This short guide is primarily targeted to students new to oral history, who might not yet feel comfortable reaching out to strangers, or even friends, for an oral history interview. There are a number of tips in here that will make you more effective in the process of oral history interviews, but much of this information is more broadly applicable to public history practice and community engaged scholarship.
Read MoreKelly, Jason M. “The COVID-19 Oral History Project and the Ethics of Collecting.” Oral History Association of India (7 March 2021).
Read MoreIn March 2020, the COVID-19 Oral History Project, based at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), teamed up with A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY), based at Arizona State University to create and curate a series of oral histories focused on the lived experience of the pandemic. Among the results of this collaboration has been a focus on research-based pedagogy and learning for undergraduate students, graduate students, and the public at large. This pedagogical emphasis has both shaped the archive and has been shaped by the process of developing the archive.
Read MoreIn the end, I decided to frame rights in the context of "rights-making" and "rights-taking." By "rights-making," I asked the students to reflect on the fact that civil, human, constitutional, etc. rights are always made in a historical context. In practice, rights are never constant. They are negotiated, claimed, and fought for. By "rights-taking," I wanted them to think about how, in these historical contexts, rights are taken (i.e. claimed) by activists or taken away by those with power. Rather than working from a history-of or a taxonomical approach to rights, we would focus on rights as an assemblage of ideas, concepts, social relations, symbolic forms, claims, laws, practices, and materialities in motion.
Read MoreThe COVID-19 Oral History Project has teamed up with the Journal of the Plague Year (JOTPY) project to make these oral histories about the experience of COVID-19 available to the public. Among the items created through this collaboration is our Oral History Training Module. The first version of this module is available in Canvas through Indiana University.
Read MoreThis essay, “The COVID-19 Oral History Project: Some Preliminary Notes from the Field” reflects on C19OH as a rapid response oral history project – how the research team conceived and implemented it, both in the field and in the classroom, and how they continue to transform it in response to practical concerns and ethical frameworks.
Read MoreThe COVID-19 Oral History Project is one of several research projects in which historians and museum curators are collecting stories about the lived experience of COVID-19. This important work is being contextualized by journalists, who see the importance of this archiving work for future generations.
Read MoreWe developed The COVID-19 Oral History Project to allow professional researchers and the broader public to create and upload oral histories about the lived experience of COVID-19 to an open access, open source database.
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