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Throughout the 2025-2026 academic year, ECAR at Clemson students in the Creative Inquiry team collaborated with four refugee families to document and record their life stories. Each student conducted home visits to listen, inquire, record, and transcribe the oral histories.
Notably, our students were entering into spaces already created and established as “home”, which often meant that sessions were undertaken while children squealed, televisions blared, and cooking pots gurgled. Fortunately, our student volunteers were equipped to handle effervescent environments through a workshop series on oral history and positionality statements.
In the oral history workshop series, students gained classroom experience through the analysis and critique of oral history readings such as Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Additionally, they discussed the mechanics of oral histories, emphasizing the importance of empowering the research subject through facilitating a narration as opposed to documenting an interview.
Lastly, the positionality statements workshop taught student practitioners how to self-reflect so as to ward off known or unknown personal biases, which have a tendency to disrupt the facilitation of a narration.
Through this workshop series, ECAR students learned oral history strategies that dignify and empower our target community. Research is ongoing, and we expect the oral history project to expand in the years to come.
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