Roots and Branches of Oral History
Roots & Branches of Oral
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- T 10:10 a.m.-1 p.m.
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Instructor:
Nyssa Chow
Info - 4 points
ORAL HISTORY WORKSHOP
This year-long course introduces students to important conversations within and about oral history through a series of curated public lectures. We will meet for six events a semester, plus one session to orient you to the class. From 5:00 – 6:00, students will meet with the speaker for an informal conversation about their career path and research process. The public portion of the event will be from 6:10 to 7:30 PM. You should plan to be in class until 8 in case an event runs slightly over, and so that you can stick around after the event to chat with the speaker or have a glass of wine.
- R 5:30 p.m.-8 p.m.
- 1 points
ORAL HIST:FIELDWORK/DOCUMENTN
This seminar is the first half of a two-semester practicum in which students will learn and practice the critical skills required to conceptualize, conduct, analyze and disseminate oral history projects in a range of contexts and communities.
In the Fall semester, we will learn project design, approaches to interviewing and other genres of oral history, remote and in-person audio recording, transcribing, indexing, and digital archiving. Students will have the option of working on oral history projects conducted in partnership with Fieldwork Partners or working on their own projects.
By the Spring semester course on Curating Oral Histories, students will be expected to be primarily working on their own projects. In the Spring we will focus most of our attention on the analysis and dissemination of oral histories, including audio editing, online presentation, museum exhibits, and other public oral history genres. Our spring work will culminate in a collaboratively curated interactive public exhibit
- W 10:10 a.m.-1 p.m.
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Instructor:
Lynn M Lewis
Info - 5 points
Social Science and Other Approaches to S
Soc Sci & Other Apps
Life histories and narratives don’t speak for themselves. To disclose what these have to offer, we have to analyze them. This can be true even if the teller or author of a story is making a point with her history or narrative. That is, this teller or that author is not the only interpreter of the narrative. And this is so whether it is about herself, about other people, about organizations, about movements, about whatever; whether it’s “real” or “imaginary;” whether the medium is words, images, sound, or whatever senses a “text” engages. Life histories and narratives—usually told as sequences of events, sometimes temporally sequential, maybe connected in the telling but maybe not—have to be analyzed to be understood. Put another way: How are you going to make sense of your interviews? We need to think about analytic methods to do so. This course focuses on what it means to deploy some such methods, the utility of doing so, and the importance of doing so self-consciously. Because we employ methods for substantive purposes, the course focuses on using methods for thinking about the relationship between individual lives and the social structures within which those lives are lived. That is, we learn how to develop and deploy C. Wright Mills’s “sociological imagination” through methods learned.
The course tries to achieve these ends by considering ways in which scholars and writers analyze life history and narrative information. It focuses on the utility and importance ofdifferent approaches to analyzing such information, and exposes students to the mechanics of analytic tools for carrying out such analyses. In particular, we introduce approaches used in formal social science, historical and anthropological analyses of qualitative information analysis and in not so formal social science analyses, e.g., novels! These methods/approaches can be used to reveal underlying dynamics that generate life histories and/or narratives and so deepen our understanding of specific people and their relationship to larger social and historical elements.
- R 1:10 p.m.-3 p.m.
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Instructor:
William McAllister
Info - 4 points
VIDEO PRODUCTION FOR VISUAL STORYTELLING
VIDEO PRO FOR VISUAL STOR
Students will have hands-on learning experiences using camera controls and techniques and optics to accentuate psychological and atmospheric aspects surrounding the subject. Additionally, through visual storytelling, composition and basic color theory students will understand how to incorporate theories of cinematic language to emphasize the mood and perception of the story. This course will cover basic lighting techniques for the interview in a hands-on practical experience that will strengthen participants’ camera, cinematography and storytelling skills. Students will complete the course by creating a final short video, having collaboratively conceptualized, filmed, interviewed and shot the necessary B-roll to structure a basic visual storytelling piece with the use of image, sound and basic editing.
- W 3:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
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Instructor:
Oscar Frasser
Info - 4 points
Oral History & Justice: Memory, Power, a
HUM RGTS & ORAL HIST
This course will explore the ethics and politics of using oral history methods for documenting injustice, oppression, and human rights issues. The course is open to graduate students of oral history, human rights, journalism, and related fields; no prior experience with oral history interviewing is required. Oral history can be a powerful means of documenting oppression, human rights abuses, and crisis “from the bottom up” and facilitating the understanding and possible transformation of conditions of injustice. It can open the space for people and narratives that have been marginalized to challenge official narratives and complicate narrow accounts of injustice and crisis. The course will first explore what is distinct about oral history as a response to harm or injustice, comparing it to more familiar forms of testimony and narrative used within the realm of human rights, social justice organizations and courts of law. With its commitment to life narrative interviews and archival preservation, oral history situates injustice within the broader context of a life, a historical trajectory, and a political and cultural setting. Weaving together conceptual and practical approaches, we will examine different potential goals of oral history, such as documenting the experiences of people who have been marginalized; seeking justice; fostering dialogue and healing; and/or supporting activism and advocacy. The course covers interviewing skills and project planning specifically for oral history projects about injustice and human rights, and explores various dimensions of how power, politics, and ethics come into play — how politics and power shape the way a narrative is heard; the challenges of realizing ideals of collaboration and shared authority amid uneven power dynamics; contending with the effects of trauma on both narrators and interviewers; and critical considerations for projects produced with activist and advocacy aims. We will explore how oral history can work alongside other forms of memory and witnessing that go beyond words, such as activism, film, and memorials.
- T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
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Instructor:
Suchitra Vijayan
Info - 4 points