Columbia Oral History: A Working Praxis of Critical Care and Relationship-Building

Co-sponsored by: Columbia University's Oral History MA and the Oral History Association

In this workshop series, we will question and experiment with what it means to teach oral history as site-specific approaches that center deep care and relationship-building. What exactly do we mean by care and relationship-building, and why are these concepts central to our pedagogical spaces-- ranging from the classroom to grassroot organizations and activist spaces? What does it look and feel like to create an oral history process that privileges the emergent questions, expertise, and specific needs of a memory community, rather than beginning with a universalized set of best practices? Lastly, what does it mean to teach and practice oral history in ways that are feminist, anti-racist, and anti-extractive? While this workshop series honors the importance of oral history archives linked to recordings and transcripts, we will also expand our understanding of the archive given that relationships, too, are embodied forms of memory archiving.

This is a two-part workshop series open to educators, activists, artists, and others who are already teaching, or are interested in teaching, oral history through a feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial lens. While the first workshop will be open to the general public, the second session will take on a more hands-on approach and be capped at 25 participants (limited to those who participated in the first workshop). Participants of the second workshop will be selected from a brief application process to ensure that a plurality of projects and teaching contexts are included. One of the goals of the second workshop is to collaboratively create an open-ended archive of working syllabi, readings, and pedagogical materials, including sounds and images, that can be shared with participants beyond the workshop series.

Crystal Mun-hye Baik is Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies (GSST) at the University of California, Riverside, a feminist memory worker, and a graduate of the OHMA Program (2010). Her first book, Reencounters: On the Korean War & Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press) examines the everydayness of the Korean War and its consequences through a diasporic feminist archive of memory works, including oral history projects. Facilitating jolting moments of opening or reencounters with the mundane, these cultural memory works reckon with the Korean War's ramifications, even as they underscore de-imperializing possibilities that challenge the 70-year US militarized occupation of Korea. Crystal is also an active member of several collectives and shared spaces, including GYOPO, Migratory Times, the Ending the Korean War Collective, and the A/P/A Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project.

These events are open to all. For more information or if we can make any of these events more accessible to you please contact Rebecca McGilveray at rlm2203@columbia.edu.

This event will be recorded. As with our oral history interviews, we will wait until after the event to determine with the guest(s) whether or not they want to share the recording more publicly. You can follow our social media channels/mailing list for updates on if/when recordings are made available!