The Brooklyn Historical Society announces a New Seminar:
Listening to Women: Documenting Women’s Lives through Oral History
A six-week non-credit course meeting once per week for 2 hours
Wednesdays March 18, 2009 – April 29, 2009
6:30 – 8:30pm
Registration Deadline: February 25, 2009
Admission limited to 15 participants.
Sign up HERE
I took it for granted that like most of the billions of people who are born and die on this planet I was just an accident. There was no reason for me. Yet my life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant. Something in me must have been waiting to stand up and demand to be counted. Because eventually, when I was presented with an opportunity to talk about myself, I grasped at it.
— Nuala O’Faolain in her book Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman
Seminar Description and Objectives:
This seminar will introduce the practice of Oral History as an historical methodology, a unique narrative genre, and a tool in the reconciliation of social injustices. It will be interdisciplinary, drawing from history, sociology, memoir, and gender studies. We will examine oral history in all its forms — audio, video, print, and exhibit — and in a variety of settings — museums, schools, archives, performance, radio, and online. In particular, we will consider the dynamics of listening to, recognizing, and validating the voices of women, who may not know their stories have an audience. In addition to learning the theory and background of oral history, students will learn the practical and technical information needed to conduct their own interviews.
