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.
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Instructor:
Nyssa Chow
Info - 1 points
CURATING ORAL HISTORIES
This seminar is one of our core course, in which students will learn and practice the skills required to conceptualize, conduct, analyze and curate oral history interviews. In Curating Oral Histories we focus our attention on the curation and amplification of oral histories, including archiving, online presentation, museum exhibits, oral history documentary, advocacy, and teaching oral history. Our work this semester will emphasize interpretive processes, collaborative work, and how the public perceives and receives oral history. Students will be expected to be primarily working on their own thesis or capstone projects. Our core question:
How do we present oral histories, with all of their length, depth, complexity and intersubjective richness, in an accessible way to a public audience without sacrificing those qualities we so value?
- W 10:10 a.m.-1 p.m.
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Instructor:
Nyssa Chow
Info - 5 points
Listening and Seeing with the Body in Mi
Listening & Seeing w/ Bod
Long-time colleagues and friends, Mary Marshall Clark and Ann Cvetkovich will model collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to oral history that draw on their overlapping and shared interests in oral testimony as a genre of public feeling, witness, testimony and psychoanalysis. They have both, for example, contributed to Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Oral History and Narrative and Memory project and the Covid-19 Oral History Narrative and Memory Archive project. Ann Cvetkovich, a professor of gender and sexuality studies with training in literature, brings to the mutual conversation interests in queer theory, trauma, affect, archives, and creative approaches to method, as well as experience with interviewing artists and HIV/AIDS activists. Mary Marshall, director of the Columbia Center for Oral History, brings 21 years of building oral history projects on everyday life, politics, trauma, activism and the arts. As a psychoanalyst in training, she also brings the lens of psychosocial analysis to questions of suffering, of social difference and intersectionality.
In addition to readings in theory and method, the course will focus on listening to oral histories with a sample interview for shared discussion each week. The final project for the class will provide students with an opportunity to work intensively with an interview of their choosing, and there will be brief creative exercises along the way that will allow students to workshop and share their process as listeners and visual observers to the world of memory and affect.
- M 2:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
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Instructor:
Mary M Clark
CULPA: 1 Info - 2 points
MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING
MULTIMEDIA PRACTICE
This course is a survey of the documentary craft and industry through the lens of the documentary relationship. We will define the documentary relationship as those relations organic to the process of crafting documentary. Those can be between narrator and producer, between collaborators, and between material and meaning. We will ask questions about craft, ethics, and power within documentary work and workshop short documentary works of our own
- W 2:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
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Instructor:
Sayre Quevedo
Info - 4 points
Serious Play: Oral History and the Art o
OH and the Art of Story
In this workshop, OHMA students will deepen their exploration of core tensions in the practice of oral history through the creation of narrative art in a range of genres and forms, including writing and performance. We ask of each form: What lines are marked by conventions of genre, and how do those compare to lines drawn by the ethics of oral history? How can we draw on narrative and performance in our own creative and scholarly contributions to oral history?
This class will be a space for experimentation and serious play, where students will discuss questions raised by the work of others, and grapple with those questions by making their own creative work. Pedagogically, we will simultaneously explore two areas of creation: oral history on the page, and oral history in performance. Students will make new work and engage in discussion about existing work. Class time will be spent discussing texts, workshopping students’ creative projects, and participating in activities designed to prompt collaboration and engineered to inspire new work. Over the course of the semester students will write, perform, and create prompts inspired by oral history.
- R 10:10 a.m.-1 p.m.
- 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.
- T 10:10 a.m.-1 p.m.
- 2 points