from the beginning…
I embarked on this project knowing that a lot of things at the College weren’t quite set up yet. I want to honor the experience of being a student doing something new, because I wanted to and it was important, and also feeling like I was messing everything up and getting in the way of other bureaucratic processes. So here I will talk about some of the barriers my advisors and I encountered, willfully, knowing that not everything had been quite arranged/approved under a specific program at the College.
But first of all, there was so much that paved the way for me! As I mentioned in a previous post, the Greenfield Center supported institutional history projects, including oral history, during its lifespan 2014-2016. Also, folks had done oral history projects under Pensby fellowships: here, here, and here, all originating from the same motivation as mine–documenting past students’ experiences, building a history for the community that each of us found here. Jada Ceasar even spent a summer at other schools assessing projects like Black at Bryn Mawr, and recommending structures that Bryn Mawr could implement to support oral history work. She and Shannan Stafford began doing oral history as work-study, and I attended their workshop last year at the second mini-CDL. I asked their advisor, Kate Blinn, to oversee my work this semester, through Praxis, which gives students course credit for experiential learning. Praxis Independent Study had supported Black at Bryn Mawr four years ago. Furthermore, there’s a new grant between Pensby and the ECC to pay student workers to collect oral histories about Perry House! So that’s work-study again, plus Prof. Gallup-Diaz’s Praxis seminar next semester, “Telling Bryn Mawr Histories,” which will be for History credit.
You see the problem? There are all these different routes to doing historical research, but they’re all in different areas/avenues/structures of the College. There’s no coordinated oral history program to comprehensively train students and then share experiential knowledge. While there have been some meaningful steps forward–Eric Pumroy and Special Collections worked with the College Counsel last summer to create standardized consent forms!!– in other ways it felt like we were reinventing the wheel. I think ultimately there should be as many people doing these projects as possible! But for me this semester, it often felt like I was just adding to the chaos rather than piloting something really meaningfully.
This is something we kept realizing in the Telling Histories Working Group: this fundamental lack of organization for history projects. That’s why we included in our recommendations that there be a Standing Committee to direct history-projects. The Group was convened to work out how the College could continue to address the exclusionary histories brought up by the renaming of Old Library, and that was the single most important recommendation was to organize that labor so that it wasn’t being done in a million different places without building to anything. And importantly, Eric Pumroy, Director of Special Collections, is leading a charter to, among other things, consolidate & ratify oral history standards for the College, and building a relationship Alumni Relations & Development, who are crucial to this work. But it’s still a far cry from the Standing Committee we recommended.
I’m choosing to lay all of this out here, in my ethics post, because a lot of my thoughts and feelings about ethics are tied up in all my unresolved feelings about this project and the resistance points we’ve met along the way. At various times, I have felt (imagined or real) skepticism about the rigor of my oral-history training as an independent researcher with Kate and Ignacio, as well as resistance around the IRB question, feeling like my project was somehow illegal or something. Or that the research was potentially ethically-risky because it was indpenednt/under Praxis and not a class. And all of that is part of the disjointed nature of oral history research at Bryn Mawr, with everyone kind of on a different page about training, ethics, and IRB. We knew it was going to be more challenging to forge forward without waiting for administrative things to progress, but I never stopped feeling like some people on campus resented me for doing this work, like I was out-of-line. But also, as I think you’ll see from my ethics discussion, students want to do this work, because it’s deeply personal to us, to understanding ourselves and our community. So it’s going to keep happening, and it would be so nice to have the College to support us in a unified way.
ok, so finally, ethics:
In addition to some great practical guides at Canaday, the Oral History Association (OHA) has great resources online about ethical considerations and training resources in general. The OHA stresses four key points of oral history ethics: informed consent, clear communication of potential risks, providing interviewees the opportunity to amend a transcript, and sufficient preliminary research prior to the interview.
Thankfully, Bryn Mawr’s standardized consent forms, mentioned above, come in two parts, providing for a two-part conversation with participants: first, getting informed consent before the interview; and second, allowing the participant to amend the final transcript before it enters Special Collections.
Within this project, ethical considerations were alive for me in a way that isn’t true for all oral historians. Interviewing recent alumni of color about their labor at Bryn Mawr often felt insane. Why would I of all people, ask people to relive potentially traumatic experiences, so soon after they had happened? I was comforted, again and again, by my participants’ overwhelming willingness to take part, and by the knowledge that each of them thought about posterity when they were here as students.