Talking Through History

Catalog description

"Tell me a story." Many of us have had the pleasure of listening to an older person- a parent, a grandparent, a teacher, a family friend- tell us about what life was like way back when. Historians, journalists, and others who research and write about the recent past for a living get to do this too, as we listen to people to learn more about the events that they helped to shape, as well as those that shaped them in return. This practice of interviewing people about their lives is called oral history. It's an important way that we can get insight into the rich texture of people's individual lives, and it has been an invaluable tool for understanding groups of people whose experiences have historically been understudied, including women, people of color, queer people, and workers. However, memory is a tricky thing. If you ask two people to recount the same event, you're likely to get two different stories. In fact, research in cognitive science shows that memory is not a stable thing: the act of retrieving a memory, such as during an oral history interview, reshapes it in subtle ways. Entire communities have also been shown to misremember key events, such as the murder of one of their members. These more widespread distortions can show up in oral histories as well. So, if oral history is an important method for recovering the experiences of "ordinary" people and people from marginalized groups, but the memories that it elicits are also messy and sometimes unreliable, then what do we do with it? If the memories that are retrieved through oral history are subjective, doesn't that make them untrustworthy? In that case, what can oral history really tell us? In this course, we'll consider these questions and more as we learn about the theory and practice of doing oral history. This means that not only will we learn about insights from history, anthropology, folklore studies, psychology, and cognitive science on how we know what we know about the past, but we'll learn to conduct interviews as well. We'll cover the techniques of effective interviewing, such as how to develop rapport with a narrator (which is what oral historians call the person being interviewed), how to ask good questions, and how to navigate difficult moments. And finally, we'll learn all about the process of conducting an oral history interview, from planning and outreach, to conducting and transcribing the interview, to long-term archiving and preservation. Then we'll put our new knowledge to use by conducting oral history interviews with staff and volunteers from the Southern Tier AIDS Program, which has provided HIV testing and services to people in Broome County and the surrounding area since 1984. In this way, we'll develop and refine our skills as oral historians at the same time that we capture and preserve a key piece of local history.