Anti-Oppression PSN Series Video Chat #1: Anti-oppression after collecting your interviews

Anti-oppression after collecting your interviews

Thursday, September 18th
4:00 - 5:15pm EST

Co-facilitators

• Manissa Maharawal, Writer, Scholar, Activist (manissamaharawal.net)
• Shane Bernardo, Detroit Asian Youth Project and EarthWorks

In this first chat of the Groundswell PSN Anti-Oppression series, we will use the major themes of anti-oppression organizing to explore the phase of an oral history project that comes after the interviews have been collected and organized. In asking questions about where the interviews should be archived, what should be made public, and what kinds of events and programming are most effective for revolutionary change, we will pay close attention to anti-oppression principles. This PSN is open to practitioners in all stages of a project, but we will focus our conversation on how anti-oppression principles can inform the decisions we make and products we create after interviews have already been completed.

Groundswell’s Practitioner Support Network (PSN) and Anti-Oppression working groups are teaming up this Fall 2014 to offer a 5-part “anti-oppression and oral history” PSN chat series. Each chat will look at one specific moment in the process of doing oral history and consider how an anti-oppression approach impacts our practice:

1. Anti-oppression after collecting your interviews
2. The principles of allyship for oral historians
3. Building anti-oppression principles and practices into your project at the design/proposal stage
4. Before recording begins: using anti-oppression in the pre-interview process
5. Power dynamics and anti-oppression within the space of the interview

Ultimately, we aim to create a textual resource (medium to be determined) aimed at social justice oral historians. The PSN series will give us a strong sense of the kinds of questions that oral historians are asking with regards to anti-oppression work. We would like for this document to be something of a handbook for incorporating anti-oppression into the entire oral history project from start to finish.