Upcoming Events
Workshop #1: Narrator Experience and Storytelling Ethics
Virtual
VOW’s summer workshop series provides training opportunities to help you gain skills, reflect on best practices, and plan a storytelling project to amplify community voices.
Workshop #1 provides an introduction to our ethics-driven, empathy-based approach to oral history storytelling, with a focus on trauma-informed practices and centering the voices and experiences of narrators throughout the project. We’ll create space to collectively reflect on important ethical questions, and a VOW narrator will share their perspectives on telling their story through the oral history process. The workshop will be facilitated by VOW staff and Gabriel Mendez, a narrator from Solito, Solita: Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America.
Democracy and Civic Engagement Workshop for Educators
Virtual
Voice of Witness is hosting a workshop on democracy, civic engagement, and storytelling in the classroom, with a special feature from NPR/PBS member station KQED about their Youth Media Challenge: Call for Change. Geared toward middle and high school educators, this one-hour session will explore democracy and civic participation through the lens of personal storytelling, community voices, belonging, and resistance. We’ll highlight VOW’s new thematic unit on democracy, which features four ready-to-go lesson plans, along with a larger oral history project. Educators will leave with tools and materials ready for the classroom.
Workshop #2: Exploring the Interview Process
Virtual
Workshop #2 provides an introduction to VOW’s interview practices, focusing on the role of respect, curiosity, trauma-informed approaches, insider/outsider power dynamics, consent, and more. We’ll explore case studies and create space to discuss best practices and challenges that may arise during oral history interviews. The workshop will be facilitated by VOW staff and Andrea Quijada, a media literacy consultant, community organizer, and co-editor of the upcoming VOW book Global Stories from the Automated Welfare State.
Workshop #3: Building Narrative Editing Skills
Virtual
Workshop #3 provides an introduction to an oral history editing style that combines journalistic integrity and a literary approach to honor narrators’ voices and highlight complex issues through personal story. We’ll explore concrete skills and tips and provide an opportunity to practice on a sample transcript. This workshop will share best practices from VOW’s 15+ years illuminating issues of inequity through first-person narrative.
Socialism Conference
Chicago, Illinois
A four-day conference featuring participatory discussions, lectures, and workshops organized by activists from all over the country, the Socialism Conference explores radical traditions and movements for survival and liberation. Voice of Witness is facilitating two sessions at the conference:
Storytelling for Social Justice: Using Oral History in Community and Movement Building
In this interactive session, staff from Voice of Witness will share key principles of their ethical storytelling methodology and discuss how first-person narratives can be a powerful tool for organizing and advancing social change. They will be joined in conversation by Katrina Powell, editor of the latest VOW oral history book, Beginning Again: Stories of Movement and Migration in Appalachia. Session participants will have the chance to practice hands-on interviewing techniques.
Looking For Indigenous Futures
VOW will facilitate an insightful, intergenerational conversation between two narrators from the oral history project How We Go Home: Voices from Indigenous North America. Indigenous women’s rights advocate Gladys Radek (Gitxsan/Wet’suwet’an First Nations) and tribal administrator Ashley Hemmers (Fort Mojave Indian Tribe) will discuss leadership, advocacy, and transforming narratives around Indigenous representation.
