Staring Out to Sea and the Transformative Power of Oral History for Undergraduate Interviewers

Abstract

In January 2013, Abigail Perkiss, assistant professor of history at Kean University in Union, New Jersey, began work with six undergraduate students to develop an oral history project to document Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath. For several months, these students worked to set the parameters and scope of the project, while at the same time studying the work of oral history and preparing themselves to go into the field to recruit participants and conduct interviews. For a number of these students, themselves impacted by the storm, the project took them into their own communities to capture the stories of their neighbors and friends. The students gained new insights into their own agency in the world; they turned their own feelings of victimization after the storm into a sense of ownership and control during the recovery process; and they felt empowered as both historians and as historical actors to effect change in the world around them. This essay traces the transformative impact of the Staring Out to Sea Oral History Project on these undergraduates.

• Hurricane Sandy
• natural disaster
• project-based learning
• transformation
• undergraduate education

I would like to thank Kean University, Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, and the Tuckerton Seaport Museum for their support of this project; Linda Shopes, Don Ritchie, Stephen Sloan, D’Ann Penner, Jennifer Block-Lerner, Lindsay Liotta, Christina Cooke, David Caruso, and Kate Scott, for their guidance in developing this course; Dan Royles and his Digital Humanities students at Stockton College, for adding new depth to this work; and OHR editor Kathy Nasstrom, for inviting me to write this piece and for her critical and constructive eye in guiding it toward publication. Most importantly, my thanks to Alicia Hill, Trudi-Ann Lawrence, Brittany Le Strange, Mary Piasecki, Abdelfatth Rasheed, and Arij Syed, for their commitment to this work, and for the transformative impact they have had on me.

Notes

¹For works on oral history and empowerment, see, for example, Steven High, ed., Beyond Testimony and Trauma: Oral History in the Aftermath of Mass Violence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015); Daniel Kerr, Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011); Patricia Robin Herbst, “From Helpless Victim to Empowered Survivor: Oral History as a Treatment for Survivors of Torture,” Women & Therapy 13 no. 1-2 (1992): 141-154; Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, Oral History and Public Memories (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008); Valerie Janesick, “Oral History as a Social Justice Project: Issues for the Qualitative Researcher,” The Qualitative Report 12, no. 1 (March 2007): 111-121.

²Eric Blake, et al, “Tropical Storm Report,” National Hurricane Center, February 12, 2013, http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL182012_Sandy.pdf, (accessed May 11, 2016), as cited by Diane Bates’ Superstorm Sandy: The Inevitable Destruction and Recosntruction of the Jersey Shore (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 7.

³“Kean University,” Kean Autism Research and Education Center, accessed March 5, 2014: http://www.kean.edu/∼kare/about_us.htm; “Kean University Institutional Profile,” Kean University, 2015, last accessed May 24, 2016: http://ir.kean.edu/irhome/PDF/EXACCT15.pdf.

⁴For works on oral history and trauma, see, for example, Stephen Sloan, “Oral History and Hurricane Katrina: Reflections on Shouts and Silences, Oral History Review 35, no. 2 (2008): 176-86; Mary Marshall Clark, “Case Study: Field Notes on Catastrophe: Reflections on the September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative Project,” in Donald Ritchie, ed., Oxford Handbook of Oral History (2010), 255-64; Caitlin Tyler Richards, “Oral History in Disaster Zones,” Oxford University Press Blog, December 14, 2012, http://blog.oup.com/2012/12/oral-history-in-disaster-zones/; Mark Cave and Stephen Sloan, eds., Listening on the Edge: Oral History in the Aftermath of Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

⁵The project website is http://www.staringouttosea.com. Student reflections on the course and the process of developing the project are available there.

⁶Arij Syed, “Preparing for the Interview Process,” Staring Out to Sea Course Blog, March 5, 2013, accessed January 28, 2015, http://staringouttosea.com/.

⁷One of the more noteworthy insights to come out of these original interviews was the need to ask directly about the narrator’s race. We knew we wanted to look at socioeconomic indicators in evaluating storm response, but not until the students began their interviews did we realize that the audio format would be limiting unless we added specific questions about identity politics.

⁸Mary Piasecki, “Getting their Voices Heard,” Staring Out to Sea Course Blog, March 22, 2013, accessed January 28, 2015, http://staringouttosea.com/.

⁹Mary Piasecki, Speech, Port Monmouth American Legion, Port Monmouth, NJ, March 21, 2013.

¹⁰Mary Piasecki, “Getting their Voices Heard,” Staring Out to Sea Course Blog, March 22, 2013, accessed January 28, 2015, http://staringouttosea.com/.

¹¹Brittany Le Strange, “Staring Out to Sea: The Story of Superstorm Sandy in Three Bayshore Communities” (presentation, Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, College Park, MD, April 2013).

¹²Brittany Le Strange, Class Reflection, May 2013, document in Perkiss’s possession.

¹³Trudi-Ann Lawrence, Class Reflection, May 2013, document in Perkiss’s possession; Trudi-Ann Lawrence, “Institutional Collaboration: Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, Kean University, and a Hurricane Sandy Oral History Project,” (presentation, 47^th Annual Meeting of the Oral History Association, Oklahoma City, OK, October 11, 2013).

¹⁴Arij Syed, Class Reflection, May 2013, document in Perkiss’s possession.

¹⁵Jennifer Reut, “Oral History Projects Document Hurricane Sandy,” Perspectives on History, October 2013, 10-11; accessible online at https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2013/oral-history-projects-document-hurricane-sandy.

¹⁶Arij Syed, interviewed by Abigail Perkiss, Staring Out to Sea, May 8, 2015.

¹⁷Mary Piasecki, interviewed by Abigail Perkiss, Staring Out to Sea, May 19, 2015.

¹⁸Trudi-Ann Lawrence, interviewed by Abigail Perkiss, Staring Out to Sea, June 17, 2015.

¹⁹Lawrence, interview.

²⁰Alicia Hill, “Personal Biography,” Staring Out to Sea, www.staringouttosea.com.

²¹Brittany Le Strange, interviewed by Abigail Perkiss, Staring Out to Sea, June 11, 2015.

²²Christopher Bellitto, e-mail to Alicia Hill, Trudi-Ann Lawrence, Brittany Le Strange, Mary Piasecki, Abdelfatth Rasheed, and Arij Syed, October 11, 2013, used with permission.