October 2014 PSN: What can oral historians learn from the Belfast Oral History Project case?

What can oral historians learn from the Belfast Oral History Project case?

Sinn Fein Protest, Downpatrick, against shooting death of PIRA man Colm Marks by the RUC, 1990s. Bobbie Hanvey, photographer. Image bh011750, Bobbie Hanvey Photographic Archives, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. This image is part of a series of images found at: hdl.handle.net/2345/1926

Friday, October 24th, 2014

1:00 - 2:15 PM EST

There is a max of 8 spots available for this PSN 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.

Co-Facilitators: Maggie Lemere, Zoë West, Cindy Choung

A broad discussion about the Belfast Oral History Project. Questions we hope to explore in the chat include: How can we ensure protection to narrators when our promises of confidentiality are jeopardized by unchecked government surveillance and the threat of subpoenas? What are some practical measures we can take about confidentiality, both as individuals and as a community of oral historians? What does the Belfast case say to the public about oral history? Could the Belfast case make oral historians overly cautious? Should there be a distinct line between oral history and journalism? If so, where is that line and how does it influence the rights and obligations of the interviewee and the interviewer? What are the ethical responsibilities expected of oral historians when it comes to crimes revealed by interviewees? What are the implications of the Belfast case for doing oral history with activists and communities who engage in civil disobedience, direct action and/or armed resistance? How can the Belfast situation be turned into a positive for the oral history community?

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November 2014 PSN: How can we engage oral history to help today's activists learn from our movement past?

A new generation of Cascadia Forest Defenders blockades the Elliot State Forest in 2009, drawing on a history of blockades and direct action in Oregon's forests since the early 90's. 

How can we engage oral history to help today's activists learn from our movement past?

Thursday, November 20th

12:00 - 1:15pm EST

There is a max of 8 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.

Co-Facilitators:

• Kiera 'Loki' Shackleton, artist, PhD Researcher and lapsed Earth First! activist.
• Sarah K. Loose, Groundswell Co-Coordinator and Coordinator of the Rural Organizing Project's Roots & Wings Oral History Project 

Don't reinvent the wheel. If we don't know our history, we're condemned to repeat it. History is a weapon of the oppressed. Part of the promise of oral history for organizers, activists and movement leaders is to help us learn from the success and mistakes of our movement elders.  But how does that happen? 

What questions can we ask to draw out the knowledge and lessons that will be useful to us today? How can we solicit the perspectives of 'others' or outsiders in ways that are useful or that offer critical insights on movement building and tactics? What are the best formats for sharing interviews with activists in order to facilitate critical reflection and generate strategic conversation about the present and future of our work? How can we learn from the past while also recognizing the unique and changing context of our present and future? In doing this work, how do we balance our roles as activists and researchers?

In this chat, we'll draw on the experiences of call facilitators and participants to explore the utility - and challenges - of using oral history to "learn from our past."

December 2014 PSN: Indicating editing

Indicating Editing

Wednesday, December 10th

1:00 - 2:15pm EST

There is a max of 8 spots available for this PSN 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.

Co-Facilitators:

• Amy Starecheski, Associate Director, Columbia Oral History MA Program; Member, Groundswell PSN Working Group
• Sara Sinclair, Program Manager, Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project, Columbia Center for Oral History Research

As oral historians continue to develop their collective audio editing skills and editing audio at the request of a narrator has become feasible for many, an issue has arisen for which there seems to be no standard in the field. Should we show where an interviewee has edited a transcript or audio tape? If so, how? If not, why not? What if they have deleted content? What if the content is only closed for a period of time? Do we treat this differently from a permanent deletion? 

This question raises questions central to the field of oral history in new ways. How do we balance the privacy and authority of the narrator with the researcher’s desire to know everything possible about how the document was created? Who keeps the unedited drafts of oral history tapes and transcripts, and why? If oral history is a primary source document, what part of the complex, drawn-out, intersubjective process becomes a source, and what becomes a secret? This topic also brings up a fundamental question that is especially relevant when doing oral history with communities that have been historically marginalized and oppressed: To whom are oral historians accountable and how do we balance multiple "accountabilities"? 

September 2014 PSN: Letting go of the one-on-one interview?

Letting Go of the One-On-One Interview?

Monday, September 15th

1:00 - 2:15pm EST

There is a max of 8 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!

Co-Facilitators:

• Rebecca Lorins, Texas After Violence Project
• Sarah K. Loose, Groundswell Co-Coordinator and Coordinator of the Rural Organizing Project's Roots & Wings Oral History Project 

Oral history is most often seen as a practice that takes place between one interviewer and one narrator, in an exchange that prioritizes an individual's personal story and experiences. What impact does this highly individual nature of oral history have in doing social movement and community-oriented oral history projects? Might it reinforce an overly-individualistic view of history and movements? When should we let go of the one-on-one interview?

In this chat, we'll explore the utility of formats other than the one-on-one interview for doing oral history. What is the value of group or collective interviewing, especially in cultures and groups where community and the collective are highly valued, or in applied oral history projects with clear organizing or community-building goals? What are the challenges of having multiple voices in an interview space and navigating those power dynamics? What skills are needed to facilitate group interviews - and how are these different from or the same as the skills for a one-on-one interview? Finally, what collective methods do (or could) communities/groups use to share and present their multi-vocal stories? 

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!

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

Groundswell's Anti-Oppression 5-Part PSN Series

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 - September 18th, 2014
2. The principles of allyship for oral historians - October 21st, 2014
3. Before recording begins: using anti-oppression in the pre-interview process - February 25th, 2015
4. Power dynamics and anti-oppression within the space of the interview - March 25th, 2015
5. Building anti-oppression principles and practices into your project at the design/proposal stage - Date TBD

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.