In Solidarity: A Statement from OHMA

The racist killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and now Rayshard Brooks, coming on top of 400 years of oppression and state-sanctioned violence against Black people in North America, fill us with grief and rage. While the historic uprising of the past weeks has been inspiring, exciting, and challenging, we know, and we are reminded, that the work of dismantling white supremacy is hard and it will be long. As we support and join with New York and global protests that challenge policing and systemic racism, we know there is also work for us to do from within a predominantly white, elite institution. I know this personally as a white person in a position of leadership.

Every fall I teach a class on doing oral history from an anti-oppression perspective to our new cohort. We talk about how this work has to happen both in our practices as oral historians, and in our work to develop the field of oral history. We talk about how, in our interviews, we have to ask white people about race, and not bolster the assumption of whiteness as a neutral identity. We talk about how it is not enough for our institutions to “welcome diversity” – we need to change so that we are no longer white institutions that welcome in people of color, but are truly led by people of color in ways that transform our work. All of this talk is important – as oral historians we know that listening and speaking can be transformative - and we do some work to back it up, but we see this moment as an opportunity to do more.

In the past few weeks I have been pondering how OHMA can deepen our work to challenge structural oppression, and white supremacy and anti-Black racism in particular. I asked myself, and our community, “What do we have, and what can we do?” With the support of our faculty and staff, I am sharing the following plans and thoughts:

We have authority, as one of the oldest and largest oral history programs in the world, and as an Ivy League institution. We recognize that privilege, even as we seek to undermine it. We can use that authority to challenge what counts as oral history, to lift up the voices of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) oral historians. In our syllabi and in our public programming, we commit to continuing and intensifying our work to center the ideas, practices and writing of Black, people of color, and Indigenous oral historians.

The majority of our students, the speakers in our Thursday evening public programming series and the instructors in our Saturday workshops are BIPOC. We direct most of our financial aid to BIPOC students. This is intentional, and we pledge to continue it.

Some of our syllabi, including mine, too much reflect the overall predominance of white voices in the oral history literature. We can and will do better. Over the summer, we will be working to center the knowledge of BIPOC more in our syllabi.

We have a space to think. The training, experiences and identities of the people facilitating those spaces in our classrooms will shape the conversations we have.

Our faculty has not represented the diversity of our world, or of our student body. We have to do better. For the 2020-21 academic year we are thrilled to welcome Sara Sinclair and Zaheer Ali to our faculty. Sara will be teaching Indigenous Oral Traditions and Anti-colonial Oral Histories and Zaheer will be teaching Listening After the Interview: Oral History as Archive & Historical Method.

As a team, our faculty and staff will be participating in an anti-oppression training this summer, with a particular focus on understanding and fighting anti-Black racism. We will work as a group to develop shared strategies across our classes so that our incredibly diverse students can learn from and with each other. We must be able to vigorously challenge each other and open ourselves to receiving such challenges while also not allowing microaggressions and other expressions of white supremacy and structural oppression in our classes.

We are teachers. It has been an extraordinary experience for us during this pandemic to take our public training workshops online, and see the large global audiences we have been able to serve and connect with.

This summer, we will be offering a free, public training series sharing a range of decolonized and anti-oppression approaches to doing oral history work. Donations will be welcomed, and anything we raise beyond the cost of paying the instructors will go to a grant for an incoming Black student. Stay tuned for registration info for these later this month.

We have a community. On our student and alumni listserv some of us have been sharing how we are contributing to the work of challenging white supremacy, from protesting in the streets to organizing in our communities to having difficult conversations with family members. This has been inspiring.

For many in the OHMA community, the work of dismantling structural oppression and decolonizing our world has been and will continue to be central to our work. We invite you to check out some of these projects.

As a program, we commit to supporting spaces for Black, Indigenous and people of color staff, students and faculty to convene and build community amongst themselves, in whatever configurations and for whatever purposes they find most useful. As a leader, I welcome and commit to listening carefully to any ideas, requests, and critiques that come out of these spaces. We also commit to an expectation that white students also take responsibility for this shared work

As oral historians, our work is to listen. We understand that dialogue itself can be a site where power is grappled with and contested. As educators, we create supportive spaces where we can all be challenged to take risks, to grow, and to change. We pledge to use these skills and our resources to engage actively in the long, hard, essential work of undoing white supremacy and colonialism, and challenging all forms of structural oppression.

Black Lives Matter!

In solidarity,

Amy Starecheski

Announcing the 2019 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award Winner and Runners Up!

In November of 2015, Jeffrey H. Brodsky, OHMA alum, announced a generous cash prize of $3000 for an outstanding capstone/thesis.  The criteria for receiving the award is that the capstone/thesis must “make an important contribution to knowledge and exemplify the rigor, creativity and ethical integrity we teach our students.”  For his own thesis Jeffrey conducted over 60 hours of videotaped interviews with politicians on their memories of their first campaigns.  He created a video documentary based on his interviews, one of the first multimedia theses in our program, and was advised by OHMA co-founder Peter Bearman.
 
This year, our fourth awarding this prize, we had an exciting and varied pool of theses and capstones to consider. We are proud to announce the winner, Carlin Liu Zia, and three runners up, Kim-Hee Wong, Tomoko Hiramoto and Lynn Lewis. All three of these works have made unique and innovative contributions to oral history theory and practice. We are excited to share them with the world and honor the hard and important work of these emergent oral historians.

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Winner

Uncertain Journeys. By Carlin Liu Zia.

Thesis Advisor: Mary Marshall Clark

Careful about every phrase, every pronoun, every silence and hesitation, Carlin Zia demonstrates how closely the acts of speaking and writing and visual memory intersect as she transcribes the story of  her grandfather’s migration from China to the United States as told to her over two years. As Luisa Passerini has written, oral history is more than direct memory; it is in its deepest sense cultural memory: where poetry, visuality and narrative meet.  In Uncertain Journeys, a title with great meaning for our world, Carlin invites us to join her in the journey from the past to the future by also writing about her own life. She is inspired by the oral history conversation with her grandfather and the literal journey she takes back to Changzhou, his home city in China, to encounter the palimpsests of memory that words alone cannot evoke. The journey, in the words of Luisa Passerini, is one from memory to utopia.

As Carlin writes the story of her journey, with questions that arise from the translation of her grandfather’s journey, she invokes the words of Italo Calvino, the Italian folklorist and author.  I will reinvoke Calvino’s words here (because they belong with my own visual memory of Carlin carrying his well-worn book Invisible Cities  into my office so many times).

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles or the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

And Carlin, in visiting her grandfather’s home in the midst of writing her thesis – the city of Changzhou – returns to us the palimpsest where visual, aural and written memory combine to produce an irreducible artifact of memory. This palimpsest is a library (a place of great meaning to Carlin and her grandfather).

We reach the big intersection at the southeast corner of the old Cultural Palace Park and this time stay straight to cross instead of making our way right. There have been pedestrians cued up at the inside corner, but when we get there we see there is really no walkway to speak of, just a long bike lane. We set out, single file. I am at the front again, which I am ambivalent about. I’d rather be at the back so that I am the buffer against oncoming bikes and protecting these kinds of relatives I have put in dangerous situations, but I also like the feeling of trailblazing! Of being the explorer. (Indiana F. Jones is back…)

Later in the story, after Carlin has fully told her grandfather’s story, well as much as he would tell her, and all the relatives were safely returned, Carlin’s own voice bursts forth to make sense of many hundred hours of scribing another’s.

The sky has set out the open window of this café. In all essays, it seems, there’s a reveal of a revelation, a Redcrosse falling into the water revelatory coincidence of meaning, a turn. After weeks and weeks or the equivalent energy of staring, sorting, resorting, analyzing, the storyteller suddenly, by a hair, sees/remembers -  this seemingly irrelevant thing, element, conversation and it throws all that has been labored into transformative relief.

Because of Carlin’s willingness to take an uncertain journey, one in which the past is not quite clear and the future is still hazy, she  makes it possible for us to glide along with her across the sea from the beginning of her grandfather’s journey through to her/our own. We ‘see’ the glistening of the oceans that connect her to him, as well as nooks and crevices in the durable brick house in Raleigh, North Carolina where her grandfather and grandmother landed and only recently left. We will not forget how both their hands touched the door of the Library in Changzhou, and each other’s, and then reached out …..perhaps towards us.

We read, hear, and see (in words) the material power of this migratory love, a story that might be the most important story for the world to hear now.

The pages of the book Carlin made, and handcrafted, burst with visuality, sound, and sight in a synesthesia of emotion, desire, and the burning desire to know.  To explore the known in relation to the unknown. In doing so Carlin has reminded us that oral history is no less than poetry unbound. And as Audre Lorde’s work teaches us, poetry might just ignite a revolution of love where hope and desire meet to create a better future, of the kind the Zia family fought for.

It is for these reasons that we award Carlin Zia the 2019 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award.

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Runner Up

He Lei Wāhine: Oral History Through a Hawaiian Lens. By Kim-Hee Wong.

Thesis Advisors: Amy Starecheski and Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart

Kim-Hee Wong interviewed Native Hawaiian female leaders - wāhine mana. To do this work, she developed a methodology and theoretical framework that integrates academic approaches to oral history with Hawaiian oral traditions and language, indigenizing the western practice of oral history. Kim-Hee’s work is deeply grounded in her knowledge and practice of Native Hawaiian oral history practices and epistemologies, such a “talk story” as a form of dialogic conversation, and hula as a language for embodied historical memory. In her thesis, she seamlessly weaves together the work of indigenous scholars, the literature of academic oral history, and her own subjectivity, embodied knowledge, and voice. The online version of the project allows us to hear narrators’ voices, and move in a less linear way through Kim-Hee’s ideas. Her is a critical contribution to an oral history practice that moves beyond an individualistic vision of personhood, a linear sense of time, and a disembodied imaginary of the interview.

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Runner Up

Restoring Testimonies: Rediscovering the Individual & Unfolding Memory in Hibakusha Narratives. By Tomoko Hiramoto.

Thesis Advisor: Mary Marshall Clark

Tomoko Hiramoto interviewed Hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. By comparing the narratives co-produced through an oral history process with hibakusha’s pre-existing public testimonies, she shows the gaps between a public, collective memory and the more intimate, dialogic public memory of an oral history. She expertly situates her findings in the history of public memory about the atomic bomb, both in Japan and internationally, with a focus on American understandings of this event. She not only demonstrates what is obscured in ritualized collective memory, but shows us the specific historical contexts through which these narratives were produced and solidified. In order to get beyond the “restrictions” of public testimony, she develops innovative interviewing methodologies, including the use of colorized archival photos, long, iterative interviews, and a deep reflective process as an interviewer. She finds that anger, hopelessness, experiences that cannot be verbalized, and ongoing pain and trauma shape the hibakusha’s experiences as much as a desire for peace and a healing trajectory do. Tomoko’s work has important theoretical and methodological applications, but her larger aim is to keep these experiences alive and relevant, to maintain these memories of war as part of a long-term project of peace-making, as ritualized testimonies lose their power.

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Runner Up

The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project: Don’t Talk About Us, Talk With Us! By Lynn Lewis

Thesis Advisors: Amy Starecheski and Bill McAllister

Lynn Lewis created an ongoing oral history project to document and activate the history of Picture the Homeless, a pioneering homeless-led grassroots organizing organization which she led for seventeen years. In her thesis, she shares and analyzes findings from the initial phases of work, and describes her innovative methodological approach, combining content analysis, participatory action research, and community organizing into what she calls “participatory oral history.” As an experienced community organizer, Lynn articulates and builds on the resonances between oral history practice, social science, and community organizing, as well as the differences. Like oral historians, organizers seek to identify themes and analyses that resonate across individuals’ stories. Like social scientists they seek powerful critical understandings of what makes the world work. Lynn developed innovative tools to involve diverse narrators in the ongoing and demanding process of analyzing and disseminating a collection of interviews, building on the process of analyzing and approving their own transcripts. Lynn’s thesis both provides the seeds for a much-needed critical history of Picture the Homeless, and analyzes how collective memory and storytelling have played a role in PTH’s successes.