Panelists and/or chairperson for working-class oral history panel

[andyjh...@gmail.com]

I am trying to assemble a panel broadly concerned with oral history and working-class research topics in border communities, though anything related to any of that could probably be made to fit. 

I'm an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M International Univ. in Laredo. A graduate student and I are trying to assemble this panel. I am supervising the student's project on the Chicano movement in Laredo as a movement against classism in the absence of a stark Anglo-Mexican divide. She will present on her research, which utilizes oral history. I will present on one of three topics, depending on how the panel shapes up; 1) a history of NAFTA-induced deindustrialization and economic change in border communities, 2) a history of migrant student education in Laredo, 3) something more methodological on oral history research into working-class topics with the help and development of undergraduate and graduate researchers. 

We're open to a lot here. Any project related to oral history in working-class or Mexican-American and/or border communities is welcome.  

Thanks,

Andy Hazelton

[Ron Lambert]

Hi Andy,

I have a long involvement in working class politics in Gippsland  Australia.  I have posted in the Wild cat strikes group above your post.  Please have a look and let me know if  we can work together on any aspects of Oral History and working class community life. 

Thanks Andy

[Ron Lambert]

Hi Andy, 

Phil Rubico got  back to me this morning saying his panel  was full.

In 1987 I was working power industry and very active in the labour movement.  My main involvement at the time was a a organiser for the Gippsland Trades and Labour Council's Art and Working Life Committee.

We were funded by the Arts funding body of the Federal Government to produce  a play about the history of a town called Yallourn.  This town was dug up for coal mining in the middle 1970s and its story is not  widely known in Australia.

Gippsland has a strong history of working class struggle and the digging up of Yallourn was  the first small step in dismantling the power of the unions  in the region.

The process used , collecting Oral History from workers who were there at the beginning of the town and some of the subjective meanings people talked about in their recordings makes fascinating narrative. I have presented some of this material in Australia, but would love to work with you on this.

This year I was fortunate enough to present a paper at the IOHA conference in Finland and I'm very active in Oral History groups in Victoria such as the Oral History Victoria Association (OHV)

 Thanks Andy  

[lcampb...@gmail.com]

I can't tell what the status of this proposed panel is, but I could submit a proposal using oral history. It would focus on the many oral histories collected in the late 1970s and early 1980s from coalminers in Colorado and the uses that have been made of those memories. Even though most of the workers were too young to have lived through the 1910-1914 Colorado strike that included the Ludlow Massacre, they "remembered" it, and they had trouble remembering the 1927-1928 Colorado Coal Strike that they had lived through. Does this sound like something that could work? 

Leigh Campbell-Hale

[cmc...@uw.edu]

Hi Andy,

This may be too late to be helpful, but am a labor archivist who has partnered with unions, nonprofits, and faculty and oral historians to curate oral history projects on oral history topics. I would imagine I might talk about the curatorial, preservation, permissions and outreach pracites the Labor Archives of Washington has been using to curate the collections for the past 5 or so years. The collections are intentionaly built around documenting the broad labor movement and include active union members, organizers, retirees, individual workers, and labor activists. Topics include: The 15Now Minimum Wage campaigns in SeaTac and Seattle, farmworkers in Washington State, longshore pensioners on the Pacifiic coast, member of a healthcare workers SEIU local, and various other communities.

Thanks for considering it,
Conor

[andyjh...@gmail.com]

Thanks to all for the interest. Panel has been finalized. 

[sonofh...@gmail.com]

Hi, Andy!

I would love to join this panel to add some practical tips on sound recording. Sadly, so many incredible oral histories are horribly marred by poor sound recording. Maybe the audio recording was enough for the historian or folklorist to transcribe the interview, but with terrible hiss, room noise, and distortion the actual audio recording is so poor it is unusable for radio and does not reach a larger audience.

With a few simple techniques, these problems can be avoided! Current, relatively inexpensive digital audio equipment allows oral historians to capture rich, detailed human voices if--and only if--they follow some simple guidelines for recording clean audio.

I first learned audio recording to interview Eulah McGill, a veteran labor activist of the 1934 Great Uprising strikes of textile workers in the Southern US.

Please, let me join your panel! With just a little guidance, oral historians can learn to get good, clean sound! Allow me this opportunity  to help them!

This sounds like a great panel! I am a labor educator at the Washington Labor Education and Research Center at South Seattle College. I studied labor and Latin American History at the University of Michigan. I'm also a filmmaker with experience as a sound recordist. I recorded sound for Haskell Wexler's film, "Four Days in Chicago" for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyyaNDRbei4

in Solidarity,

Daniel O'Donnell

Daniel....@seattlecolleges.edu