2024 Oral History Association Annual Meeting

Informed by years of developing ethical storytelling principles and practices, the human rights oral history nonprofit Voice of Witness will lead a conversation on narrator agency and community-driven projects. We’ll discuss how we as practitioners can revisit and expand our current definitions of narrator participation, as well as challenge ourselves and our storytelling projects to truly engage as meaningfully as possible with community members.

ABSTRACT: How do we define “narrator agency” and how has that definition evolved over time? What does it mean for narrators to participate in all stages of an oral history project, including years after a project has taken place? Are archives meaningful and accessible to community members–if not, how might we reimagine the spaces (physical, digital, and beyond) in which communities engage with storytelling? What does it mean to truly commit ourselves and our oral history practices to community? These are just some of the questions that our interactive roundtable will consider. Our conversation will be led by staff from Voice of Witness, a human rights oral history nonprofit that develops books and educational resources that explore issues of race-, gender-, and class-based inequity through the lens of personal narrative. Over 15+ years, Voice of Witness (VOW) has worked with a range of oral historians, journalists, educators, community advocates, and narrators to develop a framework of ethical principles for conducting community-rooted oral histories and centering narrator agency. VOW will share insights, challenges, and examples from their oral history projects and invite discussion on how these ethical principles may, in fact, be limiting and how they may continue to evolve in the future. VOW will be joined in conversation by other oral history practitioners who are currently leading community-based projects and exploring these similar questions. Speakers may include Fanny Garcia (from “Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity,” which amplifies stories of family separation at the US-Mexico border) and Lynn Lewis (from “The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project,” which highlights the voices and valuable community organizing insights of people experiencing homelessness). We will invite audience members to join the conversation, sharing their experiences, questions, reflections, and imaginings for deeper narrator and community engagement.