MARCH PSN: Success Stories: From Oral History to Social Change

January 15, 2016 by Michael Falco in Civil Rights, Anti-Oppression, Class Ethnicity & Race, Gender

What 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.

PSN Reportback: Lost in Translation? Oral History Across Languages

November 09, 2015 by Michael Falco in Class Ethnicity & Race, Anti-Oppression, Civil Rights

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.

UF Oral History Program Digs Deep in the Delta

October 04, 2013 by Michael Falco in Civil Rights, Class Ethnicity & Race

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.