Thursday, February 13, 2025, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm at the Observatorio Cervantes at Harvard (2 Arrow St, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA)
This will be an in-person event, combining English and Spanish. Click here to RSVP.
Oral history with Latina/o/e communities centers on cultural practices rooted in testimonial traditions, comunidad, and cariño. Elena Foulis will focus on conducting oral histories with diverse communities, including best ethical and logistical practices, and she will provide insight into planning and executing successful oral histories projects and consultation with the community.
Prof. Foulis will highlight the importance of cultural and linguistic awareness to maintain a respectful space at all stages of the interview process. This presentation argues for the need to center Latina/o/e projects (oral history and other public humanities products) on students’ own cultural, community, and linguistic wealth. She will describe the development of student projects that pay attention to the process of building, engaging, and critically reflecting on our personal commitments to building accessible, multilingual archives that center on the community’s knowledge.
Importantly, Prof. Foulis applies Yosso’s model of aspirational, cultural, linguistic, resistance, social, and navigational capital to compose interview questions that position narrators and students as knowledge producers and co-constructors. The audience will learn about the intricacies of working with underrepresented multilingual communities, as well as interviewing techniques in English and Spanish, transcription methods, and archiving practices.
Elena Foulis is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M- San Antonio and Director of the Spanish Language Studies Program. She has directed the oral history project Oral Narratives of Latin@s in Ohio (ONLO) since 2014. The project is an ongoing collection of over 160 video narratives, some of which can be found in her iBook, Latin@ Stories Across Ohio. Her research explores Latina/o/e voices through oral history and performance, identity and place, and linguistic practices. Prof. Foulis is the host and producer of Latin@ Stories, a podcast that invites audiences to connect and learn more about the Latina/o/x experiences at a local level while amplifying the voices of these communities more broadly.
Elena Foulis is the author and co-editor of the book Working en comunidad: Service-Learning and Community Engagement with U.S. Latinas/os/es (2024, University of Arizona Press), and is working on her monograph Embodied Encuentros: Bilingual Oral History Archives of Latinas/os/es Experiences (Ohio State University Press). Foulis is an engaged scholar committed to reaching nonacademic and academic audiences through her writing, presentations, and public humanities projects.