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The Laramie Project, Documentary Theater & Oral History Performance

In this post, writer, historian, and activist Holly Werner-Thomas explores “verbatim theater” as a medium for disseminating oral histories, reflecting on her son’s recent high school’s performance of The Laramie Project .

By Holly Werner-Thomas

Oral historians don’t always think of the theater as an outlet for their work.

This thought occurred to me last winter when my son, who was a freshman in high school, brought home the script for The Laramie Project, a documentary play developed in 1998 after the murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The brutality of the murder focused international attention on homophobia, and eventually led to the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2009.

Playwright and theater director Moisés Kaufman has said that the idea for The Laramie Project originated in his desire to understand Matthew Shepard’s murder, why it happened in Laramie, and how Laramie is both different from and similar to anywhere else in America. He asked the members of his theater company, the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project, “What can we as theater artists do as a response to this incident? And, more concretely, is theater a medium that can contribute to the national dialogue on current events?”

In order to answer these questions, he and nine other members of the Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie in November 1998, only four weeks after Matthew Shepard’s murder, “to collect interviews that might become material for a play.” The theater group visited the town several times over two years and collected more than 200 interviews. The Laramie Project debuted in 1999 in Denver at the Denver Center Theatre (the closest regional theater to Laramie), moved to the Union Square Theatre in New York, and by November 2000, staged in Laramie. The play was also published that year and produced off-Broadway, with HBO airing a star-studded film of The Laramie Project in 2002. The play has also been produced internationally – in 2016 in Uganda, for example, where same sex relationships are criminalized – and by more than 400 regional, university, and high school theaters, including, most recently, my son’s high school in Washington, D.C., where he played Harry Woods, a gay 52-year-old Wyoming man, alongside four other roles. (Twenty-one high school cast members played about five roles each.)

The performance impelled me to think about verbatim theater (that is, plays that are constructed verbatim from interviews) from an oral historian’s point of view. It confirmed the suspicion I had that oral historians don’t always think of theater as an outlet for their work, or more specifically, of collaborating with theater producers and writers. And that perhaps they should.

There are exceptions of course. Both scholar E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea and the Living Histories Ensemble of Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, which produced Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and other Human Rights Violations are examples.

Johnson conceived his much-lauded book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008) as an oral history collection, before deciding that “the verbal tics and mannerisms” of the narrators would be best performed. Johnson’s work recalls that of Anna Deavere Smith, who is perhaps best known for her pioneering one-person verbatim play, Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992). Yet both Johnson and Deavere Smith are performers and scholars who use oral history methods to compile the stories they want to tell, not academic oral historians who turned to the stage.

Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and other Human Rights Violations, on the other hand, was organized by Concordia as an oral history project from 2007-2012 in order to record and explore the experiences and memories of refugees and other displaced persons who had settled in Montreal. The resulting performances were “by, for, and about [the] communities” involved—in other words, self-referential.

Since the first production of The Laramie Project nearly 20 years ago, verbatim theater has evolved under the umbrella term documentary theater, which is a form of nonfiction theater that incorporates, but is not limited to, re-creation drawing on interviews. For example, in 2000, the Brooklyn theater company The Civilians, introduced the idea of “investigative theater,” which, according to its mission statement, “brings artists into dynamic engagement with the subject of their work. [This] ethos extends into production, [where we invite] audiences to be active participants in the inquiry before, during, and after the performance.” The Life Jacket Theatre Company’s motto is “Creating Theatre from Real Events,” and its mission is clear: “Through field interviews and archival research, we share real stories about diverse human experiences, particularly those living on the margins — the outsiders, outcasts, and outliers.” In sum, the efforts of documentary theater makers are what one writer in American Theatre magazine called, “a multifaceted attempt to unearth bare truth through theatrical storytelling and engage audiences in meaningful conversation.”

What can academic oral historians learn from these theatrical presentations?

Toward this effort, recent topics in American documentary theater have included: how Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism reverberates through American society today (AYN RAND: Trauma Response) from The Builders Association in Brooklyn; a play about sex offenders in Florida (America is Hard to See) from the Life Jacket Theatre Company; and a play titled Tangles & Plaques from the Neo-Futurists of Chicago that explores dementia and memory. Each of these nonfiction plays relies upon documentary source material, especially interviews, but also court transcripts, newspapers, and journal entries.

People who work in theater have propelled oral history performance, rather than oral historians who have turned to the stage; yet oral historians also want to engage audiences in meaningful conversation. As academics, they attempt to unearth the truth, and to interpret and disseminate it via publication or another public means, such as exhibits or podcasts. What, then, can academic oral historians learn from these theatrical presentations?

There are differences, of course, between the disciplines: theater producers and playwrights consider documentary performance, like all performance, from the vantage point of story first, and sometimes fret over the responsibility of telling others’ real-life stories, while oral historians accept this as a given (Not that we don’t fret!). I argue that at least for oral historians focused on current events or the recent past who desire to spark a dialogue, hold a mirror up to society in an effort to reveal truths, or promote social change, performance represents an opportunity to reach new audiences. The immediacy of the spoken word and the opportunity for deep listening are abundant in theater.

The Laramie Project head writer Leigh Fondakowski’s inscription to the author’s son.

There are lessons for oral historians too, in the willingness of theater makers to experiment with form and style, sometimes by making their processes transparent. For example, in one performance, the director had audience members read from the transcripts onstage. Theater producers and writers also allow themselves to eschew professional and temporal distance. The Laramie Project is an example of how to interview people in crisis: The creators met and spent time with people and were open to listening and learning. Leigh Fondakowski, the head writer of The Laramie Project, said that the first question they always asked was, “What do you love about Laramie?” This endeared them to Laramie residents, and they were invited back. She said the townspeople told the New Yorkers, “you seem like good listeners. Maybe you’ll set the record straight.”

Playwrights and theater producers aren’t waiting for oral historians to conduct the interviews for them, however. Like radio producers who have jumped on podcasting to create serial audio stories, theater makers focused on contemporary issues and making social change through art are doing it for themselves.

Holly Werner-Thomas is a student at Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts program. A writer, former journalist, and historian, Holly is from Portland, Oregon, but has lived in New York and Washington, D.C. for several years, as well as in Turkey, Brazil, and France. She has worked as an oral historian for The Building Museum in Washington, D.C., the Hurricane Katrina Oral History Project in conjunction with the University of Southern Mississippi, as Research Director for a historical consulting firm, The History Factory, and as an activist for the pressure group Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, where she created an oral history project for gun violence victims and their family members. Her current focus is on gun violence, right-wing extremism, and trailing spouses. 

Featured image “_MG_2177” is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic  (CC BY-NC 2.0) by Flickr user Michael Taggart Photography

OHR Conversations: Chris Nugent on Gender, Transmission of Memory, and the Third Reich

We are pleased to announce the launch of OHR Conversations, our new initiative to turn the microphone toward Oral History Review authors to give them an opportunity to share what inspired their articles, giving a behind the scene glimpse at how oral historians think about their practice, methods, and theories.

In our first installment of OHR Conversations, we interviewed Chris Nugent, Library Director at Warren Wilson College, and author of “Remembering, Reflecting, Reckoning: German Women and the Long Shadow of National Socialism” in the Winter/Spring 2018 issue of OHR. She discusses the origins of her project interviewing two generations of German women—the first who grew up under National Socialism, and the second the generation of their daughters, focusing on ideas including the transmission of memory and gendered forms of communication.

Listen to audio only.

Christine Nugent serves as library director at Warren Wilson College. Her research interests include German national identity, memory studies, Holocaust literature, and oral history methodology.

 

Author interview: Noah Riseman on what’s left unsaid in oral histories

We asked Noah Riseman, author of “‘Describing Misbehaviour in Vung Tau as “Mischief” Is Ridiculously Coy’: Ethnographic Refusal, Reticence, and the Oral Historian’s Dilemma” in the latest OHR, to discuss his use of oral history as a research method, reflecting on situations that lead oral historians and narrators to avoid certain topics, just one of many ethical issues oral historians grapple with in their work.

What sparked your interest in oral history?

I actually fell into oral history. I did my PhD on the role Yolngu people from Arnhem Land, Australia played in the Second World War. For that project I had it in my head that I would go to this remote part of Australia and interview the survivors and descendants of a group of Aboriginal men who served in a small unit. In the end, several factors, Ied me to do two oral history interviews for that project. However, in the process I learned quite a bit about the ethics of working with Indigenous people, preparing me well for future projects.

For my postdoctoral research, I developed a project to document the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander military service in the post-Second World War era. By its very nature the project had to be oral history-based as individual accounts were the natural source base, and that because this helped ensure that Indigenous people were being treated respectfully as participants, rather than objects, of the research. I absolutely loved it. The Indigenous service members I met over the years were so generous with their time and stories, and I met some incredibly inspiring people.

Since then, I have consistently developed projects with oral history as the principal methodology. I love it because I get to meet such interesting people, and I never know what is going to come out in an interview. It makes my research exciting, and there is something to be said about working with living subjects to craft histories that have not adequately been told.

I do believe there are times when ethnographic refusal is a valid and important approach to research. Now that I recognize it, though, I have become more consciously reflective in my practice.

Please explain the concept of ethnographic refusal, as well as how you have dealt with/ overcome it?

My colleague Kat Ellinghaus from the University of Melbourne first introduced me to the concept of ethnographic refusal, which she learned about from Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson. At the time I had already committed to present a paper about ethics and oral history practice, so I immediately chased up the reference when I returned to my office.

Ethnographic refusal comes from the discipline of anthropology, coined by Sherry Ortner in 1995. While not widely used, I found the term a perfect description of the dilemma I wanted to write about. Ethnographic refusal occurs when a researcher chooses to avoid going down an analytical path or examining particular research questions because of the adverse consequences such findings may have on their research participants. When Ortner introduced the concept, she did so in a critical way, arguing that it was not appropriate. Since then, scholars including Audra Simpson have reconceptualized it positive, sometimes necessary methodology, because of the cultural or political damage some research findings may have on Indigenous (or other) communities.

While the scholarship on ethnographic refusal describes it as a conscious decision, in my own experience it occurred more as an unconscious bias. I have focused my work on writing histories of marginalized people, especially Indigenous and LGBTI people in the military. Given my objective of restoring people to the historical record who most narratives have overlooked or denigrated, my instinct to focus on the positive aspects of their service was, on reflection, a form of ethnographic refusal. As my OHR article explains, I do believe there are times when ethnographic refusal is a valid and important approach to research. Now that I recognize it, though, I have become more consciously reflective in my practice.

Can you describe the concept of “reticence” as it relates to your oral history methodology, and any strategies you have used to counter it?

I can still remember the word ‘reticence’ being one of the SAT vocabulary words we had to learn in Grade 11. Seared in the back of my mind is the definition ‘passive acceptance.’ In oral history practice, the work of Leonore Layman describes reticence as the interview participant avoiding particular topics, sometimes through silence, other times through deflection or changing the topic.

It is challenging during an interview to counter reticence. I sometimes return to a question again later, perhaps probing for a bit more information. When a participant clearly does not want to talk about something, though, it is most appropriate to respect their wishes and to move on.

During the wider research and analytical phase a researcher can best counter reticence. For instance, using multiple narrators means that some participants may be willing to talk about topics others are reticent to discuss. Written records may expose that which is left unsaid. This was certainly the case for the topics which sparked my OHR article: written records told more about Vietnam veterans’ bad behavior in Vung Tau than what the oral histories revealed.

In my early days as a scholar, ethnographic refusal and reticence almost combined, unconsciously, when I often became more prone to avoid the topics in my writing that the participants did want to discuss. It was a referee report that sparked me to be more reflective about this. Now in my writing, if there is a topic that interview participants are reticent to discuss, I note that in the text and analyze the reticence.

Of course, sharing authority is not exactly possible when someone has been dead for eighty years!

Do you believe oral historians are held to a higher ethical standard than other historians?

Any historian who works with living subjects is held to a higher standard. To an extent this is rightfully so, as what we write can affect these people’s lives personally and professionally. There is also always the threat of defamation suits.

That said, those who work with deceased subjects can learn a lot from oral historians’ respect for their participants. I recall a few months ago attending a talk from a historian doing work on human trafficking in the early twentieth century. She discussed how she wanted to make sure to treat the subjects of her research in a respectful way and this was a challenge for her. In our chat afterwards, I talked about her objective as a noble and important goal, and pointed her to some literature on working with living subjects in oral histories which may inform what she wants to do with archival sources. Of course, sharing authority is not exactly possible when someone has been dead for eighty years!

Can you think of any examples from your own interviewing experience where you see ethnographic refusal as necessary?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. The conclusion I came to is that ethnographic refusal is best guided by reticence. When participants are reticent to talk about a subject, even if other material exposes information, it may be best not to discuss it (at least not without their explicit permission down the track).

Sexual assault and childhood sexual abuse are two specific examples where I have been most prone to exercise ethnographic refusal. For instance, one of the Aboriginal ex-servicemen I interviewed unexpectedly mentioned in an interview that he was raped at boarding school as a teenager. I have never written about that because it is not pertinent to my research. In my project on LGBTI military service, though, there have been at least a dozen participants who experienced physical or sexual abuse as children. When there are more participants, in some ways it becomes ‘easier’ to write about the topic because I can write generally/broadly without needing to implicate specific people.

What has the role of “shared authority” been in your research?

Shared authority is another concept I have been grappling with lately. I always give interview participants an audio copy and written transcript of our interview, along with the opportunity to make revisions. Most narrators have been happy with the interviews as they were, but occasionally some have requested I cut sections, when they regret what they said.

I take different approaches depending on what I am writing, the audience, and the content. When I am writing straight biographical pieces, whether a chapter or a book, I always send the work to the narrators to make sure they are happy with what I have written (and sometimes this necessitates a bit of to- and fro-ing). When I write pieces with multiple short excerpts from interviews, I have been less prone to do this because it can become unmanageable. In those situations, I have to make a judgement call: is this such sensitive or potentially harmful information that they should read it in advance? The best example of this was an article I had published in the International Journal of Transgenderism, when I allowed all of the transgender women quoted in the article to read and comment in advance. This was because most were still serving in the Australian Defence Force and there could be ramifications for their careers.

How do you contemplate the role of the future researcher when interviewing about sensitive subjects? Do you consider yourself more accountable to that imaginary scholar, or to your narrators?

Normally I don’t think about future researchers when interviewing because I do not know what is going to come up. On consent forms I request permission to archive, so there is the abstract knowledge from both participant and myself that one day someone else may use the interview as well. I consider myself accountable to my narrators, and there is a genuine uncertainty about what future scholars may say, but only occasionally do I even think about it.

That said, I have recently come across literature about secondary analysis of oral history interviews, and I think that the field of oral history needs more reflection in this space. One of the reasons we do oral history is to record voices of people whose histories have been marginalized, and archiving those interviews for future use is a vital part of the preservation practice. Yet, there almost seems to be a stigma in the field against those scholars who use existing archived interviews – like they have somehow failed as researchers for not doing their own (unless of course the potential participants are all dead). If that is the attitude, then what really is the point of archiving interviews? We need to destigmatize the practice of secondary analysis of oral history interviews, while simultaneously thinking through all of the questions of ethics and ways of sharing authority. As I say: another article for another day!

Noah Riseman is an associate professor of history at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne. His research interests include Indigenous and LGBTI history, and he is the author of Defending Country: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service since 1945 (with Richard Trembath), In Defence of Country: Life Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Servicemen and Women and Defending Whose Country? Indigenous Soldiers in the Pacific War. His forthcoming book (with Shirleene Robinson and Graham Willett), Serving in Silence? Australian LGBT Servicemen and Women, will be published by NewSouth Publishing in 2018. 

Featured image “VUNG TAU 1967” licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) by Flickr user manhhai.

Diagnosing Public Health Crises: What We Can Learn About Ebola from Oral History

In this post, public health journalist Katherina Thomas contemplates the power of oral history to not only document a public health crisis, but also create greater understanding about health inequities by empowering communities and allowing those too frequently silenced to share their stories.

By Katherina Thomas

Last week, as the Democratic Republic of Congo declared a new Ebola outbreak, I thought back to the 2014-2016 epidemic that claimed more than 11,000 lives in West Africa and I hoped: perhaps this time, responders will listen to communities from the onset. The new outbreak in the Congo is much smaller than West Africa’s crisis, which was one of the most serious eruptions of viral hemorrhagic fever in history as health systems in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea buckled. That was a public health emergency stoked by inequity, fragile health systems, lack of trust and gaps in global compassion, but also a crisis of connection  both spurred and slowed by the power of stories.

As the epidemic raged, policymakers did not heed lessons from previous public health crises such as SARS and H1N1. Early global conversations about the response excluded civil society and community leaders in West Africa—the pillars of knowledge and decision-making in local society—and by the time the world realized, many of them were dead. The post-mortem was damning: at the community level, the people with the answers had been shut out. In the wake of the epidemic, countless ‘lessons learned’ reports and conferences emerged, but few placed West African perspectives front and center. Living and working in Liberia as a writer and health journalist during the aftermath of the crisis, I kept coming across pieces of knowledge—shards of story from ordinary people—that the world had chosen to ignore. As vaccine trials advanced and geneticists sequenced the Ebola genome, I, along with five Liberian colleagues, turned to oral history.

Although it is not a tangible tool like a stethoscope or thermometer, narrative is another kind of diagnostic instrument.

Oral history seems a particularly apt medium for understanding the nature of infectious disease outbreaks and how pathogens spread. Although it is not a tangible tool like a stethoscope or thermometer, narrative is another kind of diagnostic instrument. The Ebola virus hijacked human relationships, slashing the fabric of society and making vectors of life’s furniture: bed sheets, door handles, handshakes, love. It infected patients and doctors, police officers and criminals, taxi drivers and passengers. Most importantly, in countries with inequitable access to health information and education, narrative played a pivotal role. In some cases, rumors and stories spread faster than the pathogen itself.

My Liberian colleagues were Paradise Oghenereuse Young and Abraham Fahnbulleh, university students who had led the Liberian health ministry’s Ebola contact tracing operation for western Monrovia. Angie Dennis, a former aid worker, aspiring journalist and an Ebola survivor joined us too. Together we traveled around the country, pressing together the missing pieces of the epidemic through hundreds of oral history interviews.

So far we have collected about 200 oral histories, from city slums to remote villages accessible only by canoe. Our interviews have typically lasted between 40 minutes and three hours each, and include testimonies from Liberian policymakers, thought leaders, activists, traditional and religious leaders, burial teams, hygienists, community health teams, military personnel, active case finders, but mostly from ordinary people: survivors and their families. More than 90 percent of the narrators are Liberians, thus leveling the playing field by propelling community leaders to expert status and illustrating the pivotal roles of ordinary people whose actions helped to curb the outbreak.

The collection is provisionally titled Heart Fall Down: An Oral History of Ebola in Liberia (a Liberian term for when hope is lost). In addition to discussing the disease, we asked about topics including fashion, old photographs, nature and dancing, childhood and family, lovers and marriage, birth and death, farming and food. We talked about nightmares, war crimes, religion, and justice. We asked about hope. In rural places with little access to formal education, this often meant chancing upon deep repositories of oral knowledge, or impromptu storytelling sessions by elders.

Old Ma Bendu Fofee is a 90-year-old traditional midwife who had spent three weeks in Ebola quarantine. “I’m happy you came,” she told us. “Since I’ve been knowing myself, none of you people ever asked to sit with me on the same bench before.” Richard Cooper was a teacher who ran algebra classes in the back alleys of a slum when schools closed during the outbreak. “I want to share. You can be old as anything and still teach people something,” he said. Josiah Karmie was a pharmacist in the West Point community. “Nobody cares to listen to poor people,” he said. “That’s why this Ebola thing happened.”

“I never knew what Ebola was, I never went to no workshop about Ebola,” said Sean Don, a jeans salesman who broke into and looted an Ebola treatment unit in Monrovia’s West Point slum. “I only knew that movie, Resident Evil…. a scientist creates a virus and he spreads it around so he can get more money because he has a cure. People kept saying, ‘Ebola is real, Ebola is real,’ but I never knew what it was. It didn’t mean anything to me.” Dr. Mosoka Fallah, a Liberian epidemiologist and foremost expert on Ebola, said, “people were in pain. People were hurting. One morning I remember the health minister coming into work and a colleague of ours, Dr. Brisbane, had just died … and I remember going home that day and my friends were having a birthday celebration. They said, ‘can you come by the party?’ I looked at them and I just said, ‘no, I’m going home.’ That was the lowest day of my life… There was a lack of hope, you know.” Folo Siakor, a softly spoken midwife who delivered the babies of pregnant women infected with Ebola, said, “it takes more than medicine to make an Ebola patient well. Even the talk from your mouth can help make them well.”

In some cases we traced the stories of affected communities from start to finish, following the journeys of taxis, ambulances, extended families, and groups of friends as the virus spread through them, and among them. But amid data challenges during the outbreak, our interviews revealed a more nuanced picture. About one in eight of our interviewees at the community level claims to have survived Ebola without treatment, suggesting many more people may have contracted the disease and survived than official figures imply.

Together, the oral histories we collected form a crowdsourced picture of the outbreak in Liberia that could inform our response to future health crises. Still, stories are not science, and there were times the fault line trembled between fiction and memory. Sometimes recollections of events shifted during second interviews, or changed with the faces in the room. We fact-checked many memories— names, data, places—against records from the Liberian health ministry and aid agencies, but sometimes stories splintered, or fell apart in our hands. Every death from Ebola meant not only a cut to family or community but a loss of knowledge, a hole in our understanding of the outbreak.

The project raised challenges. We approached our work from both journalistic and oral history ethics, but in a country with unreliable and inequitable access to health information, sometimes narrators asked us questions. One man wanted to know whether he was responsible for sexually transmitting Ebola to his late girlfriend. Because we worked closely with the Liberian Ministry of Health, we knew that he had. But we didn’t know how to answer him both fairly and ethically, and neither, it seemed, did any oral history textbook.

Many narrators cried, often freely and at length. In most cases, they wanted to continue the interviews, but we worried about the toll it might take on them. This was an unfunded project on a traumatic topic and none of us had access to much in the way of psycho-social support. Thanks to the kindness of colleagues, I eventually completed a short course in trauma interviewing and counseling, and we referred narrators to licensed clinicians wherever possible. But these kinds of questions persist in my mind: how can we, as oral historians researching trauma, do better to safeguard the wellbeing of our narrators as well as ourselves?

Ultimately, we hope to publish these oral histories as a book and establish or contribute to an archive of publicly accessible oral histories of people affected by the outbreak. Substantial resources have tackled the health system gaps that fueled Ebola, but science and medicine are only part of the picture. We think that the lessons of an infectious disease outbreak like Ebola can only be fully digested when communities, no matter their size, come together and share their learnings. Perhaps an oral history research project such as this one, carried out at the community level, could become a replicable model for deepening understanding in the wake of other public health crises.

Katherina Thomas is a Harvard and MIT-affiliated writer-in-residence, and a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good. She began her career in journalism on the foreign desk of The Independent in London, and lived and worked in West Africa for ten years, where she covered global health and human rights and translated French poetry. She was the founding editor of Ebola Deeply, a Rockefeller Foundation-supported platform that covered the outbreak in depth, advancing global health literacy through public service journalism. She is an MPH candidate at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and has held patient advocacy and health information equity positions in Liberia. Her research interests include narrative medicine, literature, medical anthropology, and patient experiences. Her writing has been published by The Guardian, Reuters, BBC, Guernica, The Economist, PEN America and many others, and recommended by The New York Times and The New Yorker. 

Images courtesy of the author.

Embodying the interview

In the latest issue of the Oral History Review, Nien Yuan Cheng’s “‘Flesh and Blood Archives’: Embodying the Oral History Transcript” explores ways in which oral historians can consciously engage with embodied communication for the benefit of future audiences of the interview by including this dimension in transcripts. Here, she recalls embodied moments from two interviews, sharing methods to convey the interpersonal dynamics between interviewee and interviewer.

By Nien Yuan Cheng

The first oral history interview I conducted was set in a gauzy fog. Ribbons of smoke from the clove cigarette between my interviewee’s fingers never stayed vertical as his hands enthusiastically accompanied his gravelly voice. We were in a quiet café in Indonesia, one with lukewarm air-conditioning but excellent cappuccinos. An ojek (motorcycle taxi) driver, Fakhri (not his real name) had greeted me before our interview with a flash of his white teeth and a strong handshake. This benign contact between our palms seemed awkward despite the fact that during many a hairy traffic moment I had clung to the back of his leather jacket like a baby koala, knuckles white and my inner thighs tight against his outer legs. Yelling out a few friendly words to each other over the angry sputter of a motorbike was a far cry from sitting at a quiet booth, face to face, not touching but trying to make a connection.

As a performance studies scholar, I have always been interested in bodies, movement and place. I found out through this experience, rather unexpectedly, just how much of a performance event an interview was. I had trusted the comforting presence of the voice recorder to provide all the information I needed, until I realized how much more I would have missed: Fakhri’s physical demonstration of how he played chess as a child, the group of teenage boys watching us wondering what a young Chinese woman was doing with an older Muslim man, even my own gestures as I struggled a little to communicate to Fakhri in Indonesian, more nervous than usual in this framed, heightened encounter. All these factors influenced the process and the result of the interview in some way.

That was how I decided to find out more about the oral history interview as embodied performance. While there was a burgeoning discussion in the field about this, Jeff Friedman’s 2014 article in this journal being the most recent, beyond being aware of embodiment in the interview I wanted to know how we could include embodiment in our research and interview outputs so that others would be able to benefit from and appreciate this aspect. Knowing more about bodies, movement and place in the interview is more than adding ‘color’ or embellishment. It gives important insight about the interpersonal dynamics between interviewer and interviewee, about how place plays a part both in the interview situation and in the stories interviewees tell, and even about the embodied historical knowledge interviewees have. How could future audiences get an idea about all of these things? Current ways of disseminating oral history, either through books, audio recordings or archival transcripts don’t seem to accommodate these aspects.

The notion and value of ‘embodying’ the transcript became clearer to me in another setting – this time in Bengaluru, India, at the XIXth International Oral History Association conference in 2016. In one of the sessions, Mark Wong from the Oral History Centre in Singapore talked about the Centre’s new handy search function in the online archival database: they were experimenting with automated transcription software to improve the ability to search for text within an audio track so that users can listen to that moment in the transcript in its original vocal expression. It’s a great idea, because it encourages researchers to attend to the orality of the interview. To demonstrate, Wong first asked the audience to read a portion of an interview transcript of a former Singaporean midwife. Madam Mary Hee describes how midwives used a bicycle pump to induce labour in the 1960s:

Fig 1: Screenshot of the transcript, available online at the OHC portal.

 

There were a few surprised laughs among the audience, perhaps at the subject matter, as we took a little time to read the script. As Wong played the audio recording of that moment, those words, and some which had been edited out of the transcript, came to life (This is my printed representation of what the moment sounded like. Listen to the audio excerpt, starting from 19:55):

Ah! They use the thing, put in,

apply ah, the cup ah,         put in the head there

then is connect        aall the tubings        into the bottle?         Then got the bicycle pump ah, we pu-u-u-ump and pu-u-u-ump and pu-u-u-ump

and then pull thebabyout. You’ve never seen, eh? Oooooh, wonderful that’s why I say eheheh last time we really had tough time you know

pumping the thing⁠ – 

Instead of beginning her explanation with a mere, ‘Yes,’ (as stated in the transcript), Madam Hee launches into it when an emphatic, very Singaporean agreement, ‘Ah!’ in a tone as if she were saying, ‘You better believe it!’. She relishes her interviewer’s surprise, as evidenced from her knowing, gleeful utterance of ‘You’ve never seen, eh?’, and the descending glissando of ‘Ooooooh,’ edited out of the transcript.

Madam Hee’s words may have come to life with her voice, but there are still gaps discernible in the spoken description which I represented with literal, extended gaps between her words above. To me these pauses, together with the instructive tone of voice Hee used, indicate that she accompanied her words with demonstrative gestures that stemmed from her embodied knowledge and history as a midwife who actually used these pumps. These gestures seem to make up the bulk of what she was trying to communicate to her interviewer, and the audio recording actually highlights the absence of some of these meanings.

Such moments benefit from a treatment of the body in the transcribed text to fill those gaps. There is a false distinction between ‘voice’ and ‘text’, one that excludes the dimensions of moving bodies in place. Embodying the transcript blurs this distinction by documenting the oral history interview event as a three-dimensional, affective performance, and allows us to include details that audio and even video recordings cannot. In my article, inspired by the expertise of people who have always been writing the body such as anthropologists and dance scholars, I put forth some practical ways in which we can do so. It’s not, by any means, a comprehensive handbook or a list of instructions, but it suggests ways in which we can begin to understand and practice oral history as what the legendary George Ewart Evans calls it: “flesh and blood archives”.

Nien Yuan CHENG is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney’s Department of Theatre and Performance Studies. Her doctoral research on Singaporean oral histories touches on the performance of citizenship, neoliberal storytelling and the interview as embodied performance and performative. She is co-founder and editor of Perspectives on the Past in Southeast Asia.

Featured image: Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2007, by Flickr user Rosino. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0).

New Issue Live!

We’re pleased to announce that the digital version of Winter/Spring 2018 OHR is live, featuring the Special Section, “Decentering and Decolonizing Feminist Oral Histories: Reflections on the State of the Field in the Early Twenty-First Century,” organized by guest editors Stacey Zembrzycki and Katrina Srigley, along with a slate of other articles and reviews. Check out the full table of contents.

In the coming weeks, we will feature some of the authors here in interviews and guest posts, with additional digital content. Stay tuned an be part of the conversation.

Featured image: Juliette Sutherland’s Family, circa 1940s, Mushkegowuk Territory. (Photograph courtesy of Lorraine Sutherland.) Learn more in Katrina Srigley and Lorraine Sutherland, “Decolonizing, Indigenizing, and Learning Biskaaybiiyang in the Field: Our Oral History Journey,” The Oral History Review, 45, no 1,  Spring/Winter 2018, 7–28, https://doi.org/10.1093/ohr/ohy001

Industry’s Long Good-bye: Listening to Stories of Jobs Lost and Hopes Remembered

In this installment of our Oral History in the Age of Trump series, Annie Valk discusses interviews conducted by students at Williams College with residents in the nearby deindustrialized town of North Adams, noting how the accounts complicate the superficial narratives of our current political moment.

By Annie Valk

Three years ago I began teaching an oral history class at Williams College that asked undergraduate students to interview people about living and working in North Adams. Tucked in the mountains of northwestern Massachusetts, North Adams and Williamstown (home of Williams College) are separated by four miles and myriad economic and social differences.  Williamstown represents the affluence commonly associated with the Berkshires: nearby tourist sites include the dance venue, Jacob’s Pillow; Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; numerous spas and yoga retreats; and the popular Appalachian Trail.

Looking north on Eagle Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, between Center and Main Streets. Photo by Joe Mabel, via Wikimedia Commons.

Within this culturally rich area, North Adams stands out — and usually not for positive reasons.  With approximately 13,500 residents, North Adams has the character of a small town but shares problems faced by many urban areas across the U.S.  About 30% of the population is food insecure and 21% live on incomes below the federal poverty level.  The conditions wrought by underemployment have worsened in the past decades following numerous plant closings; notably, Sprague Electric Company, which made capacitors and other electrical components shuttered in the 1980s, ending fifty years as the area’s chief employer.  Three years ago, the city’s hospital dramatically cut staff and services. Countywide, the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen by 78% since the 1970s, leaving tourism and hospitality the most energetic part of the local economy.

The disparity among the white, working-class, struggling residents of North Adams and the wealthy, urbane institution of Williams College does not escape the attention of students– that is, when they even think about North Adams at all. My goal of using oral history to introduce students to the nearby city has taken on new meaning in the months since the last presidential election.  As a nation, we’ve become comfortable explaining electoral politics in terms of such contrasts. Listening to residents’ stories gives students new understanding of the human impact of the loss of manufacturing while offering a powerful way to challenge many current political truisms that blame disgruntled former industrial workers for Trump’s ascendancy.

Since the spring of 2016, we have interviewed about 30 individuals who describe the long process of deindustrialization they and their city have endured. Most narrators grew up in North Adams and recall the city in the years before the 1970s, when industry hummed and Main Street bustled.  Adults enjoyed access to plentiful jobs and although conditions often were harsh, generally pay was good and work was steady. These benefits translated to upward mobility: the ability to buy homes, afford vacations, send children to college, and retire while healthy enough to enjoy it all.

Robin Martin describes working at Wall Streeter shoe manufacturing, her first job.

Friends, neighbors, and family members, sometimes spanning multiple generations, worked together in textile, shoemaking, and other mills, creating a tight sense of community and bonds that supported people through hard times, including labor strikes and turmoil resulting from alcoholism and accidents.

Tony Pisano recalls the work his family did for Sprague Electric Company.

The North Adams that endures in residents’ memories differs starkly from the city that students see (and generally avoid) today.  Stories of loss reverberate powerfully throughout the recordings: lost jobs, lost business, lost community, lost pride, and a lost communal vision of the future.  As historians have noted, deindustrialization is a process, not an event; in North Adams, that process has continued for decades and the community has been barely holding on for a long time, as individual residents cope with systemic change.  The interviews detail the ways that plant closings shredded the social fabric of this tight-knit community. The downsizing and departure of factories forced other businesses that served food, sold clothing, and offered necessary services to close, a wave that rippled to every corner of the city.  One resident explained that the community has been saying a “long good-bye” to Sprague Electric for more than thirty years. A new museum, Mass MoCA, has moved into some of the buildings deserted by Sprague but the “hole in North Adams’ soul” left when Sprague closed remains unfilled.

Residents talk about working at Sprague, the company’s closing and their hopes for the future.

Most interviews concentrate on the local economy’s transformation, going from vibrant to stagnant in the period of fifty years. But the country’s broader political context becomes especially evident when residents talk about the future. In deep blue Massachusetts, North Adams’ voters backed Bernie Sanders in the primary; and 65% cast ballots for Hillary Clinton in the November 2016 election. These, then, are not the allegedly racist and embittered voters responsible for Trump’s victory.  Given their familiarity with the widespread and long-term impact of job loss, residents put little stock in candidates’ campaign promises.  It took a long time for the jobs to disappear and it will take more than slogans to guarantee their return. Generally, residents don’t expect the state or federal government to enact measures that successfully bring back work and repair the damage done to the community.  Instead, they stress that residents themselves need to come up with solutions.

Robin Martin expresses skepticism that federal policies can bring back factory jobs.

It will take a while to sift through the accumulated interviews and even longer to know how four years (or more?) of a Trump presidency will affect the local economy or modify the political attitudes of either residents or students.  However, the interviews already go beyond the superficial narratives too frequently offered to explain this current historical moment. Oral history reminds us to listen with empathy and not disregard the hard lessons of lived experience. The stories of North Adams reveal the richly textured lives of low-wage workers and the resilience of those living on the edge financially and they offer alternative narratives about the impact of disappearing jobs and lost industry.

Jennifer Munoz recalls the  widespread impact of the closing of Sprague Electric.

Interviews from the North Adams Oral History Project will be archived by Williams College Special Collection Library. Access excerpts from some interviews, along with short audio essays produced by students here.  

Annie Valk is Associate Director for Public Humanities and Lecturer in History at Williams College. She is a specialist in oral history, public history, and the social history of the 20th century United States. She teaches experiential and community-based classes in oral history and public history. During 2015-16, she served as president of the Oral History Association. 

Featured image: Buildings of the Arnold Print Works (now MASS MoCA) as seen from the Route 2 overpass over State Street in North Adams, Massachusetts. Photo by Beyond my Ken.

Transcribing Woes of Disabled Oral Historians

In this guest post, public history graduate student Grant Stoner reflects on the difficulties of oral history transcription for individuals with physical disabilities, challenging us to consider issues of accessibility within oral history methodology, while noting the limitations of digital technologies.

By Grant Stoner

During my first semester as a graduate student in the Public History program at Duquesne University, I was tasked with conducting an oral history of the Third Alternative campaign, a local campus movement that lasted from 1970-1971 consisting of several student-led fundraising events. With the goal to raise one million dollars, students garnered national attention for their efforts to prevent Duquesne from shutting its doors. I was thrilled knowing that my classmates and I had the opportunity to sit down with participants of this movement, learning about their incredible experiences.

Before our prospective interview dates, our professor facilitated classroom discussions on best practices for conducting an oral history interview. These conversations even included recommended transcription methods.

Depending on the length of the interview, transcription by a non-professional like me may prove to be nothing more than an 8-hour process: laborious, but doable. Plus, our lab came equipped with Express Scribe software, as well as a transcription pedal. Transcribing shouldn’t be too difficult, right? Not for an able-bodied individual. Surprise, I’m physically disabled.

At 13 months old, I was diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type II, a neuromuscular disorder that gradually weakens my muscles over time. I utilize an electric wheelchair to move, a speech-to-text program in order to finish my numerous assignments, and a friend who acts as my scribe in the classroom.

Despite my physical limitations, I completed my undergraduate schooling with a dual degree in Classical Civilizations and Journalism. Throughout my Journalism studies, I sat down with countless individuals asking them to share their stories. Similar to oral historians, journalists often transcribe excerpts of their recordings. However, journalists only need to search for a few specific quotes in order to produce the piece. An hour-long interview may only utilize a fraction of a specific recording. Therein lies the problem for me as a budding oral historian. If a particular section was especially pertinent, I would simply ask for assistance with typing the necessary passage. But it would be unfair of me to ask someone to transcribe my 45:01 oral history, word for word.

Not wanting to disappoint my interviewee, I suggested that I would attempt to transcribe the interview through my Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech-to-text software. After all, I had read that voice recognition programs, while not entirely successful, were accurate enough to create a decent transcription. With my professor agreeing to my plan, I borrowed the appropriate equipment, and set out to create a modified transcription. After returning home, I simply activated the software, positioned the microphone toward my speakers, and turned on the recording.

This is the result:

“All 616 so first question what do you dislike and the individual the only Mount Washington my father would it is so applied to it quite a while will but I really want to stay home and precinct on was the campus like very welcoming verys the student union with just a cross place that was really nice the ball all that was your starting to have been possible names that this that was a witness agreed by non-as far as I think that was it wasn’t so much the buildings and everything is it was the intellectual”

Here is the audio of the same excerpt:

Within an hour, the software was only capable of producing 99 words, none of which formed a cohesive sentence. My plan had spectacularly failed.

In a state of panic, I attempted to discern the problem. So, I repeated the steps and watched as my program decided to reboot itself to its introductory stages. Essentially, it was unable to accurately understand the voice through my speakers, thus requiring me to go through the painstaking process of retraining the entire program to accurately hear two voices.

Thankfully, my professor was more than understanding, and asked that another student whose interview withdrew at the last minute perform the task of transcribing my piece.

I do not write this post to complain about my transcription woes, but rather to comment on this aspect of inaccessibility within the oral history field. Oral historians who require assistive technology need to be aware of the pitfalls of voice recognition transcription. Speech-to-text may seem like a panacea to the obstacle of transcription, but it is far from perfect, and will not solve the issue of transcription for those of us with accessibility needs.

Are there any solutions? Unfortunately, I have no answers. Until voice recognition programs become accurate enough to detect the varying volume levels and accents of interviewees, speech-to-text software is not a viable option. Although, hybrid models like Pop Up Archive (recently purchased by Apple) and Trint are beginning to improve quality, while providing users with an easy way to edit the rough transcriptions generated through voice recognition.

It is also possible to transcribe by listening to the interview then speaking it back into a microphone connected to the voice recognition software, yet there are factors that may mar this method. For example, if my voice is particularly weak, then my software will struggle to produce an acceptable product. Also, oral history projects need to consider time restraints. If an able-bodied individual can finish a transcription within 8-hours, then it would be safe to assume that a disabled historian’s time would be doubled. Hiring transcribers is desirable, but budgets frequently prove to be restrictive.

Does this recent incident negatively impact my experiences as an amateur oral historian? No, not at all. I thoroughly enjoyed connecting with my interviewee, learning of her involvement with the Third Alternative movement. I enjoyed drafting questions with my classmates, spending class periods articulating each question. But more importantly, I enjoyed preserving these stories for future generations.

I am hopeful that my university continues to invite me to conduct more oral history interviews; I just won’t be the one to transcribe them.

Grant Stoner is a first-year Public History Master’s student at Duquesne University. His primary interests include designing museum exhibits pertaining to disability representation in the ancient world. He also enjoys learning of personal experiences through oral history interviews, and relaxing with his cat, Goomba.

 

 

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Featured image by Flickr user Jason Lombard.

Analia Cabral interviewing Maria Elena Durazo, union activist; AFL-CIO

Context Matters: Interviewing Political Women in the Age of Trump

In this, the second in our series of guest posts considering the role and significance of oral history during our current political climate, Natalie Fousekis reflects on interviewing women involved in California politics in the years leading up to and following the historic presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

By Natalie M Fousekis

On September 27, 2016 I walked in to the offices of the Feminist Majority Foundation to interview one of its founders, Peg Yorkin.  The office was abuzz with excitement over the upcoming election and the prospect of voting for the first woman President in U.S. History.  I sat with this 89-year-old feminist as she recalled the details of her life surrounded by photos of Yorkin with other feminist activists, Democratic presidents, and female political icons, including Hillary Clinton.  

Fousekis with Feminist Majority founders

Natalie Fousekis (middle) with Peg Yorkin and Kathy Spillar, founders of the Feminist Majority.

I interviewed Yorkin as part of the Women, Politics, and Activism Since Suffrage Project, which I launched in 2013 with the goal of recording stories of Southern California women who have been engaged in politics and activism from the 1960s to today.  My hope was to develop an archive of women’s stories so that when we begin celebrating the 100th Anniversary of women’s suffrage in 2019-2020, we could share a body of interviews with women who shaped politics and policy in Southern California with scholars, students, and the community.  I wanted to provide more recent, local stories of women’s political power as well as reflections from the women themselves on the unique contributions of women to civic life.

Lola Smallwood Cuevas, Director of Los Angeles Black Worker Center

Eleven students in my 2013 oral history course conducted the initial interviews.  They recorded memories of immigrant women who led a rent strike in Santa Ana in the 1980s, mothers who demonstrated against police brutality after their sons were killed by police, mothers who defeated an effort to build a prison in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in east Los Angeles, women who worked to advance the Republican party’s goals, women who fought for gay and lesbian rights, and the woman who served as the first female mayor of an Orange County city.  While rumors circulated of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for the presidency at the time, no public discussion existed of Donald Trump’s presidential run.  After receiving major funding from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, in fall 2015 my students, the staff at the Center, and I embarked on two years of intensive interviewing with over 100 women who had/have been politically active in Southern California.

Norma Gibbs, the first woman to serve on the Seal Beach City Council and as the city’s mayor (1960-63)

In my grant proposal to Haynes, I suggested that “The current presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton… highlights the importance and timeliness of this project and will undoubtedly shape the views and perspectives of the women interviewed for this project.”  While I included this line in my proposal, I could not anticipate the myriad of ways Hillary’s campaign and her loss to Donald Trump would influence the creation of these narratives.  

As an oral historian, I have long understood that contemporary context shapes the narratives of my interviewees, but not until this project had a topic of study resonated so closely with the national conversation and discussion.  Almost daily, newspapers and online periodicals published articles discussing the issue of women in politics, the barriers these women faced, and the history of women’s political involvement.  Moreover, gender itself became a topic as the campaign intensified, with accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against Trump, daily scrutiny of Clinton’s outfit selection in contrast to Trump’s ability to throw on a dark suit and a red tie, differences in the ways the public evaluated the qualifications of male and female candidates, and the significance of Hillary becoming the Democratic Party’s first female presidential nominee.  

“I couldn’t be happier than thinking that there could be a woman President of the United States….  I also worry about sexism and I think that that will be rampant in the campaign.” — Joy Picus, 2015

With these contemporary events in mind, we developed questions to ask directly about Hillary’s candidacy, although many narrators referenced the current political context without prompting, expressing hope and optimism.  In April 2015, my first narrator, eighty-four-year-old former Los Angeles City Councilwoman, Joy Picus, said: “I couldn’t be happier than thinking that there could be a woman President of the United States. I really couldn’t be happier. I think [Clinton] has all the requirements to make an outstanding president. I also worry about sexism and I think that that will be rampant in the campaign. I think it will be rampant once she is elected. It was true of Barack Obama, racism, and I think it will be less veiled than the racism has been against Obama. I think it will be much more overt. That worries me, but not enough to say she shouldn’t be President.”  

Natalie Fousekis interviewing Nury Martinez

Natalie Fousekis interviewing Nury Martinez, Los Angeles City Councilwoman, in 2016

Narrators told powerful stories about watching Hillary accept the Democratic Party’s nomination in June 2016. For example, Los Angeles City Councilwoman, Nury Martinez (the only woman serving on the LA City Council at the time), recalls an emotional tale of her last-minute decision to attend the Democratic National Convention, flying on a red eye the night before Hillary’s acceptance speech without a hotel or credentials.

Nury Martinez, Los Angeles City Councilwoman (2013-present)

Even Republican women spoke to the importance of Hillary’s candidacy. Former city of Orange mayor and councilwoman, Carolyn Cavecche, responded: “Well, it’s funny because a lot of us who are more conservative have talked about it.  I think there will be great pride even if we don’t care for her or her politics.”   

Caroline Cavecche, former City Councilwoman and Mayor, City of Orange

The tone and conversation shifted after November 8, 2016, as many narrators grappled with Hillary’s loss as well as the fear and uncertainty that came with Donald Trump’s election.  Just three week’s after Trump’s election, I sat across the table from Cheryl Parisi—long-time Executive Director of Los Angeles American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). I did not ask Cheryl a question about Trump directly, but rather asked about the most critical issues her union faced today.  She looked at me, gave a long sigh, rolled her eyes, and paused before she said: “Well, we’re in a very different environment today, you know, with the election of Donald Trump, and what that’s gonna mean for the entire labor movement… I mean, I just think that we’re facing potentially kind of a full effort to decimate the power of the US labor movement.  So, this is a very serious time, and I don’t know the answers.  I know that this is a time to continue to organize.”

Cheryl Parisi, long-time labor activist and current Executive Director of Los Angeles AFSCME

I am just beginning to reflect and unpack the multiple ways the 2016 election shaped the interviews we conducted for the Women, Politics, and Activism Project.  Those I’ve shared above represent some of the most direct ways Clinton’s candidacy and Trump’s election shaped our narrators’ responses.  This spring I am on sabbatical and will spend much of my time culling the over 150 interviews in this collections for references, both subtle and obvious, to the current political context, paying particular attention to tone and outlook.  In a future and much longer piece, I look forward to sharing with you my observations, reflections, and conclusions about what we might learn as oral historians from our two years of interviewing in the Trump Era.

“We don’t want our daughters to slay the same dragons, we want to pat down the grass for them.  But at the same time it’s important to know their own history and the champions that came before them.” — Gloria Molina 

Like our narrators, I’ve had to grapple with my own disappointment and dismay at the results of the 2016 election.  One thing is clear: interviewing strong women who have been politically engaged for years while overcoming barriers and political opposition, yet still advocating for the issues they believe in, has lifted my spirits on more than one occasion. Since October I’ve continued to repeat in my head words spoken in my interview with Gloria Molina: “We don’t want our daughters to slay the same dragons, we want to pat down the grass for them.  But at the same time it’s important to know their own history and the champions that came before them.”

** Many of the interviews we recorded (and eventually all) are available in their entirety on the Women Politics and Activism website.

Featured image caption: CSUF 2017 graduate, Analia Cabral interviewing Maria Elena Durazo

Natalie Fousekis is Director of the Lawrence B. de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History (COPH) and Professor of History at CSU Fullerton. She specializes in modern U.S. History, grassroots politics, women’s history, and oral history.  Fousekis has been engaged in oral history work for almost twenty-five years — conducting dozens of interviews, teaching oral history methodology to undergraduate students, graduate students, and community members. She is the project director for the Women, Politics, and Activism Since Suffrage Project.

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