Anti-oppression after collecting your interviews

Anti-Oppression PSN Series Chat #1: Anti-oppression after collecting your interviews

Thursday, September 18th
4:00 - 5:15pm EST

There is a max of 7 spots available for this Video Chat. To participate, register via EventBrite using the button below. We ask participants to make a sliding scale donation of $3-$10 to reserve your spot. Your donation will help us continue to organize and offer these chats in the future!

Eventbrite - Anti-Oppression PSN Series Video Chat #1: Anti-oppression after collecting your interviews

Co-facilitators

  • Manissa Maharawal, Writer, Scholar, Activist (manissamaharawal.net)
  • Shane Bernardo, Detroit Asian Youth Project and EarthWorks

In this first chat of the Groundswell PSN Anti-Oppression series, we will use the major themes of anti-oppression organizing to explore the phase of an oral history project that comes after the interviews have been collected and organized. In asking questions about where the interviews should be archived, what should be made public, and what kinds of events and programming are most effective for revolutionary change, we will pay close attention to anti-oppression principles. This PSN is open to practitioners in all stages of a project, but we will focus our conversation on how anti-oppression principles can inform the decisions we make and products we create after interviews have already been completed.

Groundswell’s Practitioner Support Network (PSN) and Anti-Oppression working groups are teaming up this Fall 2014 to offer a 5-part  “anti-oppression and oral history” PSN chat series. Each chat will look at one specific moment in the process of doing oral history and consider how an anti-oppression approach impacts our practice: 

  1. Anti-oppression after collecting your interviews
  2. The principles of allyship for oral historians
  3. Building anti-oppression principles and practices into your project at the design/proposal stage
  4. Before recording begins: using anti-oppression in the pre-interview process
  5. Power dynamics and anti-oppression within the space of the interview

Ultimately, we aim to create a textual resource (medium to be determined) aimed at social justice oral historians. The PSN series will give us a strong sense of the kinds of questions that oral historians are asking with regards to anti-oppression work. We would like for this document to be something of a handbook for incorporating anti-oppression into the entire oral history project from start to finish.

The principles of allyship for oral historians

Anti-Oppression PSN Series Chat #2: The principles of allyship for oral historians

Tuesday, October 21st
1:00 - 2:15pm EST

There is a max of 7 spots available for this Video Chat. To participate, register via EventBrite using the button below. We ask participants to make a sliding scale donation of $3-$10 to reserve your spot. Groundswell members participate for free.  Click here to join Groundswell and get your PSN "promo" code.

Eventbrite - Anti-Oppression PSN Series Video Chat #2: The principles of allyship for oral historians

Co-facilitators

  • David Spataro, Activist & Scholar
  • Shane Bernardo, Detroit Asian Youth Project and EarthWorks

Allyship is a fundamental concept in anti-oppression organizing, and it has become especially important in projects where organizers are situated in different positions within the structure of race, class, gender, and sexuality oppression. In this PSN chat we will talk about how the concept of allyship fits (or does not fit) within the context of an oral history project. In the instances where oral historians have access to different sources of privilege and power (institutional funding, educational privilege, mobility, white skin privilege and so forth), do the principles of allyship help to make oral history projects stronger? Finally, we will also explore criticisms of the ‘ally industrial complex,’ talk about the shortcomings of the misuse and overuse of allyship, and look at recent calls for people with privilege to become ‘accomplices’ not allies.

Groundswell’s Practitioner Support Network (PSN) and Anti-Oppression working groups are teaming up this Fall 2014 to offer a 5-part  “anti-oppression and oral history” PSN chat series. Each chat will look at one specific moment in the process of doing oral history and consider how an anti-oppression approach impacts our practice: 

  1. Anti-oppression after collecting your interviews
  2. The principles of allyship for oral historians
  3. Building anti-oppression principles and practices into your project at the design/proposal stage
  4. Before recording begins: using anti-oppression in the pre-interview process
  5. Power dynamics and anti-oppression within the space of the interview

Ultimately, we aim to create a textual resource (medium to be determined) aimed at social justice oral historians. The PSN series will give us a strong sense of the kinds of questions that oral historians are asking with regards to anti-oppression work. We would like for this document to be something of a handbook for incorporating anti-oppression into the entire oral history project from start to finish.

Reportback: What lessons can radical oral history/storytelling projects draw from the concepts and practices of anti-oppression organizing?

How can oral historians make the concepts and training tools of anti-racist and anti-oppression organizing useful in oral history work?  On this PSN video chat, we’ll draw on our collective knowledge and experience to imagine together what an anti-oppression framework for doing oral history might include.

Read More

Reportback: Movement Archives Part 2: Getting Oral Histories In!

Issues to consider in selecting an archive for an oral history collection:

*It’s best to negotiate a signed archive agreement in advance of conducting the interviews so that legal and donor issues are spelled out. This is a long-term relationship that must be worked out carefully, but by doing negotiating in advance, you have more control.

Read More

UF Oral History Program Digs Deep in the Delta

in ,

Every year in late summer, a team of researchers at the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) in Gainesville pack into two vans and head north to visit the Deep South for a week. SPOHP director Paul Ortiz began conducting oral history field work in the Mississippi Delta in 1995 as a graduate research coordinator of the NEH-sponsored Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Read More

Creating a BOOK and SOLIDARITY at the same time!

in

Los Otros Dreamers, The Book started with a preoccupation that is familiar to all of us: How do I get these powerful stories off my laptop and out into the world? How can I bring the transformative process of telling and hearing these stories aloud to the communities that are most affected by the traumas and challenges of our region’s inhumane immigration policies?

Read More