The OHA will offer 5 pre-conference workshops on Wednesday, October 14. Workshop registration is $50.
Conference registration is available here. However, if you would like to attend one or more of the workshops without attending the rest of the conference, please email the OHA Executive Office at oha@oralhistory.org to arrange payment.
The Following Workshops will be Offered:
8:30AM – 12:30PM:
- An Introduction to Oral History Workshop, led by Jeff Corrigan
- Working with Memory to Build Community, to Heal, and to Transform, led by Ann Chinn, Danita Mason-Hogans, and Wesley Hogan
- Their Story, Their Control: Interviewing Trauma Survivors, led by Sean Holman and Aldyn Chwelos
1:30PM – 5:30PM:
- AI, Actually: A Toolkit for Transforming Oral History Collections, led by Chris Pandza
- Climate Change Oral History and Place, led by Jason Davis
Workshop Details:
8:30AM – 12:30PM: An Introduction to Oral History Workshop, led by Jeff Corrigan
This introductory workshop serves as an informative overview to the field of oral history from initial idea through finished product. The workshop will cover specifics within three subcategories of oral history: Pre-Interview, Interview, and Post-Interview, including the basics of oral history, project planning, technology, interview setup, writing interview outlines, release forms, legal and ethical considerations, providing access, and a variety of available resources for further information. Additionally, the workshop will include a series of audio question and answer examples from several oral history interviews to help individuals hone interviewing skills and provoke additional discussion in the workshop.
8:30AM – 12:30PM: Working with Memory to Build Community, to Heal, and to Transform, led by Ann Chinn, Danita Mason-Hogans, and Wesley Hogan
This is a resource for memory workers and oral historians. Through three separate activities in this two-hour workshop, we use embodied memory as a path to create or enable community identity, community healing, and transforming the present. In Activity One, Clothesline, we ask each participant to bring a photograph or postcard evoking an elder/ancestor to attach to a clothesline. We invite people to have a “conversation at the clothesline” with an ancestor, building a collective, connected memory of experiences– from ancestors who have impacted the way that we view the world. “Grandmother taught me so much at the clothesline.”
In Activity Two, Wearable Eulogy, we use the Ghanian visual art of stamping to create a collective fabric honoring and naming legacy, and how it is shared and shaped in the present. Which quality/qualities you would want people to remember you by? With this activity, we form a collective eulogy. In Activity Three, Toolkit, we will introduce a toolkit for young people. This is a model that empowers them to design their own action toolkits in order to connect with their communities — both those who came before and those to come. Memory here is a site not only of remembrance, but a tool for building community, supporting healing, and shaping what comes next.
Through these three embodied activities, we interact with memory, touch, speak to, carry and remake it together. We are building on the five years of work we’ve done in practice and in conversation on three major descendant- and community-led projects: Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project, the Chapel Hill Women of the Movement Project and the SNCC Movement History Initiative. We collectively published a booklet published based on these experiences here. We invite other memory workers who are attending OHA to join us in this workshop to participate collectively, learn, and build together in these three activities. We encourage workshop participants to share the memory work activities that animate their own practice. Get ready to show, not tell!
8:30AM – 12:30PM: Their Story, Their Control: Interviewing Trauma Survivors, led by Sean Holman and Aldyn Chwelos
What does it take to conduct an interview that restores rather than diminishes a narrator’s sense of control? This hands-on workshop examines the pre-interview and interview stages of a narrator-centred methodology developed by the Climate Disaster Project over four years of field practice with extreme weather survivors. Participants will explore how to structure and conduct an interview with narrators exposed to traumatic events, establishing the psychological safety necessary for a genuine exchange. This exploration will include pre-interview processes, empathetic interviewing techniques, and a five-part interview framework that moves the narrator from person and place through to help and hope, keeping trauma from defining the experience. Participants will leave with practical tools for sharing memories and building narrative alliances with people on the frontlines of environmental and humanitarian crisis.
1:30PM – 5:30PM: AI, Actually: A Toolkit for Transforming Oral History Collections, led by Chris Pandza
The richer an oral history archive grows, the harder it becomes to navigate. Our collections can quickly become unwieldy, unsearchable, and therefore beyond the grasp of the audiences they were made for. Artificial intelligence shows promise in helping us navigate and share collections. But at what cost?
Conversations about AI tend to oscillate between hype and fear and collapse a vast landscape of methods into a single category: the large language model (LLM). Lost in that noise is a growing toolkit of computational methods that can make collections searchable, richly interconnected, and ready for curators, web developers, artists, researchers, community organizations, and the general public to engage with. Many of these methods can be deployed on our own computers, without ever sending narrator data to a remote server.
Led by Chris Pandza, a Canadian curator, digital humanist, and producer of the Webby Award-winning Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project and the Obama Presidency Oral History digital archives, this workshop surveys AI methods beyond the LLM with candid attention to how different approaches work, how they can help, where they fall short, and how they can be adapted from other fields to the specific demands of oral history. Attendees will then work through a real-world case study before workshopping attendee collections as a group: what new lives can we dream up for our archives and how do we begin to realize those dreams?
Attendees are encouraged to reach out to Pandza by September 1 for inclusion in the group workshop; those whose work doesn’t make the deadline will be offered an individual follow-up session.
This workshop is well-suited to oral historians and collection stewards at any technical level, whether their goal is more informed discussions with technical partners and vendors, a starting point for experimentation, or simply some input for dreaming bigger about their collection. No coding experience required.
1:30PM – 5:30PM: Climate Change Oral History and Place, led by Jason Davis
Philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term Solastalgia to describe a feeling of “homesickness when you are still at home,” a sentiment that is becoming ever more relevant as the climate crisis profoundly alters people’s physical and emotional connections to their home places. Climate change oral history is a powerful tool for helping narrators and listeners engage with these connections and find their place in the movement to confront climate change. In this interactive workshop, you will craft your own “climate story” and learn skills to conduct climate change oral history interviews with a focus on connection to local places threatened by the climate crisis. You will engage with the theoretical and ethical background of climate change oral history and will practice place-based climate change oral history skills.