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Fall 2019 SOHP Internship Application

Speak Out! Intergernational Oral Histories in Orange County

I have had the pleasure of working with Orange County’s Department on Aging to help bring filmed oral histories about the history of Orange County to its citizens. The idea was first suggested by members of the Project EngAGE Intergenerational Senior Resource Team (SRT). Project EngAGE is a 13-week senior leadership program aimed at training local older adults to become community leaders who help their communities become ideal places to age. After course completion, Project EngAGE graduates join a variety of different SRTs which all focus on community engagement around aging topics. The goal of the Intergenerational SRT’s Speak Out! project is to get high schoolers in conversation with lifelong members of their communities. With the help of community partners, the SRT has recruited four older adults from different areas of the county to tell their stories and share the history of Orange. With ages ranging from 80 to 106, these narrators can give us profound insight into all of the failures, tribulations, triumphs, and joys of our past.

To engage the next generation in learning about the past, Orange County has partnered with Andrea DeGette’s videography students at Cedar Ridge High School. Using the skills they’re currently developing as documentarians, DeGette’s students will work as interviewers, videographers, editors, and directors to create a documentary of these life history interviews to share at two screening events in Orange County’s senior centers in May.

On Friday, February 8^th, I had the honor of giving an introductory training on oral history’s methods and best practices, as well as practical interview tips, to these future historians.  As we discussed the ins and outs of the interview process, I was ecstatic to witness the curiosity and engagement of the students. To practice the methods we discussed, the students paired up and took on the role of either narrator or interviewer. Their challenge as interviewers was to use one of three provided prompts and to go deep with their narrator on one line of questioning for six full minutes. Using their burgeoning chops of engaged listening and strategic open-ended questions, students got a taste of an afternoon in front of an oral historian’s microphone.

Stay tuned for updates about the Speak Out! Documentary. Special thanks to Bobby Cobb, Betty Myers, Shenae McPherson, Officer Andre Richmond, Andrea DeGette, Cedar Ridge High School Videography Club, and the Orange County Department on Aging for their enthusiasm and dedication to this project and documenting the voices of Orange County.

Meet Our 2019 Spring Interns

Anne Bennett, Michael Leydendecker, and Elly Thompson (not pictured: Jona Bocari).

The spring semester is underway and flying by, and we’re thrilled to introduce our 2019 spring SOHP interns. They’ll be focusing their research and fieldwork on interviews with North Carolina members of the 2020 Vote Centennial Initiative, leading up to the centennial of the passage of the 19th amendment.

Anne Bennett is a junior majoring in Southern studies and Jazz studies. She plays jazz saxophone professionally, and does comedy both on and off-campus. This past summer, she worked as a production intern at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. She plans on pursuing a career in comedy production once she graduates and looks forward to finding ways to present archival research and tell women’s stories in new and creative ways.

Jona Bocari is an international Morehead-Cain scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in economics and history. Born and raised in Albania, she studied at the United World College of the Adriatic, an international high school in Italy before joining Carolina. A native speaker of Albanian and fluent in English, Italian, Spanish and French, she is deeply passionate about global perspectives concerning issues of justice and the power of stories to drive change. 

Michael Leydendecker is a senior majoring in history and political science. A native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Michael enjoys running and volunteers teaching civics in Durham at a local elementary school. He is looking forward to learning more about oral history, the American South, and giving a voice to a part of its rich history.

Elly Thompson is a junior from Charlotte, North Carolina who is majoring in public policy and minoring in history. She is interested in studying the intersection between historical representation and memory in American policy making. Outside of academics, Elly is a member of the Alpha Chi Omega Fraternity whose main service focus is Domestic Violence Awareness. Through this organization, Elly has helped execute events to support local women’s shelters, including the Chapel Hill Compass Center. 

“Not an Easy Thought to Hold:” Death, Dying, and Oral History

Since May of 2018, I’ve been interviewing a variety of narrators—from nurses and doctors to clergy and academics—about their experiences with medicine. With my own research centering around aging and end of life, death and dying is a natural point of discussion between myself and the narrators I’m interviewing. Through this process and these conversations, I have come to hold a strong conviction that the connotations evoked by using words like “death” and “dying” in our culture are sorely in need of a semantic overhaul. As a result,  I set out to further understand how people who have brushed against death (in any sense) talk about it, and I’d like to share a few of those stories with you through a  series of blog posts.

In this series, I’ll be posting clips from those interviews and reflecting on them through the lens of death and dying studies, or the study of thanatology. As we reflect upon these interviews, there are a few crucial questions to anchor our discussion:

• What is the state of death in our culture?
• What effect is created when we experience death in oral history?
• How does experiencing death in narrative translate to our own understanding of mortality?
• How do moral judgments of good and bad play into these stories?

As with any kind of story, it is important to consider how we exchange stories of death.  We walk a thin line between experiencing a narrative and creating a spectacle of it. An important piece of maintaining respect for the story is holding reverence for the narrator and their narrative. After all, the stories of death that I have helped archive touch on some of the most vulnerable and momentous episodes of each narrator’s life. [i] Sharing in those moments is a privilege and I hope you will join me maintaining an air of respect as you listen to these stories—something like whispering while in an old cathedral.

In this opening clip, Brian Cornell, clergy for the Methodist church and volunteer chaplain for many years, mentions “being there at the bridge,” highlighting how death is a trip between two places.  Whatever your spiritual leanings, thinking of the dying process as a journey has very practical implications for our time on this side of life. When we consider death as a journey, we give it a definitive beginning, middle, and end. Drawing these delineations helps us put death in a familiar framework. All successful narratives have beginnings, middles, and ends, after all. But most important to an American death ethic is the beginning. It is our habit to never truly accept that our time is arriving and to fight furiously “that good night,” but time and again we have seen the trauma caused by denial, both in the eventual mode of death (e.g. CPR or loved ones having to unplug life support) and in its effects on the ones left behind. We love to fight death, but we never win. Choosing our battles is an important part of a healthy end of life plan. When the journey of death has a beginning then we have accepted it as a natural sequence, something necessary and free of shame or guilt. There’s a reason Monica Williams-Murphy called her 2011 guide to the other side “It’s OK to Die.”

Death is a ubiquitous experience that is a deeply entrenched part of the American medical experience, yet, despite it being something that everyone will experience, there remains great discrepancies between how we envision our final chapter and how it elapses:

In California, for example, 70 percent of individuals surveyed said they wish to die at home, yet 68 percent do not. Instead, many of us die in hospitals, subject to overmedication and infection, often after receiving treatment that we do not want. Doctors know this, which may explain why 72 percent of them die at home.[ii]

It’s difficult to explain why so many deaths aren’t satisfactory, but Ivan Illich put it this way: “The ritual nature of modern health procedures hides from doctors and patients the contradiction between the ideal of a natural death of which they want to die and the reality of a clinical death in which most contemporary [people] actually end.” [iii] The rise of hospice and palliative care has advanced the experience of dying with bounding strides in recent decades, but there’s still a great deal of work to do in order to rectify our wish to die at home with the reality of that experience.

The Conversation Project posits that increasing our conversations about end of life is a good place to start. [iv] With the rise of projects centered around the medical humanities, such as the Stories to Save Lives Project from SOHP, we can work within a new framework to consider death and dying differently.

In like fashion, I hope that through these blogs posts, you will gain a little more familiarity (and perhaps even comfort) with not just the topics of death and dying, but discussing them—an essential first step towards creating a satisfactory end of life story for yourself and your loved ones.

I’ll leave you with one last thought to ruminate on. In this clip, Brenda McCall, a retired nurse, considers the hard work of sitting with one’s own mortality. She attributes the continuum of declining independence we experience as we age to a fundamental fear of death. Perhaps accepting our own fragility is the first step towards accepting our own mortality. At almost any age we can observe the body’s failures and begin to do the difficult work of accepting our mortality and preparing for our (eventual) deaths.

i See Christine Valentine, Bereavement Narratives: Continuing Bonds in the Twentieth Century (London and New York, 2008).
ii See MacPherson and Parikh, “Most people want to die at home…” https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/most-people-want-to-die-at-home-but-many-land-in-hospitals-getting-unwanted-care/2017/12/08/534dd652-ba74-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ce54fcce6757
iii See “The Political Uses of Natural Death”
iv https://theconversationproject.org/about/

Jacquelyn Down Hall Research Fellowship Application Submission Form