Practices of Care and Community: How Roots in Social Work and Folklore Shape Today’s Oral History Ethos, Anna Kaplan
By diversifying the histories of oral history practices, we bolster the widening array of current projects and methodologies. This session highlights concrete examples from within academia (social work, folklore, etc.) and community-born traditions to offer today’s oral historians a range of approaches from which to draw.
ABSTRACT: There is growing emphasis on oral history traditions outside of academia. This presentation extends that effort back to academic and institutional oral history, further destabilizing Allan Nevins’ and the history discipline’s hold on the practice. In my on-going research on Black women’s oral history at institutions in the early 20th century (some predating Nevins), I have encountered overlap between social work, folklore, and oral history. This presentation focuses on Ophelia Settle Egypt and Susie R.C. Byrd to illuminate them.Egypt had a social work MA when Charles Johnson recruited her for sociological fieldwork in the late 1920s at Fisk University. He strove to understand impoverished African American communities’ perspectives on the resources and public policies that they needed. During that research, formerly enslaved Tennesseans told Egypt their memories of slavery, and she collected 100 oral histories alongside Johnson’s sociological questionnaires. Egypt’s social work training—to which she returned after five years at Fisk—not Johnson’s prescribed questions, spurred her to deeply listen to these individuals. The ethics of care and advocacy underlying social work shaped her oral history approach in ways that resonate with many oral history projects today. Soon after, the Great Depression forced Byrd to quit graduate school. She began social work training before joining the Federal Writers’ Project’s Virginia Negro Writers’ Project. A former teacher with a social work introduction, Byrd approached oral history as community-building. Elders gathered groups of 30+ people where Byrd recorded individual life histories and collective recollections of folklore. This presentation thus explores the relationship between oral history, social work, and the burgeoning field of folklore in the early 1900s as foundations of academic/institutional oral history. By focusing on Egypt and Byrd, it highlights the central tenants extending from their work to current projects and best practices: care and community.
Inheriting a 27 year old Oral History Program...Now What?, Jennifer Rogers
This session will cover the Now What: the steps in seeing what the well-established oral history program was, evaluating, educating myself and my department on Oral History, then doing oral history, then we evaluated again, leading us to build oral history education and methodology into all aspects of the department's work. The session will engage in discussion of the pain points and how to give a long-standing oral history program a future.
ABSTRACT: The presentation is a chronicle of the development and transformation of the Living History studio under my leadership beginning in 2021, noting significant changes since the previous director’s 27-year tenure. The preceding program was quite prolific in conducting interviews, and there were several logistical and ethical issues in how Oral History as a discipline was being practiced. The changes that will be highlighted include directing a complete studio cleanout and redesign, championing new methods to conduct Oral History, using continuous training, the entire staff learned additional methods to conduct Oral History interviews, such as group interviews, live interviews, and short-form interviews, all of which can be equally if not more enriching for audiences than the regular-form Oral Histories. Sound/audio equipment education was introduced to the entire staff from a professional sound engineer. The session will discuss at length how the entire Oral History process for our program has developed within the contemporary technological age, specifically regarding how conducting virtual interviews became “the new normal” during and after the pandemic. The session will discuss how the program still does and will continue to face growing pains that come with the redevelopment of an unparalleled alumni-centered Living History studio in the United States. We will further the tenets of Oral History by continuing to initiate project-based Oral Histories and extending Oral History education at Georgia Tech through continuing the Silent Voices Fellowship and Internship, both of which are based on uplifting diverse, unheard alumni voices while engaging in the complete Oral History process. We are working towards our past, present, and future interviews towards being useful for historians, researchers, and the public.
