[ONLINE] Shaking the Family Tree: Oral History, Family History, Insider Interviews and Ancestral Memory

Dates: Friday, March 1 - Sunday, March 3, 2024
Schedule:
Friday, March 1: 10 AM - 6 PM
Saturday, March 2: 10 AM - 6 PM
Sunday, March 3: 12 PM - 6 PM
Location: Online via Zoom
Instructors: Suzanne Snider
Guest Instructor: zavé martohardjono (they/them), Saturday, March 2

Tuition: See below

For many of us, family is the obvious—and sometimes most complicated—place to start our work as oral historians. In this workshop, participants will learn how to use oral history to document and preserve their family stories. We’ll discuss common challenges: convincing your family to participate, delving into sensitive subjects and secrets, and working with interviewees who may suffer from memory loss. We’ll also discuss the potential for oral history to repair and transform relationships. 

We’ll build an altar literally and figuratively to our ancestors as a love letter to the future–but these interviews and histories needn’t be happy or nostalgic! Through family history, we can work out problems, become curious about pain and discover things we felt but didn’t know. 

Examples of traditional and non traditional family history will be modeled and supported, as we explore and challenge assumptions around ideas of “family.” We’ll challenge the representation of “family history,” as something discrete, linear and knowable, and find places in our family records for a range of experiences such as adoption, donor-relations, divorce/”step-family,” and estrangement.  

Welcome to those who wish to engage with ancestors, chosen family, to graft together biological and adoptive family trees, and/or to mark the absence/silence of known family. Can we create speculative family history that describes our history/selves in the future, as ancestors?

This workshop is a good fit for novices or advanced oral historians embarking on a family history project, broadly defined—or for those exploring the nuances of “insider” interviews. Also welcome: those working on projects about constructed families or constellations of people intimately related. Special topics: ethics, memory loss, individual and collective memory, song collection. 

We will be joined by guest instructor zavé martohardjono on Day 2 (10 AM - 12 PM) for a session titled “Liminal Bodies.” During this movement-based session, participants will explore embodied memory and ancestral knowledge through a series of simple, widely accessible movement scores. We will explore embodied material passed onto us by ancestors and kin we do and do not know, which can guide our oral history collection practices. We will equally honor our bodies' knowledge and its memory gaps. This decolonized approach to memory flips colonial hierarchies of knowledge. This session allows our (often silenced) bodies to lead and gives permission to (our often overactive) mind/intellect to follow.

Guest Instructor: zavé martohardjono (b. 1984 in Montréal, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist working in dance, film, installation, and writing. A queer, trans, and Indonesian-American artist, zavé makes works that dwell in their ancestors’ mythologies, contend with embodied political histories, and dream towards more just futures. As an artist, zavé employs reparative modalities from anti-colonial political education to dance/ritual modes to de-condition the body, reconjure liberatory memory, and untangle assimilation. They were most recently published in We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics. Bessie-nominated for Outstanding Performer in 2022, they have presented their interdisciplinary performance works globally including at 92Y, Bemis Center, The Kennedy Center, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Mala Stanica Multimedia Center in Skopje, Storm King, Bronx Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Gibney, HERE Arts, and Issue Project Room. Their work has been written about in the New York Times, BOMB Magazine, CultureBot and Hyperallergic. zavemartohardjono.com | @zavozavito on Instagram

*Note: This workshop does not include remote instruction on technical aspects of audio recording. Oral History Summer School will offer a stand-alone session on recording as a “hop-on” workshop a couple times this year for those seeking recording support. 

Tuition:
$0: Fellowship [2 seats] [FULL—SEE BELOW FOR WAITLIST APP]
$500: Hand-Up [Limited, up to 10 participants]
$700: Independent/Subsidized [Up to 20 participants]
$850: Institutional/Standard/Supportive [Up to 20 participants]

Tuition covers instruction, guest instruction, e-reader, OHSS workbook (digital) and other forms/resources, plus access to our alumni newsletter/network.

Tuition Fee Structure
Thank you for reviewing our tiered fee structure, which reconciles our wish to make the training increasingly accessible with our need to cover staff labor and the rising costs of our materials. Please read the descriptions below and be in touch with us (info@oralhistorysummerschool.com) if you would like support selecting your tuition tier.

Fellowship: $0, 2 participants [FULL]
These spaces are reserved as part of an equity initiative to support more BIPOC participation and historically marginalized voices at the table and in the field. If you are eligible based on these criteria and cannot attend at the standard tuition rate, please select this option.
Fellowships will be awarded early in the application process. If you are not awarded a fellowship for this workshop, please note that we will continue to offer (tuition-free) fellowship seats for all of our workshops. We encourage you to re-apply in the future.

If you wish to apply for fellowships for two workshops that are registering concurrently, please note in your applications which workshop would be your priority.

Hand Up: $500 (+ 3% processing fee), limited (up to 10 participants)
This tuition tier is reserved for people who could not attend this workshop without this subsidy, who do not have reliable or steady income or may be experiencing precarity/transitional employment, or who may be choosing this tuition tier because of categories of identity and/or circumstances that have impacted their earning opportunities. We earmark hand up seats as well as tuition-free seats in every workshop. These subsidized seats are funded through grants, fundraisers, and other members' tuitions.

Independent/Subsidized: $700 (+ 3% processing fee), unlimited (up to 20 participants)
This tuition tier is for participants without institutional support, without a salary, and/or for those who work in under-resourced economies (education, social work, etc).

Institutional/Standard/Supportive Rate: $850 (+3% processing fee), unlimited (up to 20 total participants): This tuition tier is for participants who are employed full-time/salaried, who may finance vacations and/or dining out, and/or who receive professional development funds from an institution.

Note: As a small organization, we maintain a strict cancellation policy. Tuition is non-refundable and non-transferable for withdrawal or cancellation