With Martha Norkunas
This advanced oral history workshop focuses on miscommunications and complexities in listening. Participants will read a chapter from my forthcoming book, Learning to Listen, called “Complexities in Listening” and come to the workshop prepared to discuss the issues it raises. Based on years of listening journals written by graduate students in my oral history seminars, the chapter reflects on why two people in a narrating-listening relationship can leave the interview with radically different experiences. Do we ever know how our narrator’s felt about the interview? Participants will be invited to share complex issues that arose in their own, or their students’ interviews. We will look at interpreting body language, voice inflection and pacing, the delicate, often nonverbal negotiations that take place about what is appropriate to talk about in an interview and what is too personal, and, related to that, what is culturally appropriate and who decides.
Martha Norkunas is an oral and public historian in Austin, Texas. She holds a Ph.D. in Folklore from Indiana University’s Folklore Institute. She is the author of The Politics of Public Memory (SUNY Press, 1993), Monuments and Memory (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002) and the forthcoming Learning to Listen: Exercises to Become a More Empathic Interviewer (Palgrave, 2026) as well as articles in national and international journals. Norkunas’s work examines how historical and cultural memory is represented in narrative and on the landscape, and how those representations intersect with race, gender, class and power. She taught graduate seminars in oral history at the University of Texas at Austin and in the Public History Program at Middle Tennessee State University. She directed a twenty-year project, the African American Oral History Project (now at the Library of Congress), as well as a variety of oral history projects with refugees, refugee workers, women in Democratic politics, National Park Service Superintendents interpreting slavery, and peace activists. Her own oral history project focused on women textile workers, the meaning of work for furniture workers, women and cancer, women imagining safe cities, immigrants and refugees, and political activists in resistance movements.
