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Learning to read emotions in oral history

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By Katie Holmes 

The most recent issue of the OHR featured two stories on understanding emotion in oral history interviews. In one piece, Julian Simpson and Stephanie Snow asked what role humor plays in healthcare, and how to locate it in oral history. In another piece, Katie Holmes asks how to locate historical emotion during an interview and how to interpret these feelings. Today on the blog we bring you a short interview with Holmes where we ask about her interest in studying emotions, explore the experience of listening for emotion, and hear more about how she uses this investigation in her historical analysis. Enjoy the interview below, and check out the full piece in the OHR 44.1.

What prompted your interest in reading emotion in oral histories?

Many of us have had the experience of interviewing someone who can become quite unexpectedly distressed or “emotional” during an interview and it’s not always clear what is going on for them. I’d conducted a number of interviews for the Australian Generations project where this had happened, or where the interview had dealt with some highly emotional memories, including one where the participant seemed to spend much of the time in tears but seemed quite happy to keep recording. I was struck in my interviews by the different ways in which different generations responded to their emotional distress. Older interviewees usually wanted to turn the recorder off whereas younger ones seemed happy to emote all over the place! This in itself suggested different ways in which emotions had been “managed” historically. So I started to read more of the history of emotions literature, very little of which dealt with oral history or memory and emotions. That which did seemed very inadequate, and dismissive of the idea that the expression of emotion in an interview–and I guess I’m talking here about painful emotions rather than joyful ones–could really tell us anything about past emotion. This seemed quite contrary to the albeit limited psychoanalytic understanding that I had, and so I wanted to explore it further.

You invite oral historians to try to locate “historical emotion” by paying attention both to the content and the context of the interview–the bodily movements, setting, and even your own emotional state. Can you talk more about what this looks like in practice?

It means being very attentive to the non-verbal clues that your interviewee gives. So you need to listen beyond the words and pick up on what else is happening. It’s like operating on a number of different channels. There’s the information that the interviewee is sharing with you, then there’s the non-verbal communication that is going on–how they are sitting, how does that change, the pace and volume of their voice, what they are not talking about–and then there’s what you as an interviewer are feeling. This last one can be tricky but sometimes we can have quite strong reactions to our interviewees, or to the information they are sharing. What I suggest in the article is that we need to be attentive to our own responses because they can give us clues about what is happening for the interviewee. Maybe you are reminded of something or someone in your own life. Maybe you suddenly start to feel very uncomfortable or sad or want to move the narrator along when they want to linger on a topic–all these responses can be helpful in trying to work out what is going on for the interviewee and then gently asking further questions about it. So one of the channels we have to tune into is our own, and while not letting our own responses get in the way of the narrator’s recollection, use them as a possible insight into what might be happening for our interviewee. Our role is not to play therapist, but to learn as much as our interviewees are willing to share about their past life in all its complexities.

Our role is not to play therapist, but to learn as much as our interviewees are willing to share about their past life in all its complexities.

You note that you “re-experienced” some of your narrator’s trauma alongside her, as she shared her personal history. What is that experience like as an interviewer?

It can be pretty intense! And the challenge is to maintain the professional boundaries at the same time as attending to what is going on for the narrator. In the interview I discuss, I really could sense her fear and distress as she recalled a very difficult and confusing time in her childhood. Her projection of those emotions was palpable. And that’s when the listening on all channels comes in because I was suddenly struck by how young she would have been–the same age as my daughter during a very difficult time in my family–and I could see the way my daughter watched me so closely during that time. I write in the article about being pulled out of being an interviewer into being a person and a mother and, drawing on that experience, I asked a question about watching her mother. It seems like a really odd question to ask, and I asked it a bit too quickly, but at that moment I was responding from my own subjectivity.

When our interviewees are disclosing difficult or painful emotions that affect us, it’s really important that we can sit with that discomfort and not try and steer the interview away because of our need. That does mean being both aware of how we are responding and being able to manage our own emotional response. It requires a level of self-awareness and good intuition. As I said, it can be both intense and exhausting, but it can also be very satisfying and rewarding as an interviewer to feel that you’ve facilitated a rich and complex life narration.

Part of your ability to read the emotions your narrator is expressing comes from being physically in the room during the interview. How can you do similar work when listening to an interview recorded by someone else, or when there is only a transcript available?

This can be very difficult. I have listened to a number of the Australian Generations interviews where the interviewer has noted that the narrator became distressed or emotional at times, and have found it really hard to hear it. Sometimes the recorder has just suddenly been switched off, at other times you have to assume that the narrator is still talking while tears are falling, but you can’t hear those silent drops. At other times the distress is really evident–it can depend on how much the narrator is trying to control their emotional responses. Joyful emotions can be easier to hear in the tone of voice and pace of narration. For more painful emotions, you can listen for the faltering voice, the long pauses, the sniffles, but even then they can be hard to pick up and you have to listen really carefully. Visual clues tell us so much! A transcript can be even harder, unless someone has usefully annotated it to indicate changes in volume and pace, or long pauses etc. A transcript has other benefits of course and they are much easier to work with, and help you pick up the silences and the repetitions more readily. With the Australian Generations project we decided that listening to an interview and having a transcript was the best way to work with an interview. Of course you still don’t get the visual clues but if you are working with oral rather than video interview, that is the trade off.

What role does emotion play in your current projects?

Once you start getting interested in the history of emotions, you start to see them everywhere! I’m currently working on an environmental history of an area known in Victoria and South Australia as the “Mallee.” It’s pretty marginal farming country which has been a wheat and sheep growing area since Europeans first began settling it in the late 19th century. I’ve been really struck by the emotional cycles that have driven first the settlement of the area, and then the periods of drought and extreme hardship that periodically afflict it. These emotional cycles can be affected by national developments or by the invention of a new strain of wheat or a new method of sowing and harvesting, and climate plays an important role as well – periods of extended drought are remembered as times of great strain and hardship. So there are historical periods that are marked by particular emotions. Then depending on the season when you might be visiting and interviewing a farmer from the area, the emotional tone of the interview will be very different. If you are visiting in autumn and the start to the sowing season has been good, the mood will be positive and hopes high. Return in spring after the rains have failed to deliver, and it’s a completely different scenario. And then there are the emotional connections that people have for their land or the area itself, or maybe a particular paddock or place on their property. For me what is fascinating about all this is not so much that these emotional responses are there, but that they drive the decisions people make. With farmers who are farming land that has been in their family for generations, the emotional legacy of that land and history is huge and it can often shape the ways people farm, sometimes preventing them from making decisions that might be in the best economic interests of the farm. And it’s really interesting to explore the connections between personal and community emotional fluctuations. In times of optimism people behave differently and make different decisions–maybe they will buy that land next door after all because the future is looking brighter. Climate change is now influencing emotional responses as well–uncertainty about the future is now apparent in conversations, and fear about what that will mean for the Mallee area. In my next project I am planning to bring together my interests in oral history and environmental history even more directly, interviewing people about living with environmental change. I am looking forward to exploring the issues around emotion and memory more fully in that work.

Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here?

I think if anything I could have made my argument about the possibility of accessing historical emotions through oral history even more strongly, but I was being cautious. I chose not to include links to the audio of the interview in order to protect the anonymity of my narrator, but some of what I try to describe in the article in terms of the sound of her voice, its cadences and pauses etc, is even more evident when you can hear it.

I’d also reinforce my point that this kind of interviewing is hard work! It’s emotionally demanding, it requires self-reflection and knowledge, and honesty. And not every interview, or even every interview where there is a lot of emotion expressed, is going to generate the kind of transference and counter-transference that I think happened between myself and Jana. But being quietly alert to the possibility is important.

How did you feel reading this interview, or the article in the OHR? Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Headphones” by Nickolai Kashirin, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Katie Holmes is professor of history and Director of Centre for the Study of the Inland at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include oral history, environmental history, and women’s letters and diaries. Her most recent book is Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian Women, Writing and Gardens.

 

Challenges of a hometown oral history performance

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By Elizabeth M Melton 

One of my first oral history performance experiences was watching E. Patrick Johnson perform Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales, the readers theater version of his oral history collection, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South, at Texas A&M University. I was an undergraduate studying English and Theatre, and I was mesmerized by the histories Dr. Johnson shared. Learning about his research, the relationships he developed with interlocutors, and the performances he created was the push I needed to pursue graduate degrees that would teach me the skills to become a critical ethnographer committed to oral history performance.

Fast forward to last October when you may have passed me in the halls of OHA’s Annual Meeting, or joined me in the audience of Saturday’s Plenary where once again I witnessed the power of Dr. Johnson’s work. I was a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate attending OHA for the first time, spinning from my recent exams and prospectus defense, and preparing for my first oral history performance that was scheduled to take place in November. I was grappling with two big questions: Is what I’m doing actually oral history? How do I present these histories in a way that is ethical, engaging, and critically contextualized?

Simple questions, right?

I am happy to report that my first question was embraced, addressed, and debated the entire weekend. I came away with a strong sense of my position as a critical performance ethnographer who is committed to an oral history methodology. My second question is one that continues to morph and shift as I pursue my research, but I want to share some of what I’ve learned about performance and oral histories.

My dissertation is a hometown ethnography about public school desegregation in Longview, Texas. Thus far I have interviewed ten interlocutors who were present during desegregation as teachers, administrators, students, and parents. Their stories are powerful and offer insight into the experiences of both white and black Longview residents. One of the biggest challenges of this work is my relationship with my hometown. My sisters and I completed our K-12 education in the school district I am studying, as did our parents. All of my grandparents and my mom taught in the school district, and my father served on the school board for many years. After my father passed away in 2010, the school district named the new performing arts center at the high school after him. My position is undoubtedly privileged, and my understanding of my hometown, my family’s legacy, and my education experience is distinctly informed by my whiteness.

Wrestling with all of these complexities is really challenging and I often find myself questioning what actually needs to be part of my dissertation. All of it is important and this web of relations undoubtedly informs my research… but where does it all fit?

Enter: Unpacking Longview, my solo performance-as-research play. I have found that performance is an amazing place to work out the connection between all of these histories. Before I began writing my play I knew that the voices and stories of my interlocutors would be present throughout the piece, but I didn’t know how to incorporate my own story or how to capture the distinct history and culture of East Texas without simply telling story after story after story. I was worried that there would be no dramatic action if I just sat there and explained everything to the audience. Eventually, I settled on a combination of three performance styles: autobiography, oral history performance, and camp.

The performance begins with Elizabeth-the-researcher-and-hometown-girl (that’s me!) searching and digging through boxes, trying to make sense of everything that has been left behind.

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This autobiographic part introduces the importance of my family’s history in East Texas and the way my father’s life and death inspires my research. I also acknowledge that much of my father’s success is reliant on his whiteness, and the advantages afforded to him as the grandson of a successful cotton gin owner.

After this reasonably somber foundation is laid, Elizabeth-the-researcher exits in search of a family memento that is lost amongst all the boxes. A radical shift occurs in the lighting and projections on-stage, a booming voice comes over the loud-speaker introducing the one and only–TEXAS MELT.

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That’s right. I have my very own all East Texas, all the time, alter-ego. Unsurprisingly, Texas Melt is BIGGER than life, loves to dance and yodel with the skeletons she unpacks throughout the show, and really loves giving the audience a piece of her East Texas mind. Quite simply, she’s a hoot and a half, y’all. What I love about Texas Melt is that she not only provides some much needed comic relief, but she can say things Elizabeth-the-researcher-and-hometown-girl can’t. Texas Melt is the wise(ish) fool who explains how things “really” work in East Texas.

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The autobiographic moments and Texas Melt’s interruptions are interspersed with oral history performances. These oral histories dialogically present histories from one white school administrator, one parent who graduated from Longview Negro High School and had two daughters in school during desegregation, one current high school Spanish teacher who was one of the only Latinas in the district during desegregation, and another current teacher who chose to attend the white school during desegregation by choice.

For these scenes, the audience hears a snippet of the interview with the interlocutor’s voice before I step into their story and continue performing it for the audience.

I performed Unpacking Longview last November at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and will take it to Longview this fall. Now, you might notice I’m not telling you much about the ending or other details of the play. Honestly, that’s because I’m not sure it’s really done yet. It’s a work in progress that keeps shifting and revealing new things to me. Oral history performance is the spine of this work, and I had no idea what would happen when I combined campy Texas Melt and my personal story with a performance style that often stands alone. Fortunately, mixing three styles enriches the overall telling of the story and enhances the critical voice of the piece overall. And who knows, maybe Texas Melt is an oral historian, after all.

Featured image and images included in the post are by Headen Photography, used with permission.

Elizabeth M. Melton is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on race in the United States and anti-racist performance. She is currently working on her dissertation about public school desegregation in her hometown: Longview, Texas.

Tending the roots: a response to Daniel Kerr

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By Allison Corbett

Here at the OHR blog we love a good origin story, where we get to hear firsthand how one of our colleagues fell in love with oral history, and how they use their own backgrounds and experiences to inform their practice. Sometimes, the people we hear from are drawn to oral history because it’s a place “where history really matters.” Sometimes oral history sits at an interesting intersection, a good place from which to hope. Other times, oral history is a way to build something meaningful from a disaster.  Today we hear from Allison Corbett, who explains her own radical roots and why it’s important to acknowledge the diverse experiences that enable us to listen to each other.

As a young person, I spent several hours a week learning with a group of immigrants who did maintenance work at a local golf course in Virginia. Supposedly, I was helping them learn English. I did do some of that. A lot of what I did, though, was learn. Their lives, which transpired alongside my own upper middle class white existence in my hometown, were composed of realities about which I had no idea before.

Shortly after I started to get to know these workers the local professor who was facilitating this experience introduced me to the work of Paulo Freire. Freire’s work shifted my understanding of the work that I was doing, and transformed my understanding of exchange across power differences. It taught me that any sound analysis of social in/justice and vision for lasting change must come from those directly affected.

When I went to college I continued to run adult English classes, and also began to volunteer as a community interpreter.  Years later, when I began to do oral history work, I did so with these foundational experiences in mind. Freire’s approach to popular education, which I contemplated through my weekly sessions in college, and later as a facilitator at a neighborhood community center in Chicago, greatly influenced my framework for working with people in oppressed communities. It helped fuel my own curiosity about what other people made of their lives and realities, and it gave me a critical lens with which to view so much of the “helping work” I saw around me.

The popular education center where I worked in Chicago had roots in Freirian philosophy, but was also founded by Myles Horton’s daughter, Amy Horton, and so was infused by the learning circles of the Highlander Folk School. I eventually left the world of adult education, but I did so to pursue the same principles and ethics that grounded my work there: a belief that people’s stories matter, and that when people are given space and encouraged to tell their stories and analyze them together, community transformation can be possible.

My work now straddles the worlds of interpreting and oral history. Both are specialized forms of listening and transmitting stories across difference. Both have the power to support self-determination and societal transformation. The current incarnation of this dual practice for me is The Language of Justice, an oral history project documenting the stories of interpreters who facilitate multilingual movement building across the country, a practice and ethic known as “language justice.”

These interviews have also brought me full circle back to popular education. One of the first places in the US to intentionally create multilingual grassroots spaces and train social justice interpreters was in fact the Highlander Center for Research and Education, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School.

While conducting interviews for the Language of Justice, I traveled to Highlander for the first time and met with others who now facilitate language justice circles in Western North Carolina. I was humbled and honored to be reminded of the traditions that originally sent me off in the direction of oral history as well as the deep listening that these practitioners were engaging in as part of their work.

He also reminded me that as I and others seek to engage with communities beyond the archive, and often wring our hands about what good it can do to “just” stimulate dialogue in the pursuit of some abstract embodiment of “empathy,” there are generations of folks out there who have been using storytelling and listening as the basis for deep-rooted community change, to whom we can turn to for example.

Shortly after returning from my visit to Highlander, I sat down to read Daniel Kerr’s article: “Allan Nevins is Not My Grandfather: Radical Roots of Oral History Practice in the United States.” I was already pondering the roots of popular education in my own oral history work, but the article helped demonstrate that these roots were critical to the development of the radical oral history practice that I aspire to.

Kerr affirmed what I felt to be true in my own path to oral history. He also reminded me that as I and others seek to engage with communities beyond the archive, and often wring our hands about what good it can do to “just” stimulate dialogue in the pursuit of some abstract embodiment of “empathy,” there are generations of folks out there who have been using storytelling and listening as the basis for deep-rooted community change, to whom we can turn to for example.

By acknowledging this history, we allow ourselves to make connections with valuable alternatives to the archival, university-focused model that Nevins embodies.

Featured image credit: Photo by Allison Corbett, unidentified artist, La Estación Vieja, La Plata, Argentina, 2014.

Allison Corbett is an independent oral historian and Spanish-English interpreter based in New York City.  Over the last few months she has been interviewing social justice interpreters and people doing multilingual organizing across the country for her project The Language of Justice, which is dedicated to the celebration of multilingual spaces and the people that maintain them. Her work has been by shaped the combined legacies of Columbia University’s Oral History Masters Program and the radical traditions of popular education in the Americas.

Where we rise: LGBT oral history in the Midwest and beyond

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By Andrew Shaffer

In early March, ABC released a much-anticipated mini-series that followed a group of activists who played important roles in the emergence of LGBTQ political movements. The show, When We Rise, was based in large part on a memoir by veteran activist Cleve Jones. While the series tells a compelling story, it is necessarily limited by its 8 hour runtime, focusing predominantly on the work of people in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Yet, as we have noted on the blog before, queer history happens everywhere, and oral historians are working to make this history visible. Today we continue our series on oral history and social change by highlighting the diversity of queer life and activism, exploring oral history projects from around the U.S.

The Midwest may not have had moments that grabbed national headlines like Stonewall or the rise of Harvey Milk, but it is home to pioneering moments of activism and community building. When Kathy Kozachenko was elected to Ann Arbor’s city council in 1974, she became the first out LGBTQ person elected to public office in the United States. The Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor holds oral histories and archival collections of local queer life throughout the 20th century, as well as the records of the Human Rights Party, the organization that sponsored Kozachenko’s historic candidacy.

In Madison, Judy Greenspan ran for school board in 1973, the same year as Harvey Milk first began his political career. Neither Greenspan nor Milk won their campaign, but both would help to shape the progression of LGBTQ politics. The University of Wisconsin-Madison holds interviews with and ephemera from Greenspan, as well as an archival collection that spans nearly a century of queer life. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Transgender Oral History Project and the Milwaukee LGBT History Project document even more of Wisconsin’s LGBTQ past.

The Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project, at the University of Minnesota, used its recordings to produce a book that explores a wide variety of queer histories. The book calls into question many assumptions about the story of LGBTQ activism as it has been told on the coasts, asking what this history looks like when it adopts an alternative geographic focus. Last year we spoke with Jason Ruiz, one of the project’s collaborators, about both the project and an article he had co-written for the OHRwhich asked what makes queer oral history different.

Chicago has its own unique queer history, and the Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles project holds more than 90 interviews on LGBTQ life at the University of Chicago. Both the Leather Archives & Museumand Chicago Gay History provide additional oral histories, along with videos, that document the lives of a wide variety of LGBTQ Chicagoans.

Outside of these northern cities, universities and community groups have mapped out an even more complicated landscape of queer life. The Ozarks Lesbian and Gay Archives at Missouri State contains both oral histories and archival collections. The Queer Appalachia Oral History Project at the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas’ Under the Rainbow: Oral Histories of Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, Intersex and Queer People in Kansas, and the Queer Oral History Project at the University of Illinois all provide invaluable oral history collections that depict the lives and struggles of queer people around the South and Midwest. The Brooks Fund History Project, at the Nashville Public Library, focuses on Middle Tennessee, exploring the contours of queer life before the Stonewall Riots of 1969. The geographically disparate Country Queers project includes stories from rural communities across the country, from the deep south to the mountain west.

AIDS activism dominates one entire episode of ABC’s miniseries, and is a major focus of many LGBTQ oral history projects. The New York City focused ACT UP Oral History Project provides a rich history of an organization that has been at the forefront of HIV/AIDS activism, and its recordings were the basis for the 2012 documentary, United in Anger. Both the National Institutes of Health and the University of California San Francisco have documented the experiences of medical professionals who played key roles, especially in the beginning of the epidemic. The oH Project: Oral Histories of HIV/AIDS in Houston, Harris County, and Southeast Texas has a growing collection of recordings about the local response to AIDS and the experiences of Texans. The African American AIDS History Project includes an oral history project on AIDS activism, as well as a sprawling collection of materials about AIDS in African American communities.

Moving outside the U.S., the LGBT Oral History Digital Collaboratory, located at the University of Toronto, is working to create a hub for queer oral history collections across the world, providing researchers and community members easy access to a wealth of information. In 2015 we spoke to Elspeth Brown from the Collaboratory, on the importance of working together in preserving queer history.

This short list is by no means a comprehensive overview of LGBTQ oral history projects, but it provides a taste of the diversity of stories that define this history. Queer history continues to happen everywhere, and the growing number of projects that document and preserve this history will enable the creation of new, more complex version of the vast queer past.

People from Madison, WI at the 1979 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Image courtesy of the UW-Madison Archives.

Andrew Shaffer is the Social Media Coordinator/Editorial Assistant at The Oral History Reviewand a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Down at the crossroads: the intersection of organizing and oral history

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By Daniel Horowitz Garcia

In the last few weeks, we have explored the possibilities oral historians have for using their work to create and promote changes in the world around us. Joshua Burford explained how listening to activists of the past helps locate hope and direction in the present. Holland Hall and Alexandra Weisshared their experiences at the Women’s March on Washington, and the power of listening for creating change. Today, Daniel Horowitz Garcia asks where oral history and organizing come together, and how focusing on public engagement can change the structure and value of oral history.

The crossroads, in Southern folklore, represents a place where worlds meet. It is a place where realities collide and deals can be made. Since the 2016 election I have experienced colliding realities on an almost daily basis. Until then my 20 years’ experience as an organizer and my 10 years’ experience in oral history overlapped in areas and at times but for the most part seemed separate. After the November election that is no longer the case.

Within weeks of the election I was interviewing members Project South, a southern-based, movement-building organization I worked for 12 years ago. By the end November 2016 I launched Feeling Political, a podcast about politics, emotions, and action. My original plan was to produce five or six episodes by talking to thinkers and organizers about how they felt about politics and what we should be doing. Instead I produced 11 shows, one bonus episode, and will start the second season this summer.

The premise of the podcast is that not everyone gave up hope because Trump won. In fact, there are many people who did not fundamentally change their basic political strategy because of the presidential election. These people’s optimism and hope about the future is not connected to the electoral process. Of course work adjusts based on different election results, but a Democrat’s loss or a Republican’s win does not alter how marginalized people must approach politics to survive. A fish swims even though there are sharks about, but she learns to swim well. I thought the shock of a Trump presidency was a good time to talk to some of these folks. I asked them three questions: how do they wish to be identified, how do they feel in this political moment, and what’s their advice to someone about what should be done. In addition, I asked anyone who wished to use their phone and email me a voice memo answering the same questions.

The premise of the podcast is that not everyone gave up hope because Trump won.

Asking people how they felt after the election was a powerful question. Through the podcast I found that talking with people affiliated with an organization, such as Project South, was an efficient way to gather interviews but also a collective learning process. I asked past and present board members and staff of Project South my three questions. The audio, ranging from five to eight minutes, will form the basis for a collaboration on political education curriculum incorporating emotions and politics. The goal is to help participants analyze and strategize about their work. This type of partnership will be, hopefully, the frame of the podcast in each season. I am not pretending that a podcast is an organizing or an oral history project. But I have learned from this experience that there is overlap in the skill sets.

Dan Kerr’s 2016 article for the Oral History Review, as well as the accompanying presentation at the OHA 2016 conference, argued there are methods of oral history that do not owe allegiance to Allan Nevins and the Columbia School. Furthermore, Kerr argued that oral history of or in service to an activist project does and should pursue a different methodology than the Nevins school. I thought about that argument when I heard a participant at the OHA conference argue that oral history and organizing do not share a skill set. I believe the participant is objectively wrong, and I think Kerr’s observation about different methodologies explains why someone would make that mistake. Simply put, oral history aimed at improving organizing or facilitating a victory may no longer look like oral history, at least not the academic kind. This doesn’t necessarily make things easier. If the organizing centered, then what happens to oral history standards? The field has spent decades struggling to develop guidelines that protect participants. Protections must exist whether or not Nevins can recognize the project. This is just a single example of complications of combining scholarship with activism. At the crossroads the future is uncertain, so if you show up be ready to make a deal.

Simply put, oral history aimed at improving organizing or facilitating a victory may no longer look like oral history, at least not the academic kind.

Society is changing all the time. Making social change a goal, therefore, does not seem useful. How are people engaging, or not, in change? To what end? These are good questions for the organizer or the oral historian. How do we engage with people and to what end are even better. I haven’t identified as an organizer for years, but the goal of the podcast is to move people to action. The deal I’ve made is that oral history skills, like listening and amplifying people’s voices, is enough to make that happen.

Forgive the Hegelian overtones, but when two realities collide don’t they make something new? Presently, I sit at the crossroads. My realities are colliding, and I am making deals.

Featured image credit: “2017.02.04 No Muslim Ban 2, Washington, DC USA 00521” by Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Daniel Horowitz Garcia is The Alternative Historian. He is an audio communication consultant specializing in oral history. He is the producer of Feeling Political, a podcast created after the 2016 elections focusing on emotions, politics, and action. He is also the producer of Change Over Time, a history podcast launching in Spring 2017. He has 20 years’ experience in labor and community organizing as well as popular education. He is quite tired, but his daughter is not sleepy at all.

Oral history and empathy at the Women’s March on Washington

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By Holland Hall and Alexandra Weis

Today we continue our series on oral history and social change by turning to our friends at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the University of Florida. In collaboration with colleagues at the UF Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, a group of SPOHP students A group of SPOHP students and staff traveled to the Women’s March on Washington this January as part of an experiential learning project. Their recordings captured a snapshot of a divided America, and the project aims to use oral history to encourage empathy. Check out the reflections from two members of the project below, and enjoy their special podcast from the march, put together by Aliya Miranda.

Holland Hall:

One of the most spontaneous interactions I experienced during our three-day fieldwork trip to Washington, D.C., to document the Women’s March on Washington occurred in the lobby of our hotel in Arlington, Virginia. On the night of President Trump’s inauguration, while we were discussing our fieldwork strategies for the following day in our hotel lobby, a woman stuck her head in our circle to ask, “Are you all protesting tomorrow?” Enthused by her interest in our group and feeling her excitement for the Women’s March on Washington the following day, I greeted the woman, Alyson Aleman, and informed her that we were a research group from the University of Florida. After hearing that we were in Washington to document the inauguration and Women’s March, she told me about her family and how extraordinary of a moment this was for her parents specifically.

Her parents had been divorced for over two decades, and her family’s trip to the Women’s March on Washington was the first time they were coming together as a family for an extended period since separating. Meeting this family and hearing their story not only hinted at how momentous of an event the march was going to be, but this introduction also beautifully displayed the oftentimes whimsical nature of oral history research. We were able to sit with three generations of this Connecticut family to gather their thoughts regarding the overall 2016-election cycle and why they were compelled to attend the Women’s March on Washington in response to the election of Donald Trump.

What made this interview so enjoyable for me to conduct as a researcher was creating this recording with a family during such a momentous time for not only the nation, but for their family. Ms. Aleman also brought her young daughter along to the march to instill in her that she is able to own her voice and to express her opinions freely. Another striking point Ms. Aleman brought up during our interview was the importance of the work we were doing as a research team, and how such material can be used to inspire the primary ingredient for social change: empathy.

While the family discussed the many ways empathy can be encouraged, Ms. Aleman’s husband, Karl Odden, actually highlighted where oral history comes in to play in the process of building empathy for others. Mr. Odden spoke about needing to walk in someone else’s shoes in order to gain authentic empathy for others from different walks of life. He noted that self-educating on the lived experiences of others is the most effective way to gain the understanding necessary to be able to empathize with others. Our research team sought to collect diverse perspectives from a broad spectrum of identities in the hopes that this digital material can be used to educate and inspire, as well as assist in the collective goal to build more empathy for one another as a nation.

It was 19 January, and my group had just finished our first day of fieldwork in Washington, DC. As the streets began to darken, we stumbled, sore and tired, into a food court next to the National Press Club. We’d passed a few people dressed up in prom attire – “They’re celebrating the inauguration, they’re holding parties,” my colleague Marcela explained – but hadn’t quite realized that we were directly next to the largest inaugural ball event in the city. When we emerged from the food court, we stepped into the protest burgeoning outside of the “DeploraBall.”

Alexandra Weis:

Frantically, we sprang into action, trying to capture as much footage as possible. We filmed as protesters used a floodlight to project the words: “Impeach the Predatory President! Bragging About Grabbing a Woman’s Genitals” on the otherwise pristine and sculpted face of the National Press Club. Nearby, someone inflated a giant white elephant labeled “RACISM.” The energy in the crowd of hundreds was urgent – people were palpably frightened, outraged, and desperate. We spoke to several members of an anti-fascist group shouting ill omens of the inauguration day to come. We interviewed a queer transgender woman who defiantly held up a trans pride flag against religious extremist counter-protesters. Amid the chaos, the interviewees made their concerns known: Trump and Pence are illegitimate, they emphasized over and over. Protect marginalized folks, they insisted. They were people for whom these issues were undeniably real; their lives were political not because they sought out politics, but because for them, there was no alternative to social justice.

For me, this was not only the first day of fieldwork for our trip, but the first day of fieldwork ever. As a graduate student in Gender Studies with a background in psychology, I had little experience doing hands-on research. I was passionate about social justice in my everyday life, but struggled to incorporate it into my academic practice. This first day threw me headfirst into the oral history process. People were struggling to be heard, crying out about the ways they were hurting. When I asked what brought them to the protests, people told me repeatedly and almost unanimously: they were scared for themselves, but also for their neighbors and their country. Given a platform, they were eager to explain their perspectives. As Audre Lorde wrote in her poem A Litany For Survival: “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard, nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid.” The act of speaking out can be revolutionary, but it is our job as scholars to openly listen and welcome the raw honesty, turmoil, and complexity that accompanies the moment in social movement history.

These reflections and recordings are part of the larger Women’s March on Washington Archives project, run by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and others at the University of Florida. For more from SPOHP, find them on Facebook, Twitter, or their homepage. To submit your own piece on oral history and social change, check out our CFP.

Featured image credit: “Alex and Celina” by Holland Hall, from the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida, used with permission.

Planting the seeds of resistance

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By Joshua Burford

Today we’re starting a new series on the blog where we explore the intersections of oral history and social change. Throughout 2017 we’ll bring you origin stories from activist historians, updates from the front lines, methodological approaches, and more from people who are using oral history to change their world. We begin with Joshua Burford, who first appeared on the blog last June to share his experiences preserving the history of queer people in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I have been working on preservation of Southern Queer history for ten years, and I have never felt the urgency that I feel at this moment to make certain it is safe and available. I think many archivists would agree that urgency is an undercurrent of most of the work that we do since so much information is lost when people die or move or leave their work. When the Charlotte Queer Oral Historyproject began in late 2015 the urgency that we felt was based not on fear but on the excitement that a project like this would give us access to information that didn’t exist anywhere else. I would describe our group as a family that is looking to support each other, but also support the people whose stories we are attempting to capture. Every time we meet it feels like the possibilities are endless and the urgency to get this project moving has created a set of siblings that represent generations of experience, desires, and the need to be connected to something that feels so important.

When HB2 happened in North Carolina and Charlotte was put under a microscope, the project took on a new feel for us. We had been so focused on the stories that were at risk (several people on our list were in bad health) that we didn’t really sit down and discuss how this project could be a locus for resistance to a growing anti-Queer and Trans sentiment from our state capitol. The decision had been made that each of us would follow our own interests and create micro-oral history projects within the larger scope of the project. Almost immediately we drifted towards the stories that highlighted the political work of Charlotte and the people that made the community what it is today. My first large scale project was to interview Sue Henry, a local business owner and political organizer who was most visible in Charlotte in the 1990s. I completed three interviews with her and realized right away that, although I wanted to know about her running a LGBT bookstore and her time as the first openly lesbian identified candidate for mayor, I really wanted to know how she had accomplished all she had in the face of very organized discrimination. I knew that her history would help to shed light on the processes by which this community organized politically and that her words (which have always inspired me) could light a fire under others. What I didn’t understand when I talked with her is that I needed so badly for her to tell me that we would survive HB2 and whatever came after it.

What I didn’t understand when I talked with her is that I needed so badly for her to tell me that we would survive HB2 and whatever came after it.

Sue had been a part of the LGBT group that first fought for a comprehensive anti-discrimination policy for Charlotte back in 1992. They ultimately lost that fight but the waves they created galvanized the community in a way that it had not felt before. I needed her story for my own survival as a Queer person organizing in 2016. I had always imagined that the audience for these stories would be people not directly involved in the work of the committee. I had seen students, our community elders, and future generations as the consumers of this knowledge but I had not really thought about what it could do for me. These feelings of urgency were indeed growing from my own sense of fear about where we are headed as a community and a nation. Preserving history is an act of resistance, but it’s also an act of survival. I tend to think of oral histories as the fire that lights the way to manuscript collections and all they contain. People love stories, but these stories give guidance as much as the create inspiration.

The Charlotte Queer Oral History project is a social justice endeavor. The committee struggles each month to make certain that we have room for all the voices that are overlooked. We began the project with a mandate to collect women’s history and the history of Queer people of color because we know how often these voices are silenced. Each story and its connection of the growing local King-Henry-Brockington community archive are an attempt to create a blueprint of our history so we can fight in the present. These stories shed light on what is possible and out of each comes the antidote to HB2. Our government can pass a law but our stories are the seeds of resistance because now that we know where we have been, we know where it is possible to go from here.

Featured image credit: “HB2 Protest” by Selena N. B. H., CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Joshua Burford is an archivist, an activist, and a radical educator with over 15 years experience working with minority communities and diversity education. Joshua began his teaching career in 1998 and has worked inside and outside the classroom advocating for liberation for Queer communities and for social justice. A historian and archivist by training, Joshua is passionate about education and advocacy for Queer Youth and the preservation and documentation of Southern Queer History. Joshua has been working for the past 8 years training educators, counselors, and administrators how to make their environments and outreach more inclusive to LGBTQ individuals. He joined the Multicultural Resource Center team at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2012.

Guaranteeing free speech

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By Andrew Shaffer

In a blog post heard ’round the oral history world, Zachary Schrag broke the news that the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects was finally amended to deregulate oral history. This new regulation, the result of decades of work by a determined group of scholars, is as exciting as it is complicated, so today on the blog we’re offering a meta-summary of some reflections on this change.

A post on the Oral History Association’s blog succinctly clarified the rule change.

The most critical component of the new protocols for oral historians explicitly removes oral history and journalism from the regulations…The new protocols will take effect on January 19, 2018.

Schrag’s blog post offered a detailed explanation of the technical language, and the differences between the early Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) and the final regulation.

The final rule preserves and clarifies the NPRM’s deregulation of oral history. This is a great victory for freedom of speech and for historical research.

The NPRM somewhat confusingly listed a number of activities “deemed not to be research” in §__.101, then presented the definition of research itself in §__.102. The final policy more logically defines research, then lists “activities…deemed not to be research.”

Whereas the NPRM excluded “Oral history, journalism, biography, and historical scholarship activities that focus directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected,” the final rule offers a broader exclusion:

For purposes of this part, the following activities are deemed not to be research: (1) Scholarly and journalistic activities (e.g., oral history, journalism, biography, literary criticism, legal research, and historical scholarship), including the collection and use of information, that focus directly on the specific individuals about whom the information is collected. [§__.102(l)(1)]

So freedom depends on the activity, not the discipline, with literary critics, law professors, and others who interview individuals benefiting. Another section of the announcement notes that this provision will also apply to political scientists and others who hope “to hold specific elected or appointed officials up for public scrutiny, and not keep the information confidential.”

The post went on to explain the reasoning, and another post on the blog details the consequences of the change for social scientists.

The National Coalition for History weighed in with some background on both the change and the contentious relationship between historians and IRB procedures.

[The regulation] was originally promulgated as the “Common Rule” in 1991. The historical community, collaborating through the National Coalition for History, has long argued that scholarly history projects should not be subject to standard IRB procedures since they are designed for the research practices of the sciences…

Beginning in the mid-1990s, college and university students, faculty, and staff who conducted oral history interviews increasingly found their interviewing protocols subject to review by their local Institutional Review Board (IRB), a body formed at every research institution, and charged by the federal government with the protection of human subjects in research. Human subject risk regulation had its roots in the explosion of government-funded medical research after World War II as well as with the revelation of glaring medical abuses, including Nazi doctors’ experiments on Holocaust victims and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. History and other humanities disciplines were never originally intended to fall within the purview of the regulation, generally known as the “Common Rule,” which addressed biomedical and behavioral research.

The growing inclusion of oral history under IRB review began an often contentious, confusing, and chaotic process. Was oral history—or historical studies more generally—the type of “generalizable” research covered by the Common Rule?

The post drew on an article written by Linda Shopes that clarified the process and what was at stake before the rule had passed.

Finally, Mary Marshall Clark, Director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, offered some perspective for the change, focusing on the motivation driving those who sought it.

The technical arguments we made will not stand out in the historical record; the spirit that actually motivated so many arguments regarding the application of the policy was our resolute determination to remind the board that oral history is part of protecting the right to free speech and free inquiry.

In that sense, we were not thinking of protecting narrators as potential victims, but protecting their right to speak freely and openly as citizens and agents in a democracy that guarantees free speech.

While the change will not take effect until 2018, we are excited at the opportunities this change will create for recording and preserving the voices of people who might otherwise be denied a space to speak. We welcome additional analysis, summaries, and guides, so please add to this collection in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image: “Liberty” by Mobilus In Mobili, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Andrew Shaffer is the Social Media Coordinator/Editorial Assistant at The Oral History Review and a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

 

Oral History and Social Change

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The Oral History Review blog is launching a new initiative to
emphasize the work of people who use oral history to create social change. As
part of this series, we are soliciting contributions for publication on the
blog, which could be an overview of a particular project, a
methodological consideration for bringing social change into the process of
doing oral history, a story from the front lines, or something completely
different.

We are looking
for blog posts between 500-800 words, or 10-15 minutes of audio or video content.
These are rough guidelines, however, so we are open to negotiation in terms of
media and format. We should also stress that while we welcome posts that
showcase a particular project, we can’t serve as landing page for kickstarter
or similar funding sites.

Some questions
we hope to address in this series include:

  • How does focusing on social change impact the process of engaging with oral history? Does it change the structure of interviews, or the questions asked? Does it shift positionality in the interview itself, or in how the interview is used after its completion?
  • What experiences or ideas lead to the development of a socially minded oral history practice?
  • How do projects take unheard voices out of the archive and use them to create social change?
  • Who are the target audiences for socially engaged oral history projects, and how can they best be reached?
  • What successful changes have come about because of oral history?
  • What lessons and best practices have oral historians developed from doing oral history for social change?

Additionally,
our friends at Groundswell are hosting a class in using oral history to create
social change, starting
in just a few weeks. Registration closes on February 5th, so make
sure to sign up soon, and come back to the blog to hear from your friends and
colleagues about the great work they’re doing.   

Please direct
any questions, pitches, or submissions to our Social Media Coordinator, Andrew
Shaffer, at ohreview[at]gmail[dot]com. You can also message us on Twitter or Facebook.

Featured image: “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” by Jason Hargrove, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Learning from disaster

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By Abigail Perkiss

As part of our 50th anniversary issue of the OHR, Abigail Perkiss explored the impact of oral history in the aftermath of a Hurricane Sandy in her article Staring Out to Sea and the Transformative Power of Oral History for Undergraduate Interviewers. The article is a timely look at how doing and presenting oral history changes the way practitioners interact with both their interviewees and the broader world. Below, we hear more about how the project moved from recording to presenting in only a few months and how Perkiss helped to foster commitment and transformation. If you are interested in contributing your own pedagogical experiences and insights email our blog editor, Andrew Shaffer, or Abigail Perkiss, Pedagogy Editor at the Review.

The article shows how the Staring Out To Sea project transformed the students involved. Have you seen similar effects with other projects or do you think this was unique to the traumatic beginnings or the intimate connections the students shared to the events?

I’ve used oral history in my teaching before, but the semester during which we developed Staring out to Sea was the first time I’d ever taught a seminar specifically focused around oral history, and specifically centered on the development of one collaborative project. So, it’s hard to know what made the difference – was it spending the entire term concentrating on oral history? Was it the nature of the work and the immediacy of the experience for the students? Was it the project-based approach that allowed the students to feel some ownership over the work they were doing, some agency in the process?

My hunch at the time was that it was a combination of all of those things, and in subsequence semesters, I got to see that transformative power translate to other classroom experiences, where students had the same level of creative agency and responsibility for the direction of the work.

For example, in my spring 2016 black history survey, my students and I spent the entire semester examining the history and memory of black life at Kean University, where I teach. Using the school’s special collections as well as primary sources from other local archives, and conducting select oral history interviews themselves, students in this class worked to build an institutional history of race relations at Kean, telling the story of the dynamics of race and power at the school and on its grounds over the past 250 years. The course culminated with the development of The BlacKeaning: Illuminating Black Lives at Kean University, a campus tour highlighting this racial history of the school. I would say that that experience was similarly transformative for the students involved, and it made a comparable impact on me as well.

The project developed incredibly quickly, from conceiving of the idea to presenting the findings in only a few months. What lessons did you learn that helped move it along so swiftly?

Yes, “incredibly quickly” is a good way to put it. It was an unbelievably packed semester. I’ve never experienced a class so energizing and enervating at the same time. And it wouldn’t have been possible without the generous guidance and support of so many seasoned oral historians (Don Ritchie, Stephen Sloan, Linda Shopes, among others), and of the regional oral history association – Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region – and Kean University. Knowing that these various institutions and individuals had our backs gave me the confidence to undertake such a project, and showed my students that people were taking them and their work seriously.

 I’ve never experienced a class so energizing and enervating at the same time.

I think the biggest takeaways from that spring, for me, were about preparedness, communication, and vision. I won’t rehash the things that went well in our development of the project – they’re in the OHR essay – but there are two critical things that I wish I’d approached differently.

First, equipment and technology – our mics and recorders arrived just hours before the first student was to conduct her first interview. I had used the equipment before and knew it well enough that I assumed it was relatively intuitive, and so – because of the time crunch – I forewent the proper training with the students in the limited amount of time we had for it. They all figured it out, but not without a few blips and a fair amount of anxiety for them. If I could do it over, I would have built in a technology workshop so that we could have gone through it more deliberately and collaboratively, and they could have tested everything ahead of time.

Second, the nature of the project was such that once the students graduated at the end of the semester, there was no built-in mechanism for completing the work. Such is the nature of the academic rhythms. While the project continued, through independent study and internship credit and collaborations with a neighboring institution, Stockton University, if I were to do it again, I would have thought more proactively about the longitudinal nature of the project and set up an infrastructure to develop that.

You noted that the project facilitated “a level of agency, autonomy, and affirmation that undergraduates…rarely get to experience.” Do you have any advice for educators that hope to foster similar kinds of transformation and camaraderie in the classroom?

I think developing a rapport among students is incredibly important. Before they can begin a meaningful collaboration, they need to understand where everyone is coming from, what their relationship is to the subject matter, what their work styles are, even what kind of music they like to listen to. They need to knoweach other, in order to trust each other, to be able to rely on each other.

From my experience, I’ve also found that it’s a careful balance for the instructor, wanting to encourage and affirm the work, but also providing critical feedback and – as I said in the OHR essay – “tough love.” Because sometimes the students need to step up, and the instructor needs to be able to tell them that in a way that they can hear and respond to, without feeling marginalized or silenced. I don’t think I did this perfectly, and at times I think I leaned too much toward the encouragement side, at the expense of the quality of the interviews. It was a learning process for me, too, in that way.

What is the future of the project? Are you still gathering interviews?

We collected the last of the interviews in the summer of 2015, and I’m currently at work on a book based on the stories of the narrators, which is due out with Cornell University Press in 2018. As I’m working on the book, I’ve had conversations with a number of the narrators, specifically about their social media representation of the storm as it was happening. That’s created for me a powerful parallel narrative about their experiences of Hurricane Sandy and an interesting way to contextualize and make sense of some of their recollections in the oral history interviews.

At the same time, I’m in the early stages of working with an oral history repository, transferring the interviews over to them so that people around the world can access and use them.

How has the project changed your approach to teaching, or doing oral history?

I think the biggest impact of the project for me has been in seeing the power of a project-based approach. I knew that in the abstract, prior to Staring out to Sea, but seeing the impact of this work on my students had a profound effect on how I approach the classroom more broadly, as I discussed above in working with students on The BlacKeaning.

I haven’t had the opportunity since Staring out to Sea to conduct oral history interviews myself or work with students on an oral history project, but I very much look forward to that opportunity. I’m so proud of the work that my students did over those two years, and feel tremendously indebted to them for their willingness to take on such high-stakes work. At the same time, as I’ve noted, there are certainly things that I would do differently, and so I look forward to having the chance to apply the lessons I learned from that project, to do it better next time.

Is there anything you couldn’t address in the article that you’d like to share here?

I’d just like to take this opportunity to highlight the Pedagogy Section of the Oral History Review and to encourage your readers – those in both secondary and higher ed institutions – to consider how their work might contribute to our broader understanding of how to teach oral history. When Glenn Whitman first conceived of the section in 2009, he envisioned it as a space to highlight the growing scholarship on educational methodology, specifically as it relates to oral history. For Glenn and the rest of the OHReditorial board, one of the central missions of our field is to train the next generation of oral historians. The Pedagogy Section of the journal affords us the opportunity to think collectively about how to do that.

Where have you seen the transformative potential of oral history? Add your voice to the conversation in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image: “Hurricane Sandy . The Aftermath” by Hypnotica Studios Infinite, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Abigail Perkiss is an assistant professor of history at Kean University in Union, New Jersey and the editor of the Pedagogy Section of The Oral History Review. She has been directing the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project since spring 2013 and is currently working on a book manuscript based on the project. In 2015, she won the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance’s annual teaching award for her work on the project.

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