Join this Hop-On as organizers of the Oral History Worker Collective, Sarah Dziedzic and David Wolinsky, talk about why the Collective was founded and its broader purpose to build connections between peer practitioners. They'll highlight one of the field's resources on oral history labor––the Independent Oral History Practitioner's Toolkit, an exhaustive how-to for contract oral history work––and introduce a new companion workbook. Sarah and David will also guide attendees through exercises to help calculate rates, develop project proposals and scopes of work, and build values directly into their practice. Each attendee will leave with a copy of the workbook, clarity on key features they want for their career, and ways to demonstrate solidarity within their everyday labor. Both new and experienced practitioners are welcome to join this Hop-On.

Bios:

Sarah Dziedzic is an oral historian based in New York City and has produced numerous oral history projects in partnership with museums, archives, school programs, and community groups on neighborhood history, visual arts, and cultural heritage. She is a founder and organizer of the Oral History Worker Collective, a recipient of an NEH mini-grant to research labor issues in the field of oral history, and a past member of the National Council on Public History’s Empowering the Public History Workplace Working Group. She graduated from Columbia University’s Oral History M.A. program in 2011, is a chronically ill student loan debtor, and lives in Queens with her partner and their many houseplants.

David Wolinsky is a recovering award-winning journalist (The Onion, NBC) turned self-made oral historian with a longstanding preoccupation with how people working in entertainment industries manage to survive — or "survive" — the internet. He was among the first to explore Gamergate through his oral history project, Don't Die, through which he has conducted over 500 interviews tracing how online subcultures and harassment campaigns invade people's IRL lives. These conversations are now preserved in an archive at Stanford. He has also conducted archival research for documentary films including Louder Than Guns and The Power of Film, and for podcasts at Wondery. A lifelong (?) freelancer, he is a founder and organizer of the Oral History Worker Collective, which centers the realities of oral history work. His first book, The Hivemind Swarmed, is an oral history of the uneven costs of "cool" jobs like making videogames, set against the rise of the alt-right. The book, praised as a field guide to understanding how we arrived at the current cultural moment, earned critical acclaim from Ken Burns. He has also contributed to Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt, forthcoming in April from OR Books. He's currently at work on his next book about TV workers post-strikes, along with other projects that occasionally pay!