PUBLICK OCCURRENCES — May 23, 2019
EMPOWERING COMMUNITIES THROUGH ORAL HISTORIES THAT LEAD TO EXHIBITS
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Wistariahurst’s Black Holyoke project and the Worcester Historical Museum’s LGBTQ + Worcester – For the Record use oral histories and discovery days to build documentation of communities whose histories have previously been neglected in their collections. Exhibits coming out of such work then educate the public about these histories and build momentum for additional oral histories and more donations of artifacts. The results are new collections that better represent the histories of everyone in the region, stronger communities who are empowered because their stories are being told, and new partnerships that build the audience for the historical museums
COLLECTING ORAL HISTORIES TO UPLIFT COMMUNITY VOICES
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Panelists will discuss oral history as it relates to community building, rebuilding and healing, the
Image of an American flag made of painted wooden slats left at the Boston Marathon memorial in Copley Square. April 2013 http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20262302
challenges and implicit biases that come with entering a community as an outsider to record its history, and the tradition of knowledge as co-created, shared, relational and evolving in the oral history field. Neighborhood Voices, an oral history project of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, uses 16 intergenerational interviews to elevate the history of the families that moved to the neighborhood in the decades following WWII and rebuilt the community across diverse racial, ethnic and linguistic identities, while the Boston Marathon Bombing Digital Archive, WBUR Oral History project, conducted 37 oral histories of bombing survivors and those affected by the aftermath through a larger city-wide and university-sponsored archive.
Plan to join us on Monday, June 24, 2019 to network, listen, and learn with more than 200
of your colleagues from throughout MA.