[Amy Starecheski]

Join us for an intensive day of workshops with OHMA faculty and alumni!

Registration
<http://www.eventbrite.com/o/columbia-oral-history-ma-program-3604748837?s=50129494&gt;
is
now open for our *ONE-DAY ORAL HISTORY TRAINING WORKSHOPS* on *Saturday,
January 20, 2018, from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m*.

*Location*: *Hamilton Hall* [Campus map.
<http://www.columbia.edu/files/columbia/content/morningsidemap_2013july.pdf>%5D
Room assignments vary by workshop.

*Registration*:* $30 – 100 per workshop, sliding scale*

For our oral history workshops, please pay what you can. We suggest $30 for
students, recent graduates, or others who are financially constrained,
while we suggest that professionals and those with more resources should
pay more.

All profits from these events go towards our annual merit scholarship for
an incoming OHMA student.

*Schedule at a Glance: *Click on the links below to register or review full
course descriptions and faculty bios.

*9:30AM-12:30PM: INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOPS*

– *Oral History and Research*
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-history-and-research-tickets-40038186293&gt;,
with Mary Marshall Clark: 306 Hamilton
– *Oral History 101
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-history-101-tickets-40040685769&gt;,* with
Amy Starecheski: 309 Hamilton
– *Introduction to Oral History for Writers
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-oral-history-for-writers-tickets-40040885366&gt;,
*with
Gerry Albarelli: 313 Hamilton
– *Introduction to Oral History for Social Change
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-oral-history-for-social-change-tickets-40038300635&gt;,
*with
Fanny Garcia: 315 Hamilton
– *Introduction to Community-Based Oral History Projects*
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-community-based-oral-history-projects-tickets-40040752970&gt;
*, *with Benji de la Piedra: 316 Hamilton

*2PM-5PM: FOCUSED WORKSHOPS*

– *Oral History and Human Rights Work*
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-history-and-human-rights-work-tickets-40034341794&gt;,
with Mary Marshall Clark: 306 Hamilton
– *Archiving Oral Histories*
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/archiving-oral-histories-tickets-40035666757&gt;,
with Kimberly Springer: 309 Hamilton
– *Oral Historian as Guide: Finding Your Voice in Narratives Based on
Oral Histories
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-historian-as-guide-finding-your-voice-in-narratives-based-on-oral-histories-tickets-40040947552&gt;,
*Nyssa
Chow: 313 Hamilton
– *Oral History and Interactive Storytelling
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-history-and-interactive-storytelling-tickets-40036659727&gt;,
*with
Whitney Dow: 315 Hamilton
– *Self-care Strategies for Oral Historians
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/self-care-strategies-for-oral-historians-tickets-40035752012&gt;,
*with
Liz Strong: 316 Hamilton

*Prospective Students: *OHMA will be offering an application fee waiver for
all attendees of our 2018 One-Day Oral History Training Workshops! Please
email us at ohma@columbia.edu once you’ve submitted your application so
that we can send the waiver to Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences.

We will also be hosting our annual *Spring Open House
<http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/calendar/People/jan-18-ohma-spring-open-house&gt;
*that
very same week on the evening of *Thursday, January 18, 2018*! If you are
interested in applying to OHMA and would like to meet with our directors or
sit in on a class while you’re in town for either event, please write us to
schedule your visit.

*Sponsors*: OHMA’s One-Day Oral History Training Workshops are part of the
Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series, co-sponsored by the Columbia Center for
Oral History Research <http://www.ccohr.incite.columbia.edu/&gt; (CCOHR) and
the Oral History Master of Arts Program <http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/&gt;
(OHMA).

Support from the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics
<http://www.incite.columbia.edu/&gt; (INCITE) is provided for programming that
embodies late Professor Paul Lazarsfeld’s commitment to improving
methodological approaches that address concerns of vital cultural and
social significance.

For more information, please email Jamie Beckenstein, Administrative
Coordinator for OHMA & INCITE, at jb3927@columbia.edu.

*WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS:*

*Morning Workshops, 9:30AM-12:30PM*

*Oral History and Research
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-history-and-research-tickets-40038186293&gt;,
Mary Marshall Clark*

Oral history is a form of biographical, social, economic, political and
cultural research – contributing to an understanding of the many ways in
which the past influences our thinking about the present and the future.
This workshop will focus on ways in which oral history as a form of
interdisciplinary research can contribute new knowledge and the development
of unique primary sources. Practical aspects of the workshop will include
thinking about how to design oral history research projects, and how to
read and analyze narrative sources.

*Mary Marshall Clark is the director of the Columbia Center for Oral
History Research (CCOHR). Mary Marshall is also the co-founder and
co-director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts degree program. Mary
Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, and was
president of the Oral History Association in 2001-2002. She was a founding
member of the International Oral History Association.*

*Mary Marshall teaches and writes on issues of memory, the mass media,
trauma, and ethics in oral history. She was the co-principal investigator,
with Peter Bearman, of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and
Memory Project, and directed related projects on the aftermath of September
11th in New York City. Mary Marshall’s current work focuses on the global
impact of U.S. torture and detention policies, focusing on Guantánamo.
Mary Marshall is an editor of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember
September 11, 2001 and the Years that Followed, published by The New Press
in September 2011.*

*Oral History 101
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-history-101-tickets-40040685769&gt;, Amy
Starecheski*

What is oral history, and what is it good for? In a storytelling-obsessed
era, what does oral history offer to researchers, artists, students,
organizers, journalists, and teachers? In this Oral History 101 workshop,
participants will be introduced to the basics of oral history practice —
planning a project and conducting an interview – and will explore how tools
from the oral historian’s toolkit can be useful to their practice.

*Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose
research focuses on property and history in cities. She co-directs the Oral
History MA Program at Columbia University. She consults and lectures widely
on oral history education and methods, and is co-author of the Telling
Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide. Amy has a PhD in cultural anthropology
from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters
Became Homeowners in New York City, came out in 2016 with the University of
Chicago Press. In 2016 she won the SAPIENS-Allegra “Will the Next Margaret
Mead Please Stand Up?” prize for public anthropology writing.*

*Introduction to Oral History for Writers
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-oral-history-for-writers-tickets-40040885366&gt;,
Gerry Albarelli*

Oral history reminds us that people are natural storytellers. The oral
history interview also gives writers unusual access—to the past; to stories
they may not have heard otherwise; to important stories in danger of being
lost forever; to the liveliness of speech; to small worlds within our
larger world. The oral history interview also poses a particular—and
particularly interesting—challenge to writers: What do we do with multiple
perspectives on a single event? How do we confront the mystery of what, if
anything, actually happened?

Participants will be introduced to interviewing techniques that tend to
lead to rich, anecdotal testimony. This workshop will be structured around
two questions: How does one earn the right to hear the important
story? Having heard the story, how does a writer earn the right to re-tell
it?

*Gerry Albarelli is author of Teacha! Stories from a Yeshiva (Glad Day
Books, 2001), chronicling his experience as a non-Jew teaching English as a
second language to Yiddish-speaking Hasidic boys at a yeshiva in Brooklyn.
He has published essays, poems and stories in numerous anthologies and
reviews, includingAcoma, The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, Global City
Review, The Breast, and Fairleigh Dickinson Review. Albarelli is on the
faculty of the Columbia University Oral History Master of Arts program.*

*Introduction to Community-Based Oral History Projects
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-community-based-oral-history-projects-tickets-40040752970&gt;,**
Benji
de la Piedra*

This workshop will introduce participants to the outlook and strategies
necessary for building and maintaining a successful community-based oral
history project. Participants will be asked to articulate their goals and
vision (however preliminary!) for a community-based oral history project.
They will learn how to refine that vision, design their project’s
infrastructure and workflow, and implement that design with flexibility
over time, within the constraints of available resources. The workshop will
include an introductory training in oral history interviewing technique
that emphasizes the interviewee’s relationship to a community. Participants
will be introduced to ethical and legal considerations of oral history
interviews, and will receive a primer on best practices for archiving and
processing interviews in a community-based context. Students will be
encouraged to apply lessons imparted not only by the instructor, but also
those learned from their own experience.

*Benji de la Piedra** (OHMA 2014) is an oral historian and writer living in
Little Rock, Arkansas, where he is documenting the childhood and African
American community life of Washington Post journalist **Herbert H. Denton
Jr*
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1989/05/01/herbert-denton-jr-post-reporter-and-editor-dies/fea9bd6a-bc9d-4ed8-8224-9d249a923401/?utm_term=.2d77650831a4>*.
In 2016, Benji was a **Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellow*
<http://www.humanrightscolumbia.org/ahda/fellowship-historical-dialogue-and-accountability>*
at
Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights. After graduating from
OHMA, Benji received the program’s **Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Thesis
Prize*
<http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/blog-posts/People/q4kyx1nioh1veh33cuoeyuj65eudji>*
for
his elaboration of democratic pluralism and the dialogical encounter in
oral history and the writings of Ralph Ellison. Benji recently worked as
Oral History Trainer and Volunteer Coordinator for the **DC Oral History
Collaborative* <http://www.wdchumanities.org/oralhistory/>* in his hometown
of Washington, D.C., and has consulted for community-based oral history
projects in New York City and Hot Springs, North Carolina. Along with Mario
Alvarez (OHMA 2015), Benji is Co-Founder, Co-Director, and Co-Lead
Interviewer of the **Columbia Life Histories Project*
<http://www.columbialifehistories.com/>*.*

*Introduction to Oral History for Social Change
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-oral-history-for-social-change-tickets-40038300635&gt;,**
Fanny
Garc**í**a*

In a recent interview Groundswell member Alisa del Tufo described oral
history as a process that is “reflective, fluid, and improvisational” and
transforms both the interviewee and the interviewer. In today’s political
climate, this dialogic exchange can be a powerful tool to combat negative
rhetoric about marginalized communities. It can also help further the
social movements that actively work towards justice and equity. In this
introductory oral history workshop, individuals will engage in
participatory exercises and case study reflections to conduct a critical
examination of the practical, theoretical, and ethical implications of
applied oral history work. Furthermore, we’ll discuss projects that have
successfully engaged oral history as a method for contributing to social
change, and equip participants with a basic framework and set of tools to
support their own efforts to advance social justice through their oral
history work.

*Fanny Julissa García is an oral historian contributing work to Central
American Studies. She is currently writing a literary oral history
manuscript using the interviews of Central American refugee women jailed in
detention centers at the U.S./Mexico border. She has worked for more than
15 years as a social justice advocate to combat the public health and
socioeconomic impact of HIV/AIDS on low income communities, worked closely
with organizations fighting for the end of family detention, and supported
survivors of sexual violence. She has written plays about the impact of HIV
on Latinas and their families, plus short stories and essays about the
Central American diaspora. She serves as the Communications Coordinator for
Groundswell: Oral History for Social Change, a network of oral historians,
activists, cultural workers, community organizers and documentary artists
that use oral history to further movement building and transformative
social change. She is also co-founder of Social Exchange Institute, a media
and education company that uses multi-media tools to produce work that
promotes social justice and equity. Recently, she joined the administrative
support staff at the New-York Historical Society. Fanny graduated from the
Oral History Master of Arts program from Columbia University where she
received the Judge Jack B. Weinstein Scholarship Award for Oral History.*

*Oral Historian as Guide: Finding Your Voice in Narratives Based on Oral
Histories
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-historian-as-guide-finding-your-voice-in-narratives-based-on-oral-histories-tickets-40040947552&gt;,
Nyssa Chow*

One of the challenges when crafting narratives based on oral histories is
deciding what role your voice will play when telling the story of another.
How visible will you be in the re-telling? What relationship will your
voice have to the material? In this session we will be looking at different
ways the oral historian’s voice can act as guide in nonfiction narratives
based on oral histories. We will look at examples from written, multimedia,
and audio storytelling, and think through how the oral historian as
storyteller can make these choices when creating narratives based on life
histories.

*Nyssa Chow **is the current Teaching Fellow at the Columbia University
Oral History Master’s Program. She is a writer, new media storyteller and
educator. She is a graduate of OHMA, and of Columbia University’s MFA
program. Her most recent project Still.Life. – Intersecting Histories
<https://www.tellinghistories.com/stilllife-portraits/&gt; won the Columbia
University Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Nyssa is a recipient of
the Hollywood Foreign Press Award, the Women in Film and Television
Fellowship, the Academy of Motion Pictures Foundation Award, and is a
recipient of the Sloan Foundation Grant. Her recent Still.Life exhibition
<https://www.tellinghistories.com/exhibition&gt; in her home country,
Trinidad, was a narrative installation of soundscapes and light built from
oral histories.*

*Archiving Oral Histories
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/archiving-oral-histories-tickets-40035666757&gt;,
Kimberly Springer*

Archives are alive! Less dramatically: the archive is not the end of your
oral history’s lifespan. Through a few simple, but meticulous processes of
organizing and carefully describing your analog and born-digital materials
you can ensure that communities of activists, researchers and artists can
access the words and thoughts of your interviewees well into the future.
We’ll briefly explore the history of archives, archival best practices and
ethical considerations of archiving your oral histories. By the end of the
workshop, you’ll have a better idea of the function of archives for
preserving memory, but also as spaces advocating active use of oral
histories. Participants will also come away with a checklist for deciding
where is the best place for people to access your oral histories and simple
templates for collecting archival-quality metadata.

*Kimberly Springer is Curator for Oral History for the Columbia Center for
Oral History Archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript
Library. She holds a master’s of information science, specializing in
archives, preservation and social computing from the University of Michigan
– Ann Arbor. She obtained her doctorate from the Women’s Studies Program at
Emory University in Atlanta. She has worked in public media and the
government sector for National Public Radio, Michigan Radio, St. Louis
Public Radio, the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the U.S. State
Department. Her research and publication areas are born-digital materials,
artists’ studio archives, social media, social movements, and television
studies as they intersect with race, gender and sexuality. Kimberly’s
publications include Living for the Revolution, Black Feminist
Organizations, 1968-1980 (Duke University Press, 2005), Still Lifting,
Still Climbing: African-American Women’s Contemporary Activism (New York
University Press, 1999), Stories of Oprah: the Oprahfication of American
Culture (University of Mississippi Press, 2010) and articles in several
journals and edited volumes.*

*Oral History and Human Rights Work
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-history-and-human-rights-work-tickets-40034341794&gt;,
Mary Marshall Clark*

Oral history is increasingly used in human rights work to engage in
historical dialogues, advocacy and the gathering of testimony in societies
engaged in conflict and post-conflict situations. Oral history
methodologies can be used by human rights advocates in multiple ways: a) to
discover the real, daily life needs of vulnerable people, b) to advocate
for social and political change based on that real knowledge; c) to develop
ways of engaging, through in-depth interviews, across lines of social and
cultural difference; and d), to construct opportunities for critical
dialogues based on models of social change that emerge out of oral history
stories about the past, the present and visions of the future.

In this workshop we will discuss models of oral historical dialogues in
human rights work, breaking down the components of successful
transformational practice. Participants are encouraged to bring their own
experiences in human rights and oral history work to the workshop.

*Oral History and Interactive Storytelling*
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oral-history-and-interactive-storytelling-tickets-40036659727>*,
Whitney Dow*

Oral history is a dialogical, co-constructed process. The interviews that
we record are usually complicated, messy and non-linear. How can oral
historians use the tools of interactive storytelling to maintain this
dialogical quality and structural complexity when we curate our interviews
for a public audience? This workshop will explore the ways in which
interactive storytelling diverges from linear storytelling in the ways that
it creates meaning and understanding for an audience. It will examine what
it means to manage authorship in nonlinear and interactive narratives, and
look at the relationship between author intent and audience participation.
It will explore a variety of interactive techniques and formats including,
branched storytelling, Installations gamification, internally v. externally
dialogical story constructs, virtual reality, and user generated content.
Participants will be given a group of online projects to review prior to
the workshop which will be explored as case studies during the class.

*Whitney Dow **is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and interactive
storyteller who has been creating projects focused on race and identity for
almost two decades. In addition to directing and producing numerous
feature films and shorts, he is the creator or the Whiteness Project, a
story-based interactive media and research project he is producing in
collaboration with PBS and Columbia University’s INCITE, and serves as the
Story Director for Veterans Coming Home, a digital initiative by the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting which focuses on the American Military
Civilian Divide. His work has been recognized with numerous awards
including the Peabody and DuPont Awards as well as many film festival
honors. Dow teaches visual storytelling in the Oral History MA Program at
Columbia University*

*Self-care Strategies for Oral Historians*
<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/self-care-strategies-for-oral-historians-tickets-40035752012>*,
Liz H. Strong*

Oral history interviewing can be a deeply immersive exchange that is both
rewarding and harrowing. Oral historians are impacted emotionally and
physically by the stories we hear. Working with narrators who have survived
or perpetrated acts of violence exposes interviewers to vicarious trauma,
compassion fatigue, burnout, and all manner of stresses that may go
unacknowledged. Reported experiences range from lack of focus to
nightmares, and from physical tension to prolonged illness. Through
cultivating self-awareness and support structures, we can learn to care for
ourselves and others, and to design resilient oral history projects in
spite of the risks.

This workshop is an introduction to a collected folk wisdom about managing
the emotional demands of oral history interviewing. Drawing on interviews
with oral historians in the field, and existing published works, Liz Strong
has compiled some tools and advice. The goal is to host a constructive
conversation about how to recognize the impact of oral history work on
interviewers and to introduce valuable resources. Participants are
encouraged to share examples from their own experiences for discussion and
reflection with the group.

*Liz H. Strong** is a freelance oral historian based in New York City. She
has worked with the Brooklyn Historical Society, the New York Preservation
Archive Project, the Washington State Department of Commerce, and many
others. Strong earned an MA in Oral History from Columbia University in
2015, and a BA in Narrative Arts from Oberlin College in 2009.*

Amy Starecheski, PhD
Co-Director
Columbia Oral History MA Program
http://www.oralhistory.columbia.edu
212-851-4395 <(212)%20851-4395>

*Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City*
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo24550813.html&gt;,
University of Chicago Press. (And in podcast form
<http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/squatters-lower-east-side/&gt;, via 99%
Invisible)

“Uses of oral history and digital storytelling in public health research
and practice <https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1W3ie7bKBieb0>&#8221; *Public Health*
.

[Author]

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