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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Instructor:
Amy A Starecheski
h-index: 5 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?
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Instructor:
Amy A Starecheski
h-index: 5 Info - 5 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
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Instructor:
Destry M Sibley
Info - 4 points
Oral History & Justice: Memory, Power, a
OH and Justice
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