community, change the systems which oppress them, and to be role models for a future generation of high achievers. Recently, Quintin was appointed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with 30 other young activists from across the nation to be founding members of the SCLC's Next Generation Leadership Council.

Brian Buckley is the Hudson Site Coordinator for the Prison Public Memory Project. Brian began his work for the Project during the summer of 2013 coordinating public events, community programming, and research projects in Hudson, New York. Brian also advises the Project in integrating new media technology with with more traditional methods of history and storytelling. Brian is currently using the Prison Public Memory Project’s archive of oral histories to supplement his research on the years leading up to the closure of the New York State Training School for Girls, a juvenile prison that operated in Hudson from 1904 to 1975. In 2015, Brian was selected as a Hackman Research Resident at the New York State Archives to continue his research on the Hudson prison. Recently, Brian was invited to present this work as a fellow at the 2015 INCITE Oral History Summer Institute at Columbia University.

SPONSORS: This talk is part of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA). Support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) is provided for programming that embodies late Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance.

INFORMATION: For more information, please email Amy Starecheski at aas39(at)columbia.edu

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

NO REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED

Apr. 14: Who Gets to Tell the Story?: A Fresh Approach to Collaborating with Activists to Create Archives

WHEN: Thursday, April 14, 2016, 6 - 8 PM

WHERE: 207 Knox Hall

Although we live in an era of unprecedented “democratized documentation” where everyone with a smart phone can save millions of pieces of information about their lives, what is ever-elusive are practices to guide the gathering, contextualization, and distribution of oral history & documentary material from people who do not habitually frequent or donate to oral history centers. If we do not develop a rich, vibrant set of such practices, we will remain very good repositories for people who want to tell stories of the powerful from the inside-out, and we may remain okay at telling stories aboutthose on the margins. But we will continue to deny future generations the stories from people at the margins that are told by people living at the margins -- that is, marginal stories told from the inside out. As activist Cynthia Brown notes, “Those most directly impacted by injustice should be at the forefront of any activism that is happening for change.” The reason, she said, was simple: “When your life does not depend on the outcome of whatever you are fighting for, you will compromise at a place where people who are impacted by the outcome would never compromise.” This is also true for those of us engaged in building oral histories. People most impacted by historical injustice should be at the forefront of any archival collection documenting their lives. Those on the margins need to tell stories on their own terms, and make the key decisions about how those stories are collected, archived, contextualized and disseminated to the public. If they’re not at the center of the decision-making, our knowledge base of their lives is dramatically limited. This talk will examine how we’ve piloted this in a multi-year collaboration between the civil rights group SNCC and CDS, “The SNCC Digital Gateway: Learning From the Past, Organizing for the Future, Making Democracy Work.”

Wesley Hogan is the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and teaches the history of youth social movements, African American history, women’s history and oral history. Her book on SNCC, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC and the Dream for a New America (2007), won the Lillian Smith Book Award, the Scott-Bills Memorial Prize for best work in peace history, and the Library of Virginia nonfiction literary award. She was the co-director of the Institute for the Study of Race Relations at Virginia State University from 2006-2009, whose mission is to bring together community organizers, researchers, and young leaders to promote healthy communities. Between 2004-2008, she was active with the project bringing together the Algebra Project, the Young People’s Project and the Petersburg City Public Schools, and coordinated an oral history project of the civil rights movement in Petersburg. She is currently working on a post-1960s history of young people organizing in the spirit of Ella Baker, and co-facilitates a partnership between the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke, “The SNCC Digital Gateway: Learning From the Past, Organizing for the Future, Making Democracy Work,” whose purpose is to bring the grassroots stories of the civil rights movement to a much wider public through a web portal, K12 initiative, and set of critical oral histories.

Charles E. “Charlie” Cobb, Jr. was born in Washington, DC and now lives in Jacksonville, Florida. He was a Mississippi field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1962-1967 working primarily in the Mississippi Delta. A founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), Cobb was a foreign affairs reporter for National Public Radio, a correspondent for the PBS documentary program Frontline,  and from 1985-1997 was a staff writer for National Geographic magazine.  He was a visiting professor at Brown University from 2001-2012, conducting a seminar called The Organizing Tradition of the Civil Rights Movement. He is currently a Duke University “scholar- activist” as part of a collaboration between the SNCC Legacy Project of which he is a board member, and Duke University developing a digital gateway to SNCC and its work. Cobb is the author of several books; his latest, published by Basic Books in June 2014, is: This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.

SPONSORS: This talk is part of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR), the Center for Oral History Archives (CCOHA), and the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA). Support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) is provided for programming that embodies late Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance.

INFORMATION: For more information, please email Amy Starecheski at aas39(at)columbia.edu

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

NO REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED

May 13: Forging Collaboration and Continuity: A Conversation between Oral History and Narrative Medicine

Please join us on Wednesday, May 13, for an end-of-the-year roundtable discussion between the Narrative Medicine and Oral History departments. The session will be held in Lewisohn Hall 212A from 6 PM - 8 PM. Please RSVP to jcc2268@columbia.edu if you plan to attend.

Forging Collaboration and Continuity: A Conversation between Oral History and Narrative Medicine

Sharing themes of storytelling and listening, the disciplines of Narrative Medicine and Oral History have a long history of collaboration. As more students cross-register and interdisciplinary ties continue to be strengthened, this roundtable discussion hopes to delve deeper into the intersectionality and collaborative potential of these fields. Jonathan Chou (Narrative Medicine ’15) and Cameron Vanderscoff (Oral History ’15) will co-facilitate, beginning with a review of the disciplines’ theoretical links as well as past moments of collaboration. Erica Fugger (Oral History '14) will discuss the ways in which the Oral History program has structurally enhanced support systems and networks for its graduates. All students, alumni, and faculty are invited to discuss how collaboration can be continued into the next year.

What can narrative medicine learn from the practice of oral history? How can oral history interviewing be enhanced through a study of narrative medicine? How can the two graduate programs work together on an institutional level? What kinds of projects are possible together?

This event is co-sponsored by the Critical Narrative Medicine Alliance and the Columbia Oral History Alumni Association. 

OHMA announces the 2014-2015 Oral History, Medicine, and Health Workshop Series

This academic year in our public workshop series, in partnership with the Program in Narrative Medicine, the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University will be exploring the intersections of oral history, health and medicine. As public health professionals experiment with using oral history to access new realms of knowledge about health and social life, practitioners of narrative medicine deploy oral history to engage with patients, and oral historians partner with people with disabilities, dementia, and mental illness to record and amplify their stories, the time is right for an in-depth multidisciplinary engagement of the productive areas where these fields meet.

Most of the events this year will focus on this theme, although some will range more widely. The events in the workshop series typically include book talks, presentations of theoretical papers, behind-the-scenes explorations of how oral histories are transformed into films or books, and sharing of projects at various stages of completion. We present finished works as well as works-in-progress. Presenters, no matter what kind of work they're sharing, frame their presentation with critical question about oral history practice.

The speakers in the series on oral history, health and medicine will engage questions like:

How can oral history contribute to public health work?

How can we better understand oral history as an embodied practice?

What can medical professionals learn from oral history research?

What can oral history research on the history and practice of medicine teach us?

What is the relationship between oral history and narrative medicine?

What does it mean for oral history practice and theory to do oral history work with people with dementia, developmental disabilities, or mental illness?

How can we effectively share oral histories with medical and public health professionals?

What are the possibilities and pitfalls of using oral history for advocacy work?

Full Event Descriptions and Schedule

All Events are Free and Open to the Public

September 11:

Sam Robson, freelance oral historian and writer; OHMA alum

Oral History Meets Dementia: A Staged Reading of the Play Timothy and Mary

Commentator: Marsha Hurst, Columbia Program in Narrative Medicine

September 18:

Luke Gerwe, Managing Editor, Voice of Witness

Seeking Witness: Voice of Witness and Building an Oral History Network

October 2:

Teiji Okamoto, public health professional

A Radical Archive of Be(long)ing

October 16:

Sayantani DasGupta, MD MPH, Columbia University Master's Program in Narrative Medicine

Narrative Humility: Medical Listening and Oral History

November 6:

Brian Purnell, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History, Bowdoin College

Can the Oral Historian Speak?

November 13:

Nicki Pombier Berger, freelance oral historian, OHMA alum

Oral History and Intellectual Disability: Navigating Authority, Authorship and Advocacy

Commentator: Rachel Adams, Professor of English and American Studies, Columbia University

February 5:

Ann Cvetkovich, Professor, English, University of Texas at Austin

After Depression:  Reflections on Oral and Written Personal Narrative as Archive of Feelings

February 26:

Christopher Sellers, MD, PhD, Professor of History, SUNY Stonybrook

Stories of Environmental Danger: A Collective Approach

March 5:

Kathy Davis, Senior Research Fellow, Sociology, VU University Amsterdam

Bodies, Embodiment, and the Experience of Passion: What Tango Dancers Can Teach Us

March 12:

Lynda Crane, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, and Tracy McDonough, licensed clinical psychologist and Associate Professor, Mount St. Joseph University

Oral History with Vulnerable Populations: The Schizophrenia Oral History Project

March 26:

Ron Doel, Associate Professor of History, Florida State University

Perpetual Handmaidens: Creating Knowledge in the Shadows

April 2:

Alessandro Portelli, Professor Emeritus, American Literature, University of Rome

Stories I Skipped: Narratives of Care, Narratives of War

April 16:

Ynestra King, feminist teacher, writer and oral historian

Listening With the Whole Body in Mind Feminist Oral History Project

April 30:

Aline Gubrium, Associate Professor, Public Health and Elizabeth L. Krause, Professor, Anthropology, UMass Amherst

Digital Storytelling as Narrative Shock: New Views on Young Parenting Latinas, Migration, and Family

Sponsors: This talk is co-sponsored by the Program in Narrative Medicine and is part of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA). Support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) is provided for programming that embodies late Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance.

For more information, please email Amy Starecheski, Associate Director of OHMA, at aas39(at)columbia.edu.

Nov. 13: Oral History and Intellectual Disability: Navigating Authority, Authorship and Advocacy

Thursday, November 13, 2014

6-8 PM

Knox Hall, 606 W 122nd St., Room 509

Read current OHMA students Nicole JeanBaptiste's 
and Dong Kue Lee's reflections on this talk.

“Nothing About Us Without Us,” a slogan of the disability rights movement, echoes the ethos of oral history, when we strive to “know with” rather than “know about” the communities whose narratives we record, preserve, interpret and share. In this session, Nicki Pombier Berger will discuss the work she did for her OHMA thesis, a multimedia collection of stories from self-advocates with Down syndrome. She will highlight how the principles and practice of oral history were affirmed, challenged and enriched along the way: from working to share authority in the project design and beyond, attending to power dynamics within the interview, and endeavoring to establish ethical partnerships in the editorial process. Nicki conceived of this application of oral history as a kind of advocacy, and continues to do so in ongoing collaborations with some of her interviewees. Individuals with intellectual disabilities have not only been historically marginalized in broader society but have been largely overlooked by oral history. What can we learn by doing the work of truly listening to people with intellectual disabilities? By sharing where she has struggled and what she has learned so far, Nicki hopes to demonstrate that individuals with Down syndrome are the expert authors of their own perspectives and experiences, and that by paying attention to how we listen, we might expand our capacity to hear people who have long gone un- or misheard.  

Nicki Pombier Berger is an oral historian whose work focuses on intellectual disability. A 2013 graduate of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University, the centerpiece of her thesis is an online collection of stories from self-advocates with Down syndrome entitledNothing About Us Without Us. She is currently a community partner on Visionary Voices/A Fierce Kind of Love, an oral history-based civic dialogue project on the intellectual disability movement in Pennsylvania. She is also the project lead on the Toward Independent Living and Learning (TILL) Living Legacy Project, which preserves and shares the family histories of individuals with intellectual disabilities supported by TILL. In 2012-2013, she was a graduate fellow in the Future of Disability Studies Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. She received her MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009, and her Bachelor of Science in the Foreign Service from Georgetown University in 2001.

Commentator: Rachel Adams, Professor of English and American Studies, Columbia University

SPONSORS: This talk is part of the “Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series,” co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA). Support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) is provided for programming that embodies late Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance.

INFORMATION: For more information, please email Amy Starecheski at aas39(at)columbia.edu

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

NO REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED

Nov. 6: Can the Oral Historian Speak?

Brian Purnell is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History at Bowdoin College. He is the author of Fighting Jim Crow in the County of Kings: The Congress of Racial Equality in Brooklyn (Kentucky, 2013), which won the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Prize in 2012. He has worked on several public history projects with the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Bronx County Historical Society, the Brooklyn Public Library and the University of South Carolina. Before joining the faculty at Bowdoin, he worked for six years at Fordham University as Research Director of the Bronx African American History Project and as an Assistant Professor of African American Studies (2006-2010). He lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife Leana and their four children and is currently working on two books: an oral history autobiography of Jitu Weusi (Leslie Campbell) and a history of community development corporations since the mid-1960s.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

6-8 PM

Knox Hall, 606 W 122nd St., Room 509

OHMA students reflect on this talk: 
Read Steven Palmer's reflection and
Bill Smith's reflection.

As oral historians, we spend a great deal of time listening, recording, writing, editing and - - speaking. We actually speak a lot. But rarely do our words become part of the final products – the books, the articles, the digital videos, the websites, the exhibits – that our dialogues with subjects help create. This presentation’s title references Gayatri Spivak’s classic essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” because the tendency to silence oral historians’ voices, and to some degree, to dismiss oral history methodology itself, stems from power-infused understandings of what makes authentic knowledge, historical objectivity, and narrative authority. This presentation explores questions about when and where oral historians should enter products of oral history. Is the best use of oral history one in which an oral historian seems to disappear from the dialogue? If so, why? If not, when, should, or can, the oral historian speak?

SPONSORS: This talk is part of the “Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series,” co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA). Support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) is provided for programming that embodies late Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance.

INFORMATION: For more information, please email Amy Starecheski at aas39(at)columbia.edu

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

NO REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED

Oct. 16: Narrative Humility: Medical Listening and Oral History

Originally trained in pediatrics and public health, Sayantani DasGupta, MD MPH is faculty in the Master's Program in Narrative Medicine and co-chair of the University Seminar in Narrative, Health and Social Justice, both at Columbia University. She also teaches in the Graduate Program in Health Advocacy at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society's Medicine, Literature and Society track at Columbia. She is the co-author of The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali Folktales (Interlink, 1995), the author of a memoir about medical school, and co-editor of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write their Bodies (Kent State, 2007) andGlobalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life (Lexington Books, 2014). Her creative and academic work has been published in diverse places including Ms., Z. Magazine, JAMA, The Hasting’s Center Report, The Lancet and Literary Mama, and included in such collections as Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (South End Press, 1999), Fifty Shades of Feminism (Virago, 2013), Health Humanities Reader (Rutgers U Press, 2014), and the forthcoming Keywords in Disability Studies (NYU Press, forth). She also writes online in such venues as Salon, The Weeklings, Feministing, Racialicous, Adios, Barbie, The Feminist Wire, Sociological Images, and Everyday Feminism.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

6-8 PM

Knox Hall, 606 W 122nd St., Room 509

Check out OHMA students' reflections on this talk: Leyla Vural, Erica Wrightson, and Steven Puente.

Watch the workshop on YouTube!

Healing, teaching, learning, and listening are all fundamentally political acts. While oral historians including Alessandro Portelli have concluded that “an inter/view is …. an experiment in equality” this formulation regarding power in the listening act is no less important to the medical inter/view and the intersubjective space of the health care relationship. Narrative medicine and other health humanities practices train future clinicians to listen to individual clinical stories in ways that deepen practice, increase successful diagnosis and treatment, promote strong health care relationships, and decrease clinician burnout. However, without both a sense of narrative humility (an inward looking to our own prejudices and frames of listening) and structural competency (attention to sociopolitical structures of power) narrative medicine training risks re-creating the self-same hierarchical health care relationships that it seemingly intends to address. Oral history practices and oral history theory can help guide narrative medicine practitioners in not only listening to embodied stories, but paying attention to (and challenging) the sounds of our own power.

SPONSORS: This talk is part of the “Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series,” co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and the Oral History Master of Arts Program (OHMA). Support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) is provided for programming that embodies late Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and social significance.

INFORMATION: For more information, please email Amy Starecheski at aas39(at)columbia.edu

THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

NO REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED