What is Oral History and What is It Good For?
In our storytelling-obsessed era, what does oral history offer to researchers, artists, students, organizers, journalists, public historians and teachers? In this interactive workshop, participants will be introduced to the basics of oral history practice -- planning a project, conducting an interview, and curating oral histories for the public – and will explore how tools from the oral historian’s toolkit can be useful to their practice. Participants will get hands-on practice in oral history interviewing, a crash course in broadcast-quality audio recording, and an introduction to oral history ethics, best practices and technological tools.
Amy Starecheski, Co-Director of the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University, is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose research focuses on the use of oral history in social movements and the politics of urban property. She was a lead interviewer on Columbia’s September 11, 2001 Narrative and Memory Project, for which she interviewed Afghans, Muslims, Sikhs, activists, low-income people, and the unemployed. Starecheski is a member of the Core Working Group for Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change, where she facilitates the Practitioner Support Network. In 2015 she won the Oral History Association’s article award for “Squatting History: The Power of Oral History as a History-Making Practice” and in 2016 she was awarded the Sapiens-Allegra “Will the Next Margaret Mead Please Stand Up?” prize for public anthropological writing. She received a PhD in cultural anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she was a Public Humanities Fellow. Her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, was published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press.
Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts Program is the first program of its kind in the United States: a one-year interdisciplinary MA degree training students in oral history method and theory.