On the Edge of My Seat: Planning an Interactive Oral History Exhibit

May 12, 2017

In this post, OHMA student Robin Weinberg (2016) reflects on her experience creating Four Chairsfor the recent Inside Voices exhibition. 

Our Fieldwork assignment, “create a significant piece of public-facing work,” seemed, frankly, overwhelming. I wasn’t sure how to put all the bits and pieces—finding a research topic and theme, conducting interviews, finding the compelling stories within, editing the audio, designing a display, crafting promotional materials, presenting the audio—together to pull off making something engaging to the general public.

I thought about scrapping the research topic I worked on first semester and starting over. In the fall, I interviewed three women for an “Empty Nest” research project, and was always unsure if this sort of project was worthy of deep oral history attention.

I listened to my interviews again, however, and thought about how my narrators told many kinds of stories from many parts of life. And how all were told, of course, from a woman’s—actually a mother’s—perspective.  Plus, they sounded like intimate conversations.  I thought that this might be a more broadly appealing frame for my project. After all, we all are, have, had, or know women and mothers.

So, this became the kernel of the idea: present a few different themes along a sort of continuum of womanhood and motherhood, up to the empty nest.  They eventually boiled down to Motherhood, Relationships, Careers, and Empty Nest. 

Find the 

http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/2017-four-chairs/

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