Why are food memories so powerful? What exactly does it mean when people talk about food? Resonating with the recent OHMA workshop with Storm Garner for her Queens Night Market Vendor Stories and Oral History Project, OHMA student Nina Zhou shares an example of how food memories are curated on documentary media.

Brandon Perdomo presents a digital manipulation alongside Mercy, a poem by Rudy Francisco, and considers circumstance of serendipity in the process of becoming, and what coping with all that noise means anyway.

Inspired by the reflections of Dr. Winona Wheeler in a class discussion preceding the OHMA workshop series event, “Land Back! The Importance of Oral History in First Nation Land Claims Cases,” Max Peterson reflects on his experience helping to facilitate intergenerational learning through a student oral history project.

How do you define Land? What meaning does Land have for you? What if your Land was stolen from you?

On March 11, Gabriel Solis visited OHMA to share and present his work as the executive director of the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP). TAVP is a community based archive dealing in critical memory work, recording and mobilizing the stories of Texas residents whose lives have been impacted by violence in Texas—namely murder, police violence, in-custody deaths, mass incarceration and the death penalty.

We were interested to learn more about trauma-informed interviewing, pedagogical and project design approaches to community-based oral histories, and the role of archives in oral histories meant to create social change.

On April 12, Kae Bara Kratcha and Taylor Thompson met back up with Gabriel Solis, to follow up on Solis’ presentation and to learn more about his ideas concerning teaching towards trauma informed care and oral history methodology. The following is an abridged interview with him.

Inspired by Storm Garner’s recent workshop, “Editing for the Mass Market: Tips and Tidbits from the Queens Night Market Vendor Stories Oral History Project,” wherein she chronicles stories from people of diverse backgrounds about the food they create, Rattana Bounsouaysana explores the idea around the different meanings of comfort.

Inspired by Holly Werner-Thomas’ February 2021 OMHA workshop Changing the Narrative on Gun Violence: Survivors Want You to ‘Sit Down and Listen,’ Emily R. Kahn explores her own experiences sitting down and listening to the stories of Holocaust survivors, refugees, and their descendants. She deconstructs her conflicting feelings and sense of responsibility about telling these stories as a non-survivor.

India has made transformative changes in its transgender laws in recent years which have started the process of social change. But only just.

by Harpal Singh

This fall brought a treasure trove of workshops that introduced us to oral history projects telling the histories of marginalized communities in their own words - from Rikers’ Island inmates to New York City’s Trans community. A new documentary seeks to do the same, directed by a collaborative team that partners subject with producer. OHMA student Lisa R. Cohen spoke to the team about their very special relationship.

Inspired by recent OHMA Workshops that explored personal experiences of how our “homes” change over time - Sara Sinclair and Suzanne Methot’s How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America, and Sarita Daftary’s on the East New York Oral History Project and the Rikers Public Memory Project – Michael Giannetti decided to conduct a listening activity with his family about their memories of Detroit, the 1967 uprising, and their contemporary ideas of the city.

After Michelle O’Brien’s workshop on the NYC Trans Oral History Project, OHMA student and librarian Kae Bara Kratcha wondered whether the material needs of all trans people will ever be met well enough that all trans people who want to could spend most of their time learning and teaching their histories. To explore this question, Kae wrote and recorded a poem and created a video to accompany the recording.

How I learned to stop worrying and love Zoom, live theatre, and talking on the telephone; and what they all taught me about in-person interviews. (Remember those?)

By: Casey Dooley

How should educators navigate controversial issues like war in their lesson plans? Current OHMA student and veterans’ oral historian Elizabeth Jefimova offers a few tips for educators looking to incorporate the topic of war into their curriculum and how oral history methodology provides a unique solution in teaching war.

Brandon Perdomo writes about testimony in relation to the body and response to social-scape by activation-of-voice in response to a presentation by both Sara Sinclair on her work on How We Go Home, and Suzanne Methot, who complements the piece with curriculum-building for Voice Of Witness.

Two thought experiments emerged in response to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s presentation at OHMA on November 12, 2020. They take the form of a diptych collage titled “Reach for the Moon or The Grass is Always Greener”.

With a small group of co-moderators, a cohort of OHMA Students participating in the Workshop course had the opportunity to host a seminar with Dr. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. For three and a half years I’d been poring over her book As We Have Always Done: Indiginous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, and I was finally meeting her in person—well via Zoom. As a student of economics, I had always wanted to ask about integrating politics of decolonization, radical resistance, and black-feminist politics into disciplines like economics or STEM. The following is a meditation on the wisdom that Dr. Simpson shared in our seminar, and the personal strategies I have been cultivating based on that dialogue.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson presents an ethical framework around consent that challenges the way museums currently handle material culture. Oral history presents one way to navigate these challenges and to preserve the relationship between object and community.

The Chavis Carousel is the centerpiece of the 37-acre park in the Raleigh, North Carolina neighborhood, Chavis. When the park opened in 1938, it was the only African American park in the Southeast United States. Because of this, it was visited by many African Americans throughout North Carolina as well as other states. Following the end of segregation the park and surrounding neighborhoods began to decline under various influences. The City pledged re-investment in the park ten years ago and is just now beginning to fulfill that promise.

After navigating Sarita Daftary-Steel’s East New York Oral History (ENYOH) Project, a current MFA dramaturgy student, Kate Foster, reflects on her journey to uncover and understand her family’s history in Detroit, MI. She remarks on the benefits of agency in learning history and discovers connections between the ENYOH Project and the elements of a documentary play.

This personal timeline essay is inspired by the East New York Oral History Project’s interactive timeline, which allows visitors to learn about the historical and political contexts of racial segregation on local, regional and national levels. Although the project’s timeline is on a grand scale, it caused me to reflect on my tenuous personal experiences in East New York, and sent me on a journey to learn more about my family history in the neighborhood.

What does an actor/actress look like when off-stage in the real world? The human drama goes on beyond the curtain fall. In this piece, OHMA student Yiling (Nina) Zhou draws from an interview she conducted studying the history of Cantonese Opera in Canada and reflects on her oral history project. This approach was inspired by the recent OHMA workshop with Nikki Yeboah, whose oral history performance project, “The (M)others, explores the stories of four women who lost their loved ones to police brutality. Her process of theatre-making shows an empowering way in storytelling of women.

In this blogpost, inspired by Carlin Zia’s March 5th OHMA presentation on her book “Uncertain Journeys,” Lisa R. Cohen reflects on the fluid nature of shared memories in different spaces - traveling back and forth between spoken, written, physical and even, increasingly, the virtual world.

Ted Kerr’s wise words inspired OHMA student Eleonora Anedda to reflect on the responsibilities of oral historians in times of crisis. Not so much on their duty towards others, but their obligations towards themselves. This piece will examine much needed self care habits that can be incorporated in our lockdown routines.

In this blog post, current OHMA student Marina Labarthe del Solar shares a conversation with Theodore Kerr about the importance of being transparent about your identity and positionality with the communities you work with. Marina writes about identity politics and how knowing where you stand with respect to power is an essential skill for oral historians.

How do you engage in a dialogue with a narrator who lives permanently in an institution? Let me tell you a story.

In this piece, Francine D. Spang-Willis reimagines a relationship with oral history and technology to create artificial intelligence that is more representative of and responsive to maintaining and perpetuating Indigenous language, knowledge, and culture. The piece is inspired by Stephanie Dinkins' Oral History as Told by AI presentation given on April 2, 2020.

To capture the complexity of the coronavirus pandemic, and to honour the voices of the communities most impacted, journalists can draw upon some of the techniques practiced by oral history.

How can we invite people to dig into their memories and offer us their stories? In this blog post, Amanda Blewitt, a doctoral student in International Education, reflects on how sharing experiences with participants can evoke the past while connecting us in the present. This reflection was inspired by Laura Mitchison’s conversation with OHMA on April 9, 2020.

How do you describe who you are? What words do you choose? What meanings do your choices carry with them? Current OHMA student Lily Doron ponders these questions in this essay on identity, language, and how we see ourselves. It is inspired by Carlin Zia’s OHMA workshop presentation, Uncertain Journeys.