The Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOHR) and INCITE are pleased to announce a new oral history project in partnership with the Human Rights Campaign, which will focus on the HRC’s mission, achievements, growth, and role in the LGBTQ movement. The project will collect and archive approximately 150 hours of audio and video, recorded over the course of 80 sessions with 40 narrators consisting primarily of HRC founders, staff, and board members.

These interviews will center on the organization’s most transformative moments, like the early AIDS crisis, marriage equality, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and the expanding focus around diversity and state work, with the recognition that these developments are crucial not only to the organization’s history, but to that of the LGBTQ movement more broadly. The project asks, just as the HRC has asked: what can a single organization tell us about a social movement and social change? How do historic moments shape organizations and vice versa? How do institutions with diverse constituencies reconcile competing needs and agendas for a forward-thinking movement, all while effectively responding to consistent external attacks?

As the field of oral history has shifted from a focus on the past to helping organizations evolve in the present, part of CCOHR’s central mission has been to address human rights challenges that dynamically link the past to the present and future. This project aims to continue that work, by promoting public knowledge about the unique history of the HRC in a way that can inform and contextualize the pursuit of equality moving forward.

INCITE and CCOHR are excited to announce a new oral history series published by the Columbia University Press. The purpose of this series is to publish innovative, creative, rigorous, and analytical oral history books based on narratives that illuminate the critical stories of our times, locally and globally.

We are eager for contributions from authors who practice oral history within disciplines of social science and the humanities in traditional ways, and also welcome scholars and writers who use oral history to work at the intersection of these disciplines in non-traditional ways, incorporating new forms of writing attuned to orality, visuality, embodiment, generative practices and memory. We are particularly interested in books that draw upon large scale interview projects and collections. We anticipate publishing diverse genres of books in this series, from analytic books that rely on oral history as key evidence to edited narratives from archival projects, that creatively communicate the stories that our narrators tell.

We are interested in stories at many scales; in narratives that provide human access to world historical events, to the horrors of war and genocide, to the struggles and hopes of people displaced from their homes, to the visions, experiences and triumphs of those resisting oppression, but also in stories that reveal in their intricacy the meanings of place, of creativity, change.

In that spirit, we issue a wide call to younger generations of oral historians, those who are bringing new analytical and innovative thinking to bear on a field that is rapidly growing in the academy as well as the public world. Additionally, we seek to publish experienced authors seeking a new platform for their most innovative work.

We hope to publish multiple volumes each year.  Authors interested in submitting a proposal to the series should send a detailed description per these guidelines to the series editors: Mary Marshall Clark, Amy Starecheski, Kimberly Springer and Peter Bearman.

Contact email: Mary Marshall Clark, mmc17@columbia.edu.

June 17, 2019 to June 28, 2019 — CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND APPLY

What do oral historians, journalists and scholars of contemporary history do when the President of the United States, supported by numerous members of congress, tells blatant lies and strives to undermine our access to traditionally reliable sources of information and democratic processes? What do oral historians, journalists and scholars of contemporary history do when scientific knowledge is dismissed as mere opinion? What do oral historians, journalists and scholars of contemporary history do when false information is knowingly transmitted with the precise aim of enhancing distrust?

The 2019 Summer Institute in Oral History will focus on the challenges we face in documenting the political present when secrecy and distortions of truth threaten the most vulnerable in open societies.  What role does public memory and the search for meaning play in rescuing and preserving the stories that we most need to hear? Specifically, we will explore what journalists, oral historians, advocates and scholars of the present can learn from each other, as we sharpen our skills and awareness of how to document the stories that we most need to record and disseminate. 

This summer’s institute will be co-sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School and The American Assembly.

Perhaps most compelling to the aims of this project are the narrators’ testimonies of their experiences with the technical government itself as they attempted to answer the outstanding demands that sparked the revolution, such as a lack of political freedoms, food price inflation, corruption, and poor living conditions.

The Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOHR) and INCITE are pleased to announce the completion of the Tunisian Transition Oral History Project. Following the address of the former prime minister of the Republic of Tunisia, Mehdi Jomaa,  at Columbia University's World Leaders Forum in 2015, the Office of University President Lee Bollinger approached INCITE to discuss undertaking an oral history project about Tunisia's technocratic government (2014-15) and its role in the transition to democracy following the 2011 Tunisian Revolution. 

The Tunisian Transition Project includes 58 oral histories with 41 narrators totaling 110 recorded hours. Narrators include politicians, officials and notable figures in the Tunisian transitional period, including Mehdi Jomaa, Moncef Marzouki, and Neila Chaabane. Each interview began with a historically grounded question, “Where were you during the events of December and January 2010?" From there, narrators also discussed their life trajectories, from childhood memories of Tunisia to their coming of age in Tunisian politics and the directions that their diverse careers took them. Perhaps most compelling to the aims of this project are the narrators’ testimonies of their experiences with the technical government itself as they attempted to answer the outstanding demands that sparked the revolution, such as a lack of political freedoms, food price inflation, corruption, and poor living conditions.

Though there is a wealth of information on the events leading up to the Arab Spring and a good deal of information on the immediate aftermath, this project engages with the less treated subject of the technical government itself—how Tunisia's leader's arrived at such a solution, whether or not it produced the intended effects, and what was revealed about Tunisian society in the process.

The archives will be made publicly available through Columbia Libraries in early 2019.
One can learn more about the Tunisian Transition Oral History Project here.  

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research (CCOHR) and INCITE have recently completed an oral history project with the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. The project investigated the impressive role played by the Harriman Institute in area studies and academia and its influence on US foreign policy in the post-Soviet region. By analyzing the history of the field of area studies, CCOHR and INCITE aimed to understand the relationship between the academy and government in the development of foreign policy.

http://www.ccohr.incite.columbia.edu/harriman-institute-oral-history/

The Center for Oral History Research/INCITE (Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics) is pleased to announce its 2014 Oral History Institute, “Second Generation Memories and Stories,” to be held June 16-27, 2014 at Columbia University in New York City.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND APPLY

In a pathbreaking move that has strengthened the Columbia Center for Oral History (CCOH), the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) has partnered with the Columbia University Libraries in managing and administering the activities and programs of the CCOH. INCITE and its founder Peter Bearman (Sociology) have worked closely with the staff of CCOH over the years, particularly in the development of the September 11, 2001 Oral History Projects and the Oral History Master of Arts program.

Under the terms of the new partnership, INCITE will have responsibility for the research, education, and outreach activities of CCOH. These include new oral history projects, the Oral History Master of Arts program (which was already jointly administered by CCOH and INCITE), the Summer Institute, and public programming. All of these activities will take shape under the CCOHR. The R stands for Research. The Libraries, in turn, will focus its energies on the curatorial and archiving aspects of CCOH’s mission. The Libraries will devote more staff and attention to acquiring, processing, and making more generally available the rich set of resources that comprise the CCOH archive. All of these activities will take shape under the CCOHA, the A stands for Archives.

This new relationship thus anchors CCOH firmly in faculty research and teaching, while bolstering Columbia University Libraries commitments to professional archival management through the Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML).

This semester, Mary Marshall Clark, director of CCOHR, along with program coordinators David Briand and Sarah Dziedzic, all officially joined the INCITE team. The CCOHR will carry out a full portfolio of new and important oral history projects. CCOHA will continue to provide reference and support services under the management of the RBML. Research activities will take place at INCITE’s research space at 122nd and Broadway.

Click here to learn more about CCOHR.

The Interdisciplinary Center Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) cultivates public intelligence concerning socially and culturally vital ideas that can be advanced by research, education and conversation at the interdisciplinary seams that the social sciences share with one another, the humanities, the life and behavioral sciences: incite.columbia.edu.

The Columbia Center for Oral History Research's mission is to record unique life histories, document the central historical events and memories of our times, and to teach and do research across the disciplines: /ccohr/

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