Oral History Project with Dr. Alison Turner

Over the past two years and thanks to the support of the American Council for Learned Societies,  Dr. Alison Turner has worked with a wide array of Shoestring parents and community members to create different oral history projects about Jackson. From documenting the early years of Shoestring to collecting holiday traditions, Dr. Turner has both enriched our understanding of our community and created promising new pathways into further research and projects about Jackson.

Her central project, Raising Children in Jackson, explores what it means to both be raised and raise children in the neighborhoods served by Operation Shoestring Interviews were conducted by volunteer committee community members with their family members, friends, and neighbors.

Dr. Turner came to us shortly after finishing her PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver, and is a native of Colorado. Below, you’ll find her thoughts on her two year long fellowship at Operation Shoestring!

Q: Why did you choose the committee based model for Raising Children in Jackson ?

 A collection of oral histories about people raising children and being raised as children in central Jackson is important; including people who live, work, and play in central Jackson in every stage of the process felt just as important, if not more so. The more I read, think, and talk to other people about archives, the better I understand the importance of a collaborative process, even if that collaboration delays and complicates the product (and it will). Understanding the context of any collection of material (Where did it come from? Who put it there? Why?)  is crucial to fully seeing what is (and is not) in a collection. Since I came into this project as an academic who is not from this community, I needed to make sure that the project explored what is important to this community— not just to me. In other words, working in collaboration with people who live, work, and play in the communities whose stories make up this oral history collection makes possible a path away from “archive taking” and toward “archive making.” 

Q: What has surprised you the most about this process? 

I knew from the beginning that I would not be able to predict the direction(s) the oral history and listening committees would take: even the theme of the oral history project (raising children) would need to emerge from the committee’s work. While I have not been surprised that the discussions have been complex, nuanced, and often full of respectful disagreement, the passion across the committee members has energized the project beyond what I could have imagined. Every single committee member believes in this work, in this community, and in how the work we are doing with oral histories can benefit the community. Across the range of this work that has taken place since Fall 2022, those members have included Sophia Beverly, Kimberly Cotton, Shalaun Davis, Velika Michael, Porshia Jordan, Kearani Miller, Anastasia Shed, and Gloria Thompson. Keep your eyes on these change makers!

Q: What conception or idea has changed the most during this process?

While I always knew that process is important, the collaborative work during these projects has deepened my appreciation for what cannot be documented even in the process of documentation. For example, for the History for the Holidays event, committee members recorded oral storytelling around the family holiday traditions of grandparents in the community. In order to create a space where grandparents wanted to share these stories, we invited them to join us for a gathering that included food, painting, and endlessly popular games of Bingo. Participants expressed joy around the entire event, but the part that was most important was having fun in a space where they could be themselves. Perhaps this should always be an acknowledged component of oral history making, and perhaps we should value that this part is always off the record. 

Q: What are some major themes or motifs you’ve noticed during this process? 

When we were done recording the 35 interviews in this collection, the Oral History Committee became a Listening Committee: all seven of us listened to every single recording. As a group, we spent hours discussing what we heard in these interviews, including their contradictions, confusions, and moments that leave listeners speechless. Within these details, we identified five major themes, including how access to activities impacts how caregivers are able to provide for their children, changing practices and expectations for discipline, the changing role of faith, a deepening understanding of the long term impacts of trauma, and an overwhelmingly consistent feeling that “the village” of in previous generations helped with raising children, but that now “the village is gone.”  We hope to more deeply understand and discuss these themes in the next phase of the project. 

Q: What are you most looking forward to this year? 

The Listening Committee is preparing an application for funding that will widen the audience for these oral histories and “activate” the information they provide in the community. We hope to record a podcast miniseries of five episodes, each of which features excerpts from the oral history collection on each of the major themes, along with discussion from the committee members. Each episode will feature an “expert” on that particular topic who will help listeners respond and take action Then, we hope to invite the community to an event that celebrates both the oral history collection and the podcast, inviting local leaders, residents, and supporters to engage in further discussion and action that might strengthen and support the community in the areas discussed. 

Q: What advice would you give yourself a year ago, if you could about this process and fellowship? 

The process of oral history making is a blend of logistics, listening, and learning – it’s part art and part skill. Oral history best practices include “shared authority,” a concept that invites the narrator to share as much or as little that they’d like others to know. It takes time, practice, and, ultimately, instinct, to know when to ask a narrator to expand on a topic and when to wait in silence or move on. As a committee for the raising children project, we often discussed our roles as oral history interviewers when recording narrators’ stories about what can be the most vulnerable of topics: being raised by our own caregivers and raising children of our own – sitting with narrators in vulnerable situation seemed to be the most challenging part of interviewing for many of the committee members. However, I believe that committee members became more comfortable with this part of oral history making after the History for the Holidays project, which collected stories of holiday traditions. While these interviews occasionally covered vulnerable terrain, for the most part the topics were easier to discuss and elaborate on. Next time I have the good luck to collaborate on a project like this, I would suggest that we start with a smaller project first, gaining initial experience documenting topics that are often (though not always) lighter and less intimate.