To celebrate the Brooklyn College Listening Project on Thursday, May 9 at 6:30pm, Brooklyn College students Michelle Ayr, Jamie Deliz, Muruful Hossain, and Jasmine Peralta and Brooklyn College faculty Joseph Entin, Madeline Fox and Jessica Siegel will discuss their experiences in creating this oral history archive of personal stories. During this evening they will discuss: How does engaging in the process of such a project contribute to a richer understanding of listening as a politically engaged act? How does working together to shape questions, conduct interviews, and listen deeply, further students’ sense of belonging to a public community and also to a community of writers, historians and active contributors to their own academic disciplines as public scholars? In turn, what is public scholarship, and what is its relation to politically engaged research and activism? Students will share excerpts from the oral histories they have conducted.
The Brooklyn College Listening Project is an oral history and community interview
initiative at Brooklyn College, CUNY, where students interview family,
neighbors, friends and strangers about their lives, their experiences and their
perspectives on the world. In “Immigrant Voices” on view at the James Gallery
May 9 through May 17, ten personal stories are explored through the students’
interviews with immigrants and children of immigrants from the Dominican
Republic, México, Haiti, Pakistan, Albania, Italy, Guatemala, China, Grenada.
Since its founding in 2015 by faculty at Brooklyn College (CUNY), over 800
students across classes in a wide range of departments— American Studies,
English, History, Sociology, TV and Radio, Journalism, Puerto Rican and Latino
Studies, Judaic Studies, Media Scoring, and more—have contributed more than 500
audio recordings of interviews in an on-line digital archive.
Joseph Entin teaches English and American Studies at Brooklyn College. He is the author of Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (2007), and co-editor, with Sara Blair and Franny Nudelman, of Remaking Reality: U.S. Documentary Fiction after 1945 (2018). He is a co-founder of the Brooklyn College Listening Project.
Madeline Fox is an Assistant Professor of Children & Youth Studies and Sociology at Brooklyn College. She co-edited the volume Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Community and Make Social Justice Claims with Rickie Solinger and Kayhan Irani and in her current work she engages in critical participatory action research with young people for liberation. She is a co-founder of the Brooklyn College Listening Project.
Jessica Siegel teaches journalism and education at Brooklyn College. As a journalist she writes often about urban education, the arts and other topics. She is the director of the Brooklyn College Listening Project and one of its founders.
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