Oral History, Empathy, and Mutual Listening - Incite at Columbia University

Participants will learn tools for teaching empathy through the practice of mutual listening.

Oral historians listen in a way that creates connection, but we often do it without being conscious of the techniques we are using or the impacts of these connections.

 

In this workshop, oral historian and psychoanalyst-in-training (appropriate to describe you this way?) Mary Marshall Clark will share insights from the field of psychoanalysis to help participants understand the potentially transformative relationships between listening and empathy and how unique forms of knowledge are generated through the oral history relationship. Participants will learn tools for teaching empathy through the practice of mutual listening, which fully recognizes both the other and the self. 

 

Mary Marshall Clark is Director of Columbia University Center for Oral History Research in INCITE and the co-founding Director of Columbia’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) degree program (with Peter Bearman). She has been involved in the oral history movement since 1991 and was President of the US Oral History Association from 2001–2002. 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. She founded the “Guantanamo Rule of Law Oral History Project” in 2009 and directs Columbia University’s biannual Summer Institute in Oral History. She is an editor of the Columbia University Press Oral History Series, as well as editor of books including After the Fall: New Yorkers Remember September 11, 2001, and the Years that Followed (2011). She is co-author of the human rights publication Documenting and Interpreting Conflict through Oral History: A Working Guide (2012). Mary Marshall Clark is a candidate-in-training to become a psychoanalyst at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City.