Venue: V. Putvinskio st. 23, 102 a., in person and online.
For Vytautas Magnus University history students, school teachers, open to the public.
About the seminar
What can we learn if we stop and listen deeply to our fellow humans? What is special about interviews as a means of collecting information? In what ways are oral history interviews valuable historical sources? In this workshop, ethnographer Christa P. Whitney will draw on her own work of over fifteen years conducting oral history to answer these questions and methodology for creating a meaningful oral history collection. She will present a model for communal oral history that focuses on language, heritage, and identity from her work experience as the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project (USA). The workshop will also cover practical considerations about project scope, interviewing techniques, archival management, and presentation of oral history for wide audiences.
About the lecturer
Christa P. Whitney is an oral historian and documentarian of Lithuanian descent, whose work focuses on language, culture, and identity. Originally from Northern California, she has traveled near and far for the past fifteen years in search of Yiddish stories as the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, a growing, publicly accessible collection of more than 1,400 in-depth video interviews. Her personal research focuses on Yiddish cultural transmission among descendants of Yiddish writers, Yiddish in contemporary Lithuania, and Jewish people’s history of Samogitia. Among other things, she is currently working towards an MBA from the Isenberg School of Management at UMass.