LISTENING AS ACTION: THE ORDINARY PEOPLE AND PLACES OF STORYCORPS

Abstract

StoryCorps is a nonprofit organization aimed to empower the voices and stories of ‘ordinary’ Americans. Founded by radio producer David Isay in 2003, StoryCorps collaborates with National Public Radio (NPR) and the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center to provide a public platform for broadcasting and preserving American oral history. The project has collected and archived over 75,000 stories, recounting the everyday places and practices that comprise American life in ordinary and extraordinary ways (StoryCorps, 2018). StoryCorps privileges both storytelling and listening as communicative practices that constructively build human connections. This piece emerges in response to my listening to NPR’s broadcast of StoryCorps segments alongside reading US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Smith’s (2015) memoir Ordinary Light.

Notes

¹ My use of the label “banal” is a direct reference to Arendt’s (1963/2006) work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, in which she associates banality with a commonness so routine that it lacks thoughtful reflection and judgment.