Oral History Research Design through Project Execution: Principles of Good Practice, Mary Marshall Clark

This workshop will focus on how to lead a research-based oral history project from the design phase, through stages of implementation and review, and final interpretation and curation.

We will look at diverse examples of projects that we have completed at Columbia University including: The September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project (producing 667 sessions of interview), as well as a smaller more focused community based project: Ground One: Voices from Chinatown, conducted on the aftermath of 9/11 in Chinatown neighborhoods and schools. Additionally, we will examine the challenge of doing oral history on law and torture: through our Rule of Law: Guantánamo Oral History Project, conducted from 2008-2012; and lastly we will look at the most recent project we have conducted, an oral history of the Harriman Institute at Columbia, a smaller more focused project on the history of Russian and Eurasian affairs before, during and after the Cold War. Please bring your project ideas to the table! Among other things, we will discuss how research design affects fieldwork practices, and how fieldwork content in turn reshapes project design.

Mary Marshall Clark is the director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR). Mary Marshall is also the co-founder and co-director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts degree program. Mary Marshall has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991, and was president of the Oral History Association in 2001-2002. She was a founding member of the International Oral History Association. Mary Marshall teaches and writes on issues of memory, the mass media, trauma, and ethics in oral history. She was the co-principal investigator, with Peter Bearman, of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Narrative and Memory Project, and directed related projects on the aftermath of September 11th in New York City. Mary Marshall’s current work focuses on the global impact of U.S. torture and detention policies, focusing on Guantánamo. Mary Marshall is an editor of After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001 and the Years that Followed, published by The New Press in September 2011.

*For our oral history workshops, please pay what you can. We suggest $25 for students, recent graduates, or others who are financially constrained, while we suggest that professionals and those with more resources should pay more. All profits from these events go towards our annual merit scholarship for an OHMA students.