2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

This listening session highlights elements of the Oral History Center's ongoing Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project, including: trauma-informed practice, project planning, and bridging the gap between conducting interviews and reaching an audience through various modes of interpretation. The panelists will play clips from oral histories and the project podcast, as well as share graphic artwork inspired by these interviews.

ABSTRACT: This listening session explores the UC Berkeley Oral History Center's ongoing Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project, which documents and disseminates the ways in which intergenerational trauma and healing occurred after the US government's incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. The first phase of this project, funded by the National Park Service's Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant, features 100 hours of oral history interviews with 23 Japanese American narrators who are survivors and descendants of World War II-era sites of incarceration. Initial interviews in this project have focused on the Manzanar and Topaz prison camps in California and Utah, respectively, and pose a comparison through the lens of place, popular culture, and collective memory. This listening session will include discussion about trauma-informed oral history practice, project planning, themes that emerged from interviews, and how to bridge the gap between conducting interviews and reaching an audience through various modes of interpretation. The session will highlight clips from the oral histories, as well as original interpretive work, including The Berkeley Remix's eighth session, "'From Generation to Generation': The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration," and graphic artwork inspired by these interviews.Topics this panel will address include: building more inclusive and accessible archives; shifting focus from firsthand accounts of incarceration to intergenerational narratives and collective impacts; trauma-informed project design, including ongoing community engagement, recruiting project advisors, and sponsoring healing circles as a resource for narrators; impacts of contemporary contexts on projects and interviews; making space for contested memory; and the ethics of conducting and interpreting oral histories as community outsiders.