As oral historians, our source of inquiry and creativity is the embodied language through which the personal becomes historical. If language surrounds, contains, and articulates all of the work of oral history, why not design our projects with very intentional attention towards it and its use? How would project design be if we de-center dominant linguistic standards and, instead, center the language needs of our participants? In this workshop we’ll discuss what Language Access and Justice could look like as actions and values inseparable from the work of oral history. We will pay particular attention to designing projects that create access for and welcome narrators who are most comfortable using Spanish in English-dominated spaces.
Fernanda Espinosa is an oral history-based practitioner and cultural organizer based in New York and Ecuador and originally from the Andes. She approaches storytelling as one of the many ways of transmitting knowledge and her analysis and practice are deeply embedded in interrogating colonial standards, including story forms. Since 2014 she has been generating, listening to, and interpreting oral histories to inform creative public interventions that aspire to act as platforms for resistance and dialogue. Espinosa holds a degree in Oral History from Columbia University, where her thesis was awarded the 2018 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. She led community partnerships with StoryCorps from 2018 to 2020, and is the recipient, along with her collaborator, of the 2020 MDOC Storyteller's Institute Fellowship. Fernanda is also the co-founder and coordinator of Cooperativa Cultural 19 de enero (CC 1/19), a wandering art and oral transmissions collaboration.
Allison Corbett (she/her) is a Spanish<>English interpreter, oral historian and language justice advocate. Over the last ten years, she has worked in both large institutions and grassroots community settings to advance equitable cross-language communication and listening and has facilitated workshops on language justice for a diverse set of audiences, including community organizers, educators, literary professionals, and volunteer collectives. Allison graduated from the Oral History MA Program in 2015 and founded the Language of Justice Project in 2016, a bilingual multimedia oral history project that celebrates and recognizes the work of people who create and maintain multilingual spaces in community organizing and social movement-building. She currently works on the Language Access team at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.
Sponsored by: OHMA and
