Beginning in January a new editorial team will take over the OHR, bringing in some fresh voices and new ideas. Before we hand over the reins, we asked the new team, composed of David Caruso, Abigail Perkiss, and Janneken Smucker, to tell us how they ...
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Allowing the past to speak

Allowing the past to speak

Beginning in January a new editorial team will take over the OHR, bringing in some fresh voices and new ideas. Before we hand over the reins, we asked the new team, composed of David Caruso, Abigail Perkiss, and Janneken Smucker, to tell us how they came into the world of oral history. Check out their responses below, and make sure to keep an eye on our social media pages in the coming weeks for more.

David Caruso

It’s really hard to get dead people to talk to you. Séances don’t count. For my doctoral degree at Cornell University I researched the history and use of American military medicine from the Spanish-American War through to the First World War. I buried myself in various archives, digging my way through voluminous folders to find answers to a plethora of questions. I read memos and reports, analyzed admission applications and equipment orders, and pulled out as much information as I could from the century-old records, and then coupled all of those with personal memoirs written in the aftermath of war. But there was no one left alive who could answer my questions directly—I had to use my training in historical research to come up with the most likely truths that the archives and books could provide.

I also had the opportunity to work on smaller, contemporary projects that focused on the history of science, involving both archival research and the chance to actually speak to scientists and engineers. The frustrations I felt when researching the history of American military medicine were nowhere to be found when working on these contemporary projects. Near the end of my graduate career there was a job opportunity at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, an independent, history of science-based research library in Philadelphia. The position entailed interviewing biomedical scientists who received an early-career grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts; I saw it as an opportunity to better understand the history of modern biomedical research funding by talking to the individuals whose work benefitted from that financial support.

I came to oral history not through a formal degree program but by realizing the limitations of traditional historical records, and deciding that I needed to talk to people to understand history better. While working on the biomedical scientists’ project, I ensconced myself in the world of oral history, fortuitously meeting Roger Horowitz when he was a fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Roger introduced me to Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, which led me to the Oral History Association.

Abby Perkiss

As an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, I studied sociology, history, and creative writing with the intention of carving out a life at the intersection of storytelling and social change. My last year there saw the US invade Iraq, and I undertook an independent senior thesis to examine whether and how Americans were using the memory of Vietnam as a way to understand and engage with the current conflict. My thinking was that I would interview folk singers from the 1960s and contemporary folk singers/singer songwriters, as the creators of collective memory, to see how each cohort was conceiving the situation in Iraq. Over a few months in the spring of 2003, I interviewed more than a dozen musicians, including Pete Seeger, Janis Ian, and Mary Travers. The project was completely flawed, methodologically and conceptually, but I was hooked.

It’s really hard to get dead people to talk to you. Séances don’t count.

From there, I studied documentary writing at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine, and then completed a joint JD/PhD in US history at Temple University. Oral history played a central role in my dissertation research, and continues to define a significant part of my scholarly and pedagogical identity.

Today, I am an Assistant Professor of History at Kean University in New Jersey, where I teach courses in US history, African American history, legal history, and oral and public history. From 2013-2016, I worked with undergrads at Kean to develop a longitudinal oral history project on the relief and recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. I will be using those interviews as the backbone of a narrative monograph documenting the uneven recovery of Hurricane Sandy along the New Jersey coastline.

Janneken Smucker

Looking back over the last 20 years, there’s no specific moment when I began to self-identify as an oral historian, but somehow the method has been a reoccurring theme in my academic career. As a college senior, I interviewed individuals for my senior seminar paper at Goshen College about the origins of the college’s Women’s Studies program. When I began studying quilts from an academic perspective, my first paper was based on an oral history interview I conducted with my elderly grandmother about the quilts she and her Amish-Mennonite peers made as young women in the 1920s in eastern Ohio. I then conducted around thirty interviews for my doctoral dissertation research focused on the relationship of Amish quilts to the art market and consumer culture. All of sudden, it felt like I’d become a bit of an oral historian, which made sense since much of my research focused on contemporary history topics from the 1970s and 80s.

I now regularly teach with oral history, working with my students at West Chester University to create digital public history projects, interpreting and providing access to archival oral history interviews, by building classroom/archive partnerships that take advantage of open source technologies. In the spring 2018 semester, I’ll be teaming with WCU colleague Charlie Hardy to teach a new course, Immigration and Digital Storytelling, which will draw on a collection of oral history interviews Charlie conducted in the early 1980s with immigrants who moved to Philadelphia from Europe early in the twentieth century.

 Join us in eagerly welcoming the new team in the comments below and on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Google+.

Featured image credit: Listen by Simon Law. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

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Engaging with history at #OHA2017

Engaging with history at #OHA2017

For most Americans, Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks for all of the best things in life: family, friends, football, and, of course, heaps of delectable food. Few care to spend any time thinking about the myths that underlie American perceptions of the holiday, and even fewer can appreciate how and why this holiday is frequently observed as a day of mourning among many Native Americans. Protests at Standing Rock and throughout the football world have made it much more difficult to sweep the histories of historically marginalized groups under the rug this holiday season. This year, Thanksgiving and its commonly espoused “theology of divine abundance” will not be enough to obscure the histories of inequality and violence America was founded upon.

Like these protests, the presentations I attended during the Oral History Association’s 2017 annual meeting delivered critical historical narratives and resources that can help us to further challenge some of the nationalist myths that obscure the experiences and perspectives of various marginalized communities in American history. These presentations helped to illuminate important lessons we can learn from an engagement with the histories and contemporary concerns of marginalized peoples in the US. In honor of the holiday season, I have put together a short list of what I was most thankful for during OHA2017.

1. OHA 2017 Keynote Address: Jill Lepore, “Joe Gould, Augusta Savage, and Oral History’s Dark Past”

I think most OHA2017 attendees would agree that the real star of Jill Lepore’s keynote address, in addition to Lepore herself, was Augusta Savage. Though Lepore’s talk (and the book it draws on) focused largely on Joe Gould, the ostensible father of oral history, conversations during the Q&A that followed her lecture focused almost exclusively on Augusta Savage and Lepore’s allusions to the years of physical and sexual violence she suffered at the hands of Joe Gould. And, perhaps even more significant was Lepore’s assertion that there were a number of important men involved in protecting Gould from facing any legal consequences for his violent acts against Savage. This story has begun to ring loudly in my ears as a number of influential men in Hollywood–long protected by their status and associations with other prominent men in the business–tumble down from their pedestals in the face of women who have been inspired to tell their stories by campaigns like #MeToo. Serendipitously timely, Lepore’s, address helps to advance our knowledge on the subject of women, sexism, and (sexual) violence in American history just as we–as a nation–are finally beginning to grapple with the knowledge that women are subjected to wide-spread and largely accepted forms of sexual harassment and sexual violence on a daily basis. As we begin to deal more fully with this reality and all of its (un)intended e/affects, it will be important to earnestly reflect on how race plays a role in shaping women’s (and men’s) experiences with sexism and sexual violence, and stories like Savages’ will provide us with a critical starting place to do this work.

When learning is a two-way street, oral history stories have the power to change the present.

2. Roundtable 065. Documenting Activism in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter and Standing Rock

Everything about this roundtable was superb, however, what I want to share with readers here are links to some of the oral history focused resources roundtable participants have played key roles in establishing for public consumption. These resources would be great sources of information for teachers and researchers alike:

The Documenting the Now project works to ethically collect and preserve “the public’s use of social media for chronicling historically significant events,” and is supported jointly by the University of Maryland, University of California, Riverside (UCR), and Washington University in St. Louis.

Inside the Activists Studio (IAS) is a web-based series that is easily accessible via YouTube and takes inspiration for the interview-styles of the popular television series “Inside the Actors Studio.” Each episode features an interview with activists about their own “political awakening and biography of activism” and is posted online for free and easy access (at least for those with access to a computer and internet).

Invisible to Invincible: Asian Activism in MN, a short documentary film available on YouTube, works to unpack the model minority stereotype while also exploring the history of Asian activism in Minnesota and the US more broadly.

3. Panel 091. Oral History and Critical Pedagogies

Each of the papers presented during this panel were extremely different in their content and subject matter, some presenters sharing insights from their university based institutional ethnographic work and others discussing the use of family oral histories to destabilize neoliberal pedagogies; however, these presentations were tied together by a few underlying ‘truths’ about the significance of oral history to developing critical pedagogies. First, the theme of lost knowledge and/or obscured stories came through in all three papers, as did the real ways that oral history can be used as a tool to bring light to ‘lost’ knowledge or stories of the past. Perhaps more significant, however, are the ways in which each presenter showed us exactly how and why it is so important for teachers, academics, and activists to learn from the communities they work within. In bringing the methods, theories and tools of oral history research into the classroom and other educational spaces, these presenters were able to show us how giving students and teachers the opportunity to bring parts of themselves into their learning environments can enable them to work together to build solidarity and new forms of identity. Thus, the most important truth to be gleaned from the presenters on this panel: When learning is a two-way street, oral history stories have the power to change the present.

What are you thankful for this year? Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on TwitterFacebookTumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: ‘Demilitarize the Police, Black Lives Matter’ by Johnny Silvercloud, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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On burnout, trauma, and self-care with Erin Jessee

On burnout, trauma, and self-care with Erin Jessee

Last week, Erin Jessee gave us a list of critical questions to ask to mitigate risk in oral history fieldwork. Today, we’ve invited Jessee back to the blog to talk more in-depth about her recently published article, “Managing Danger in Oral Historical Fieldwork,” spotting signs of trauma during interviews, and dealing with the sensitive nature of oral history.

You note that discussion of dangerous or distressing research encounters are common in “corridor talks” among oral historians, yet rarely make it into the scholarly literature. What kind of feedback or reactions have you had from colleagues as you make these conversations more public?  

Since the article went online, I’ve had a handful of emails thanking me for taking the time to write it, as it’s helping oral historians think through the dangers they’ve faced in past projects, and begin assessing potential future dangers. I also presented a few key points from the article at the Oral History Association meeting in Minneapolis, and the responses were entirely positive and supportive of the idea that—particularly given the recent deregulation of oral history in the United States—we can and should be doing more to assess danger in our work. Most oral historians seem to at least recognize the need to be more open about the potential for danger or emotional distress resulting either directly from the difficult narratives to which they’re exposed or from the personal wounds that these narratives reopen. The few resistant individuals tend to come from other fields, and object on the grounds that it wrongly detracts attention away from our participants. I understand this concern, but I think we need to find a balance between acknowledging the potentially negative impact our research can have on our mental and physical health—ideally, to create an environment that offers practitioners who are struggling more support—while still privileging participants’ narratives.

How can oral historians do a better job of spotting signs of trauma in each other, and responding positively?  

This is important, because I get the impression that many oral historians feel embarrassed or ashamed to admit when their physical and mental health has been negatively impacted by their research. Many of us are navigating heavy workloads, and it doesn’t seem practical to suggest that we all undertake formal training in counselling. Likewise, we may not all be in positions where we’re able or willing to take on the often-unpaid emotional labor that is demanded of us in helping our colleagues process personal or work-related crises, particularly when it extends beyond a momentary bad mood or emergency. But there are things we can do in our professional lives that can make it easier for us to support our colleagues when they’re in distress or minimize the potential for that distress to occur in the first place. For example, Beth Hudnall Stamm’s tips for self-care are helpful for resilience-planning in advance of fieldwork but also include small acts that people can incorporate into their everyday lives. Over time they can help to make them not only more aware of the sources of stress and harm they navigate in their work, research, and personal lives, but also make us more supportive and empathetic colleagues and coworkers.

Because of the sensitive nature of your work, some of the life histories you record must ultimately be destroyed. Have you had any difficulty navigating that reality with narrators who want to have their full story told, or institutions and scholars that want access to the primary data?   

Because I’ve incorporated a very thorough informed consent process throughout my fieldwork, and most of the people I’ve interviewed are intimately familiar with the potential risks they face in participating in the research project, I haven’t encountered any resistance from participants to destroying the interviews we’ve conducted in the past. I should note, however, that the destruction of these interviews was a requirement of the ethics committee at the university where I conducted my doctoral studies, the underlying research design for which underwent review in 2007. I haven’t heard of any researchers in recent years being required to destroy their fieldwork data. Indeed, current best practices seem to allow for the anonymization of any materials that contain personally identifying information, and limited archiving—usually closed to the public and future researchers unless permission is given by the original researcher and/or participants.

That said, with the push to demonstrate positive public impact in academic research, I have noticed some tensions between researchers, and university administration and funding agencies. In the UK, universities often maintain online repositories in which oral historians are expected to deposit their interviews, as well as associated publications, to comply with open access requirements. Funding agencies can, as a starting point, require researchers to make use of these repositories as a condition for applying for funding. The tensions emerge around researchers’ concerns that while these repositories include options for closing sensitive materials to the public, they’re still held online and, as such, are hackable. Researchers’ efforts to remove any personally identifying information prior to depositing data in these repositories doesn’t eliminate the possibility of someone’s face or voice being recognized in the event these materials do find their way into the outside world. As such, researchers who are conducting research on potentially sensitive subject matter often feel they are inappropriate for archiving their data, particularly for older projects in which these online repositories were not discussed as a potential means of archiving or dissemination for the interviews entrusted to us.

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

The US Oral History Association (OHA) has formed a Task Force charged with revisiting the organization’s Principles and Best Practices in light of deregulation and the increasingly authoritarian political climate in the US. The Task Force will be presenting the revised best practices for discussion at the OHA meeting in Montréal in October 2018. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Oral History Society and the Oral History Network of Ireland are organizing what will undoubtedly be an important conference in June 2018 on Dangerous Oral Histories: Risks, Responsibilities, and Rewards. This means there will be lots of opportunities for oral historians to publically discuss the challenges they face in their research, as well as strategies for more effectively anticipating and managing danger, regardless of where and with whom they are conducting interviews.

What self-care strategies do you utilize? Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Exhaustion” by Jessica Cross. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

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Six questions to ask before you hit record

Six questions to ask before you hit record

Erin Jessee’s article “Managing Danger in Oral Historical Fieldwork” in the most recent issue of the OHR provides a litany of practical advice about mitigating risk and promoting security. The entire article is well worth a read, but for the blog we’ve asked Jessee to provide us a list of some of the most important questions for oral historians to think about in evaluating and limiting exposure to risk. Enjoy the response below, and make sure to check out the complete article, where Jessee dives more deeply into the problem and offers an important perspective on the relationship between danger and oral history fieldwork. And make sure to come back to the blog in a couple of weeks for part two of our conversation with Jessee, where we talk about best practices, spotting signs of trauma, the ethics of open access, and more!

The most important thing that oral historians can do is network to establish a community of scholars/practitioners who have experience working in the communities or areas where you plan to conduct your research and who might be more keenly aware of the potential dangers you’ll need to address. It’s particularly important to speak with people who share at least some facets of your identity in terms of gender identity, class background, ethnic heritage, religious beliefs, sexuality, and so on, to better determine how your identity—as perceived by the people you’ll be working closely with—might shape or limit your research and the kinds of questions you can ask. Similarly, in my experience it’s important to evaluate the information that is freely revealed in the course of conversations with experienced scholars/practitioners, but also to consider the silences that might be emerging. Not all scholars/practitioners are comfortable speaking openly about the problems they’ve encountered in their research—particularly if it stems from some real or perceived error on their part—and so these areas of silence can be crucial for anticipating where you might experience potential pitfalls.

To help oral historians anticipate risk, I’d suggest asking the following:

  1. Who are the ideal people within and beyond academia to speak to about my intended research project? In drawing up your list, be sure to consider not only who might constitute ‘experts’ in terms of their overall publication record in relevant fields, but in terms of recent on-the-ground experience conducting qualitative research within and beyond academia. Additionally, consider what is the most appropriate way to approach them for advice.
  2. How might different facets of my identity be perceived by the people I intend to work with? These can shape how people respond to you in interviews and more generally.
  3. Where am I encountering silences? Listen closely during the background research and early conversations you conduct, and consider the extent to which any emergent silences might indicate additional areas of risk or danger that are important to evaluate further prior to starting my fieldwork.

Oral historians should also take the time to consider the various ways that they might be vulnerable within their research projects, and identify the resources available to them in their immediate surroundings aimed at helping them maintain positive mental and physical health. I’d suggest the following questions as starting points:

  1. In what ways might this research project negatively impact my mental and physical health? Think not only about the obvious stressors related to workload and deadlines, but also ways in which your personal experiences and deeply held values might render you vulnerable to transference/countertransference, vicarious trauma, and burn-out, for example, as well as physical danger.
  2. What resources are available to me in my community that I can draw upon to help maintain positive mental and physical health? It’s important to consider not only health services associated with the universities and organizations that you’re working with, but also options external to our places of work, such as 24-hour help lines, community support groups, and so on.
  3. What are some everyday activities that I find enjoyable and relaxing, and that take my mind off my work/research? Focus on arranging your day/week/month to include these activities frequently enough to maximize your potential for resilience throughout the project.

As researchers, it’s important that we incorporate self-care strategies into our everyday lives throughout research projects—not just once we begin to experience poor mental or physical health.

What risks have you encountered in fieldwork, and what strategies have you developed to mitigate them? Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on TwitterFacebookTumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Risk Word Letters Boggle Game” by Wokandapix. CC0 via Pixabay

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Beyond the cold fact: The WPA narratives, Brazil’s black peasants, and the conduct of oral history

Beyond the cold fact: The WPA narratives, Brazil’s black peasants, and the conduct of oral history

Last month the latest issue of the OHR hit the streets, bringing a litany of groundbreaking oral history content. Today we hear from Oscar de la Torre, author of a piece in OHR 44.2 that explored the place of narratives of good masters in the oral memories of Afro-Brazilians. Below, he asks what “layers of meaning” emerge through these recordings that perhaps fall outside the bounds of either purely factual information or oral traditions.

When the 1988 Constitution recognized and gave lands to black rural communities descending from slaves, the black peasants of Brazil made a sudden entrance into the country’s political realm. As they began to embrace their African ancestry and made it to the news all over the country, a number of scholars and journalists scrambled for some research funding, grabbed their recorders, and headed to the remotest corners of the country’s gigantic wilderness to interview these apparently unknown black peasants. It was an endeavor comparable to the famous WPA slave narratives from the Great Depression.

The process of recognizing and titling the black communities started in the 1990s with a technical report clarifying the community’s past ties to slavery, so the first wave of scholars that studied them had the goal of unearthing memories about life under this institution, just as in the case of the WPA narratives. Both sets of interviews tried to rescue experiences from a time when most interviewees were only children, and in the case of Brazil, from an era in which most interviewees had not even been born. In fact, a number of anthropologists from the states of Pará, São Paulo, or Rio de Janeiro, often collected “oral traditions,” more than personal experiences or memories. As we know, oral traditions can under certain premises be used to accompany and complement historical studies, but they need to be carefully managed, and cross-examined with other sources. Instead, a number of the early reports on the Brazilian black communities took oral traditions just as factual evidence, dismissing the rich but often ignored symbolic load that they carried. A recent PhD thesis written in Amazonia, for example, took the stories about a well where the former slaves were buried without proper rituals as factual evidence, when it is highly likely that this story symbolizes a shared past marked by collective trauma and abuse, more so than indicating a specific place where this happened.

As we know, oral traditions can under certain premises be used to accompany and complement historical studies, but they need to be carefully managed, and cross-examined with other sources.

The Brazilian scholars who collected oral histories during the 1990s and 2000s also worked under tight schedules, because some black communities started the process of official recognition as a way of stopping the land grabs of landowners and agribusiness during those years. Working to meet tight deadlines meant that some early studies lacked a deeper consideration of the type of evidence they had in their hands. In the Trombetas River (Amazonia), for example, the report published in 1991 relied on a number of oral myths and stories understood as quasi-factual evidence from the time of slavery. For example, an oral narrative about an elderly woman who was also a powerful spiritual leader at the time some maroon communities were created was interpreted as a signpost that this woman was already old during the early 1800s. Shortly afterwards, a historian found a travelogue featuring a photograph of the same woman taken in 1902. The narrative, in other words, had been used as factual evidence in a somewhat careless manner. Like this, other reports written in the provinces of Maranhão, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, or Bahia, gave a somewhat superficial treatment to the oral traditions conveyed by the black peasants, especially at the beginning.

Cases such as these point to the fact that there are still numerous stories and layers of meaning waiting to be probed in studies about black oral traditions in Brazil. The Oral History and Image Laboratory from Rio de Janeiro’s Federal Fluminense University or UFF, or the Federal University of Maranhão, are repositories of a large number of interviews with slave-descendants from the 1980s and beyond waiting to be interrogated with new questions in mind. If researchers can approach them formulating imaginative questions that point not to slavery, but to events experienced after it was abolished, and if they can approach them with new conceptual tools drawn from cultural and media studies, such collections can bear a number of valuable lessons and relate a number of interesting stories. My Oral History Review article, “Sites of Memory and Time Slips,” points to two of these concepts, but there are more. Why are there no literary studies of the figure of the patriarchal slaveowner, for example? Why has no one investigated yet the relationships between discourses about slaveowners and post-emancipation landowners? Why has no one interrogated the gender roles and representations of both black peasant women and affluent white women embedded in these sets of memories? To the best of my knowledge, there is also little to nothing published on the racial categories and representations that rural Brazilians employ in their daily life.

Oral histories about black peasants in Brazil, in sum, are newer than in the U.S. They have not experienced as many waves of scholarship as the WPA narratives, which have been alternatively embraced and rebutted by scholars like Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Leon Litwack, Eugene Genovese, Ira Berlin, Sharon Musher, or Michael Gomez, ever since they were published in the 1940s. That is why there is still substantial room to tackle them with new questions, new concepts, and new approaches. Our beloved oral histories constitute a kind of evidence that will yield rich and nuanced responses about the history of rural Brazilians–and about the history of American ones as well, once someone starts a comparative study. But in order to do so, they demand to be treated with a sensitive eye, an open-minded ear, and an imaginative tackle.

Featured image: “Vallée de l’Amazone de Faro a Alemquer, Rio Trombetas – Rio Ariramba” by Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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