Alumni Updates: Spring 2016

It’s time for another series of updates on the diverse set of projects our alums are championing! Several of them have announcements for our blog readers.

Photo by Suzanne Snider

Laura Barnett

Laura Barnett OHMA '15 is a 2016 grantee recipient from The Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) for the oral-history based project: CREATING THE URBAN CANVAS: LAND ART ON A BROOKLYN STREET CORNER, which she has been working on in collaboration with artist Alfred Evans. She developed the project during Fall 2014 at OHMA and conducted interviews as part of Jerry Albarelli's class.

The grant, in the interdisciplinary category and supported by The Brooklyn Arts Fund, which is funded by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) and will result in a public project to be completed by the end of 2016.

 

Carrie Brave Heart

Carrie Brave Heart (OHMA class of 2014) has been awarded an Oral History Grant from the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for 2016-2017.  The title of the project is, “Agnes T. “Mary” Crawler (Ta-sina-mani-win) Native American Warrior Woman.”

Sewon Barrera, Nicki Pombier Berger, Cindy Choung, Sarah Dziedzic

Sewon Barrera, Nicki Pombier Berger, Cindy Choung, Sarah Dziedzic have founded In Context Journal, an independent quarterly platform for oral historical work and thoughtful explorations of what it means to listen, to speak, and to be heard. We welcome dialogue and engagement with practitioners of any field.

Call for Submissions for In Context Journal – Deadline June 1, 2016

“Questions,” for many of us, drive the work we do. As scholars, journalists, caregivers, oral historians, documentarians, and artists in many forms, our curiosities and those of our audiences propel and shape our work. We also attend to how we ask those questions––it invokes our ethics, affects the people we interact with, and determines whether we and our audiences deem our work a success or failure. But none of us have all the answers. We work in hopes of learning from doing, and in hopes of continuing to be surprised, humbled, and awoken to new questions. By starting with the theme of “Questions,” we seek to provide a forum that honors thoughtful inquiry, protest, and exchange within our community.

With that, we invite submissions to our inaugural issue on “Questions.” We encourage visual, audio, and textual works that provoke thought or discussion on this theme and which resonate with the mission of In Context Journal.

Submissions Guidelines

Submissions can be of any medium, length, and/or file size but if you plan to send us a file larger than 25MB, please email us with a project description first. In Context Journal particularly encourages submission of works exploring new and innovative angles of consideration and reflection. We also accept submissions that have been published previously and compelling works in progress. In acknowledgement of the best ethical practices in oral history, please submit work only if appropriate permissions for your sources have been obtained. Currently, we do not offer compensation for publication. Send submissions to incontextjournal@gmail.com by June 1, 2016.

Andrew Viñales

Recently, I was hired as an Oral History Researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro) at Hunter College. I am one of many oral historians at Centro responsible for interviewing nominated Puerto Rican leaders, activists, and notable figures. Our goal is to generate a wealth of material for researchers and other people interested in Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States. Or contributions, struggles, and visibility, on a national scale with other oral historians working in Chicago, Florida and Philadelphia (and we are expanding further!). I am honored to be on part of this team and the opportunity to interview folks I have grown up hearing about!

Liza Zapol

Liza Zapol will be presenting at Celebrating the City: Jane Jacobs at 100.

As part of the Municipal Art Society of New York’s festival Celebrating the City: Jane Jacobs at 100, join us for free outdoor drawing sessions inspired by our unique urban landscape and the stories of the city. Create your own cityscape while local artist and oral historian Liza Zapol shares stories and insights that delve into the evolving visible skyline from the Whitney’s terraces.

Watching what Jacobs called the “intricate ballet” of the city streets below, we’ll look closely at layers of history in the streets and buildings, hear stories about the people who have haunted the area, and learn about the artists who were inspired by this landscape. Visitors will be invited to share their own stories and sense of place through a mapmaking exercise. Drawing materials and stools will be provided.

Farther Afield: A Series of Workshops on Anthropology Beyond Academia

This series of workshops has been organized by PhD students concerned about landing fulfilling jobs in academia and interested in thinking seriously and practically about alternatives to traditional academic positions. The workshops will explore satisfying careers for anthropologists outside, or at an angle to, academia by looking beyond what is traditionally offered by "alt-ac" databases and by focusing on careers that call upon the skills we are trained in as anthropologists: in-depth research, analytic thinking and writing, instruction. We will hear from people who have found—or created—satisfying careers about what they do, how they came to it, and why they enjoy it. 

Please join us for our second workshop, focused on public anthropology, broadly construed:

Anthropology in the Public 

Friday, April 8, 2-4 pm
Scheps Library - 457 Schermerhorn Ext., Columbia University

with
Sarah Kendzior (Writer)
and
Amy Starecheski (Associate Director of the Oral History MA, Columbia University) 

Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Anthropology Graduate Students Association. Contact the organizers with any questions: Amiel Bize (abm37@columbia.edu) and Soo-Young Kim (csk2140@columbia.edu)

Participant bios

Sarah Kendzior is a writer and researcher who focuses on politics, the economy and media. She is a columnist for the Globe and Mail, a former columnist for Al Jazeera English, and a frequent contributor to the Guardian, Politico, Foreign Policy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications. In 2012, Kendzior received her PhD in anthropology from Washington University, where she studied the effect of digital media on social movements in former Soviet Central Asia. Kendzior lives in St. Louis and is the author of the essay collection “The View from Flyover Country”.

Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian. Since 2012, she has been the Associate Director of the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University. She was a lead interviewer on Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, for which she interviewed Afghans, Muslims, Sikhs, activists, low-income people, and the unemployed. In 2015 she won the Oral History Association’s article award for “Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice.” She received a PhD in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center and her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Website coming soon at fartherafield.org

Exciting Updates from OHMA

OHMA is pleased to provide updates as it continues to strengthen engagement in the program from a variety of oral history community members.

One-Day Workshops and Alumni Short Courses Help Build New Cohorts

OHMA is proud to announce that the overwhelming interest in our one-day oral history workshops held earlier this month - attended by nearly 200 people! - has allowed us to increase in our annual merit scholarship from $4000 to $6500, with the support of matching funds from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. We are grateful for your engagement and hope that you may be interested in continuing the conversation through our Alumni Short Course Series this spring, hosted by the Columbia Oral History History Alumni Association and taught by graduates of our program. 

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Celebrating our Ten-Year Anniversary with a Digital Thesis Collection

Leading up to OHMA's ten-year anniversary in 2018, we are in the final stages of a project to preserve of our oral history thesis collection. Our students' work will be fully printed, digitized, and archived for internal use by our faculty and student/alumni communities. Access to these projects will help deepen essential discussions on oral history pedagogy, methodology, and analysis within our program. 

We will also soon be premiering a public collection of selected thesis material, with a multimedia website and abstracts of our students' work. We hope that this resource will highlight the hard work of our graduates and crucial stories of their narrators. In the meantime, please enjoy our recently updated list of students theses through which you can view the projects already publicly accessible on Columbia's Academic Commons.

LV Communications: Stories that Make a Difference

Looking for an experienced communications professional and oral historian to help your campaign, organization, or family to tell your story? 

OHMA alum Leyla Vural has lauched a new venture, LV Communications: Stories that Make a Difference. Check it out.

And read about Leyla's vision:

I am most interested in our shared efforts to make the world a more just place. I studied oral history (and in May 2015 earned an M.A. in it from Columbia University) because I wanted to learn the newest methods in the oldest of traditions: listening to people share their experience. Life stories are about understanding the past, to be sure, but they're also about shaping the future. Oral history helps ordinary people (Studs Terkel called us the "etceteras") put ourselves directly on the record. That by itself is important, but listening to life stories also is a way to imagine a brighter day and sharing those stories is a way to push for change.

One of the things I love about oral history is that it’s communal. By definition, you can’t work alone if your work is about listening to people. In this way, oral history mirrors all efforts at social change and, of course, life itself. It’s not only better with other people, it’s impossible without them. Social justice may be a forever project, but together we can keep bending that arc of history while we find strength in one another and have some fun as we go.