A cornerstone of oral history practice, the oral history release form is a dynamic document that can address ownership, agency, care and self-care, trauma, reciprocity and consent. In this workshop, we’ll break apart the meaning, mission and elements of the release form and find ways it can support our projects, our interviewers and our narrators.
While thought of as a contract in other practices, we will approach the release form as a living document that holds us to what we mutually agree upon at a given juncture and gives us a solid space to return to and renegotiate, also, in the spirit of anti-fixity, if our narrators’ wishes, genders, motives, comfort, station in life changes. How can a release form hold us accountable to a vision and an ethics?
Over the course of 1.5 hours, we will become conversant in the elements and options when fashioning our own release forms before drafting a document of our own, either as an exercise or for a project we have in mind.
This workshop is relevant for all oral historians, documentarians, narrative nonfiction writers and artists whose work centers on other people stories and/or likeness. Please join us if you want to build a release form OR if you like to engage in hands-on learning while thinking through the ethics of collaborative documentary.
A recording will be available to all participants, including those who cannot be present for the synchronous online workshop. Release form examples and a template will also be provided to registrants.
Tuition:
Standard [Unlimited]: $65.00
Hand-up [Unlimited]: $42.00
Fellowship [Limited number]: $0
*A number of $42 spaces have been reserved for participants who are under-employed or work in under-resourced economies (education, social work, etc) need a hand-up at this time.
*A limited number of tuition-free spaces have been reserved for participants with reduced access to resources, money in particular, especially if they possess visibly marginalized identities. We ask that participants consider their ability to pay and place themselves in the appropriate tuition-tier
Suzanne Snider (Founder/Director, Oral History Summer School 2012-) is a writer, documentarian, and educator whose work is deeply influenced by oral history theory and practice. In 2012, she founded Oral History Summer School, an interdisciplinary training program in upstate New York. She co-founded with OHSS Archives Director Emma Brown the OHSS audio archive, the Community Library of Voice and Sound, which houses 550-plus longform oral histories, in addition to songs and ambient sound. She consults frequently for institutions and project teams, collaborating with organizations including the National Public Housing Museum, MoMA, Center for Reproductive Rights, Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the Prison Public Memory Project. You can read more about OHSS’s collaborations, here. Her writing/audio work appear in The Guardian, The Believer, Legal Affairs, and The Washington Post, along with several anthologies and artist catalogs. She has taught at the New School, Columbia University and Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies. Prior to her work with adult learners, she taught in the New York City public school system (pre-K through 6th), and developed arts curriculum for visually impaired students at the New York Institute for Special Education. With support from the Yaddo Corporation, the MacDowell Colony and the UCross Foundation Center, she is completing her first book, The Revival. She received an MFA in Writing from Columbia University and dual BA in Literature and Dance from Wesleyan University. She has studied Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy and is currently completing graduate work in the field of Clinical Social Work.