Oral History for Social Change
Groundswell is a dynamic network of oral historians, activists, cultural workers, community organizers, and documentary artists.
Indigenous-led movements like that to protect the water at Standing Rock highlight the power of ancestral wisdom in transformative change. As movement-oriented oral historians and practitioners, how can the process and practice of oral history help us root ourselves in the wisdom of our own traditions and ancestors?
Read MoreWhat does it take to move from oral history to actual change? As practitioners seeking to engage oral history as a method for not only documenting, but actively contributing to social change, we often talk a lot about our struggles. But we also need to celebrate and learn from our victories! In this special PSN video chat, we invite three practitioners to share how they’ve successfully engaged oral history in service of social justice.
Read MoreIn this Practitioner Support Network video chat, we will discuss the potential and special challenges of interviewing about the body, and will develop strategies for interviews focused on embodied experience such as breastfeeding, living with a disability, being transgender, or dancing as well as strategies for keeping the body in focus in all of our work.
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This reportback shares our thoughts on what it might look like to bring a language justice perspective to oral history practice. The notion of “language justice” recognizes that language is power. Language can be both a tool of domination and oppression as well as a powerful means for facilitating inclusive democracy and cross-community movement building and learning. Interviewing and sharing oral histories across languages presents unique opportunities and challenges. In this chat, we explored participants’ experiences, questions and strategies around navigating the technical and ethical issues that arise in doing oral history in bilingual and multilingual environments.
Read MoreIn this chat, we’ll explore participants’ experiences, questions and strategies around navigating the technical and ethical issues that arise in doing oral history in bilingual and multilingual environments. Together, we’ll consider what it might look like to bring a language justice perspective to oral history practice.
Read MoreEvery 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 MoreThe idea for hosting a blog to share our student interns’ reflections on their oral history and documentary work with farmworkers came up during our biannual documentary advisory meeting.
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