ORAL HISTORY WORKSHOP
This course introduces students to important conversations within and about oral history through a series of curated public events.
This semester our events will explore how oral history lives in places and communities around New York City through a series of place-based events, curated in collaboration with partners around the city.
We meet approximately 6 times/semester.
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Roots and Branches of Oral History
Roots & Branches of Oral
Doing oral history is a part of being human. It is also a formalized research practice with histories that vary across disciplines, geographies, and institutional contexts.
In this class, students will be introduced to the many roots of oral history - as an Indigenous practice, in folklore and storytelling, in community organizing and popular education, and as an interdisciplinary research practice. We will explore the histories of oral history as a research practice in a range of national and regional contexts, within the disciplines of history and anthropology, and both within and beyond universities and libraries.
From these many roots, we can trace many branches. Students will learn about contemporary uses of oral history as a decolonial and feminist research method, a tool for organizing, as slow scholarship, as performance, and as a narrative praxis.
As a final project, each student will conduct research, building on assigned course readings, to identify their own relevant oral history roots and define their own approach to doing oral history.
This course is required for Oral History MA students, and open to non-OHMA graduate students space permitting and with instructor’s permission.
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Instructor:
Amy A Starecheski
h-index: 5 Info - 4 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
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Instructor:
Joseph Plaster
Info - 5 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.
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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.
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Instructor:
Suchitra Vijayan
Info - 4 points
Indigenous Oral Traditions and Anti-Colo
Through weekly readings, seminar discussions, and independent research, students will be immersed in the discourse, theoretical approaches, methods, and applications of Indigenous oral traditions and oral histories. Students will learn about the nature of oral traditions from multiple Indigenous perspectives; studying them as deeply grounded knowledge systems and world views connected to places and nations. The course will examine how colonialism has acted a great interrupter to the collective memory which is foundational to Indigenous oral traditions and nationhood. Finally, we will consider how contemporary anti-colonial Indigenous narratives are ‘remembering back’ by drawing upon and building from the stories that have (and have not) been passed down through the generations.
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Instructor:
Francine D Spang-Willis
Info - 2 points