Join us for an intensive day of workshops with OHMA faculty and alumni!
Registration is now open!
***These workshops will be virtual and take place on Zoom.
Registration: $10 - 100 per workshop, sliding scale.
For our oral history workshops, please pay what you can. We suggest $30 for students, recent graduates, or others who are financially constrained, while we suggest that professionals and those with more resources should pay more.
All profits from these events go towards our annual merit scholarship for an incoming OHMA student.
Location: ONLINE
Prospective Students: OHMA offers an application fee waiver for participants of our 2019 One-Day Oral History Training Workshops who are applying to the program for the Fall semester! Please email us at ohma@columbia.edu once you've submitted your application so that we can send the waiver to Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Sponsors: OHMA's One-Day Oral History Training Workshops are 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.
MORNING SESSIONS
Oral History 101
What is oral history, and what is it good for? In a storytelling-obsessed era, what does oral history offer to researchers, artists, students, organizers, journalists, and teachers? In this Oral History 101 workshop, participants will be introduced to the basics of oral history practice -- planning a project and conducting an interview – and will explore how tools from the oral historian’s toolkit can be useful to their practice.
Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose research focuses on the use of oral history in social movements and the politics of history and property in cities. She is the Director of the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University. She consults and lectures widely on oral history education and methods, and is co-author of the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide. 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 people who lost work. Starecheski was a member of the Core Working Group for Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change from 2011-2018, where she facilitated the Practitioner Support Network. In 2015 she won the Oral History Association’s article award for “Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice” and in 2016 she was awarded the Sapiens-Allegra “Will the Next Margaret Mead Please Stand Up?” prize for public anthropological writing. She received a PhD in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she was a Public Humanities Fellow. Her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, was published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press. She is the founder of the Mott Haven Oral History Project, which collaboratively documents, activates, and amplifies the stories of her longtime neighborhood, as told by the people who live there.
The stories that emerge from oral history have the power to foster empathy and to help us better understand history, cultures and ideas. But often, to maximize the impact of the stories that are shared with us, we need to do the additional work of editing them into the shapes that best fulfill that potential. Editing oral history is the work that makes narratives more accessible to a diverse group of readers. In this workshop we will discuss the ethics of what the Kitchen Sisters’ call “writing with other people’s words.” We will also consider the technical work of adhering to accuracy while crafting a readable and compelling narrative. These questions will be explored through in class readings and exercises to shape good stories into multiple forms. A note: this workshop is intended for people interested in editing written works, we will not be dealing with audio or video in this session!
Sara Sinclair is an oral historian of Cree-Ojibwa, German-Jewish and British descent. A graduate of Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts program, Sara was the project manager and lead interviewer for Columbia Center for Oral History Research’s Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project. With Peter Bearman and Mary Marshall Clark, Sinclair edited a book from these narratives, published by Columbia University Press. Sara has worked as an oral history consultant and educator with the Museum of the City of New York, the International Labour Organization, New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the Exit Art Closure Study, a research project on the closure of New York gallery/artist’s space Exit Art (1982-2012). For Sara’s thesis at Columbia she conducted a series of interviews exploring the narratives of university- educated, reservation-raised Native North Americans on returning to their Nations after school. Sara expanded this project, How We Go Home, through Voice of Witness’ Story Lab and is currently editing a forthcoming book with the organization.
When we think of oral history we focus first on the dialogical exchange between interviewer and narrator. However, before we dive into the conversation, we must first learn and practice how to listen to oral histories and understand their different components. This workshop will include a close listening of various oral history interviews to explore the role of the oral historian, the art of asking primary and follow up questions, and the engagement of the oral historian and narrator with the themes that arise during the interview. Throughout, we will explore the concept of “ethical listening” and how this can inform the intentionality behind the project and help shape its interpretation and dissemination.
Fanny Julissa García is an oral historian contributing work to Central American Studies. In her most recent work, Reminiscences on Migration: A Central American Lyric, she intertwines her own migration story using lyric poetry and vignettes with oral history interviews conducted with Central American refugee women who had been released from detention centers at the U.S./Mexico border. She has worked for more than 15 years as a social justice advocate to combat the public health and socioeconomic impact of HIV/AIDS on low income communities, worked closely with organizations fighting for the end of family detention, and supported survivors of sexual violence. She serves as the Communications Coordinator for Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change, a network of oral historians, activists, cultural workers, community organizers and documentary artists that use oral history to further movement building and transformative social change. She also works at the New-York Historical Society, and is co-founder of Social Exchange Institute, a media and education company that uses multi-media tools to produce work that promotes social justice and equity. She’s also on the editorial board for the Oral History Association’s Oral History Review. In 2017, she graduated from the Oral History Master of Arts program from Columbia University where she received the Judge Jack B. Weinstein Scholarship Award for Oral History and the OHMA Oral History Teaching and Social Justice Award.
Remote Recording: Best Practices for Oral History Interviewing
For several decades in the analog age, oral historians grappled with how to best conduct interviews remotely using the telephone. Although this method was never promoted as a “best practice,” it was useful when a face-to-face interview was impractical. Social distancing has oral historians searching for practical, simple, effective, and affordable solutions for conducting interviews remotely, and the digital age provides a range of useful opportunities. This workshop examines remote recording options; discusses the practicalities of choosing a platform and method for remote recording; and considers the intricacies, technologies, and challenges of conducting this type of interview. Boyd will explore and demonstrate specific options for both audio and video interviewing to fit a range of technological and budgetary needs and to maximize the quality of the recorded interview as well as the interview experience for both the narrators and interviewers.
Read notes from workshop here.
Doug Boyd PhD is director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries. Boyd envisioned, designed, and implemented the open-source and free Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), which synchronizes text with audio and video online. Boyd is the co-editor of the book Oral History and Digital Humanities: Voice, Access, and Engagement published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2014, and he is the author of the book Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community published in August 2011 by the University Press of Kentucky. Boyd served as president of the Oral History Association in the United States in 2016-2017 and conducted research in Australia as a Fulbright Scholar in 2019. Boyd manages the Oral History in the Digital Age initiative, authors the blog Digital Omnium, is the producer and host of The Wisdom Project podcast, and has authored numerous articles pertaining to oral history, archives, and digital technologies.
Oral History, as a discipline, is fairly recent. In the English-speaking world it has been approached as a formal practice since the 1940s and in other places, such some countries in Latin America, it has been a method that is particularly used in History departments and circles. Although oral history methods are related to the long and reach forms of oral traditions, they are different. In this online workshop in Spanish, I will expand on this context and then offer some introductory guidelines, values, factors and tools to take into account when designing an oral history project. This information will be especially useful for community-based individuals or groups, but it will also be open and useful for anyone getting started with these methods.
La historia oral, como disciplina , es bastante reciente. En el mundo de habla inglesa ha sido abordada como práctica formal desde la década de 1940 y en otros lugares del mundo, como en algunos países de Latinoamérica, ha sido un método que en especial se utiliza dentro de círculos y departamentos de Historia. Aunque se relacionan, la historia oral como método difiere de la larga y rica forma de las tradiciones orales. En este taller online en español brindaré información sobre este contexto para después ofrecer lineamientos y valores básicos, factores y herramientas que tomar en cuenta para comenzar a diseñar e implementar un proyecto de historia oral. Esta información introductoria será especialmente útil para personas o grupos comunitarios, pero está abierto para cualquier persona pensando en utilizar estos métodos.
Fernanda Espinosa is an oral history-based practitioner and cultural organizer based in New York and originally from the Andes. She approaches storytelling as one of the many ways of transmitting knowledge and her analysis and practice are deeply embedded in interrogating colonial standards, including story forms. She has been generating, listening to, and interpreting oral histories to inform creative public interventions that aspire to act as platforms for resistance and dialogue. Espinosa holds a degree in Oral History from Columbia University, where her thesis was awarded the 2018 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award, she has worked leading community partnerships with StoryCorps, and is the recipient, along her collaborator, of the 2020 MDOC Storyteller's Institute Fellowship. She is also the co-founder and coordinator of Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero (CC 1/19), a wandering art and oral transmissions collaboration.
Fernanda Espinosa es organizadora cultural y practicante de medios basados en los métodos de la historia oral. Tiene su base en Nueva York y es originalmente de la región andina. Su análisis y trabajo están profundamente ligados a la interrogación de estándares coloniales, incluyendo una mirada crítica de la forma de la y las historia(s). Sus esfuerzos han sido dedicados a generar, escuchar e interpretar historias orales para informar intervenciones públicas que aspiran a ser plataformas de resistencia y diálogo. Espinosa es Maestra en Historia Oral de la Universidad de Columbia donde su tesis de grado recibió el Premio Jeffrey H. Brodsky de historia oral en el 2018. Ha trabajado liderando relaciones comunitarias con StoryCorps y en el 2020 fue elegida, junto a su colaborador, para el MDOC Storyteller's Institute. También es la cofundadora y coordinadora de Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero (CC 1/19), una colaboración creativa itinerante entre modos de transmisión oral y prácticas de arte visual.
This workshop will explore how to structure a participatory oral history research project (POHR) with a social justice purpose by identifying practices that invite participation in all stages of an oral history research project. Conducting Oral History research with a social justice purpose requires interrogating concepts such as shared authority, collaboration, co-creation, participation and even dialogue in our practice. It also requires us to be intentional about how power, privilege, legitimacy and authority exist within the oral history process and offers us opportunities to structure in practices that result in relationships that challenges existing power dynamics. Inspired by other disciplines that rely upon collective analysis and collective action, POHR is an evolving concept. This workshop will examine how elements of community organizing and participatory action research resonate with some of oral histories fundamental values, including respect for the narrator’s capacity to analyze the meaning of historic events and the conditions of their own lives. This workshop will explore how these elements combine and enhance the oral history research process through concrete examples. Borrowing from these disciplines allows us to reconsider the oral history process, increasing our capacity to co-create multiple spaces for participation. Participants are encouraged to bring ideas or experience with participatory oral history research to workshop ideas, and to share your insights.
Lynn Lewis: I am a life-long community organizer and social justice worker who believes in the power of collective analysis and direct action to win justice. In order to win justice, it is essential that folks in social movements learn to document our own histories of struggle, to learn the lessons contained within those histories and to create ways to make those lessons accessible. Oral history is a crucial tool to transmit these lessons of struggle. As a former civil rights organizer and founding Executive Director of Picture the Homeless and an OHMA graduate I am working with a group of homeless leaders to develop The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project using participatory oral history methodology. My other areas of work include other freelance oral history projects, consulting as a community organizing trainer and coach and grant-writer and working as an adjunct faculty member.
We will approach the oral history interview as an act of spontaneous literature — one that contains both the individual story and the larger history. In this session we will engage the oral history interview as the first site of our creative practice. Participants will be introduced to the art of listening, the ethics of interpretation, and approach the writing process as the translation of experience. What ethical and process questions might we encounter when we endeavor to make art from the material of another person’s life?
Nyssa Chow is a lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at Princeton University and is the current Princeton Arts Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts (Princeton University). She is an oral historian, writer, and interdisciplinary artist. Chow served as Writer-in-Residence at Fordham University and as core faculty in the Oral History Masters program at Columbia University. She was the 2018 Recipient of the PEN/Jean Stein for Literary Oral History, won for the book project, Still. Life. The immersive literary oral history project ‘The Story of Her Skin’ won the Columbia University Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. She is a recipient of the Hollywood Foreign Press Grant, the Women in Film and Television Fellowship, the Toms Fellowship, the Academy of Motion Pictures Foundation Award and the Zaki Gordon Award for Excellence in Screenwriting. She was a recipient of a Sloan Foundation Grant. Born and raised in Trinidad, she is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA Film program and Columbia University's Oral History Masters Program.
Oral history and journalism have a long history of both overlapping and diverging. An understanding of the similarities, differences, and distinctive possibilities of these two approaches has much to offer anyone who is working towards accurate, complete, and equitable narratives of the past and the present—especially when the work involves cultures and histories that are different from one’s own. This workshop will offer a conceptual and methodological framework toward activating the best and mitigating the worst of journalism and oral history (as well as fiction, folklore, and documentary) in interview-based memory projects. Drawn from the instructor’s previous and ongoing work, examples and small-group exercises will examine the Federal Writers Project of the 1930s; Ralph Ellison’s unfinished “Hickman Novel”; the Washington Post in the decade of Watergate; the New York Times 1619 Project; and a nascent collaboration between two oral historians and a photojournalist about national and local memory in Lexington, Virginia. While these examples will focus primarily on representations of African American history and culture, the insights to be gleaned here—about narrative framing and project design, community outreach and relationship-building, objectivity and subjectivity, interviewing technique, and approaches to interpretation and publication—will be useful to a wide range of humanistic story-workers. In addition to practicing oral historians and journalists, this workshop should appeal to interviewers, artists, writers, editors, curators, organizers, and educators of all kinds. Much of the workshop will be devoted to discussions of particular challenges in participants’ own projects (no matter what stage the work or idea is currently at!), and the matters of craft and ethics that might animate their possible solutions.
Benji de la Piedra directs the Herbert Denton Community History Project for Central Arkansas Library System, and is working on a biography of the journalist Herbert Denton, Jr. (1943-1989), the first African American to hold the position of city editor (1976-1980) at the Washington Post. Benji currently teaches oral history in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Public History M.A. program. He graduated from OHMA in 2016, and received the program’s annual thesis prize for his extended essay “That Something Else: B.A. Botkin, Alessandro Portelli, and Ralph Ellison on Democratic Pluralism and the Dialogical Encounter.” He consults on community-based oral history projects throughout the United States, and speaks and writes regularly about American culture with an emphasis on black intellectual expression.