Stefani Evans (Project Manager, Oral History Research Center, UNLV Libraries; Nevada Representative, SOHA Board of Directors), Claytee White (Director, Oral History Research Center, UNLV Libraries), Peter Michel (Special Collections Curator, Special Collections and Archives, UNLV Libraries), and Aaron Mayes (Visual Materials Curator, Special Collections and Archives, UNLV Libraries) discuss Building Las Vegas. When UNLV Libraries began the Building Las Vegas collecting initiative in July 2016, it thought broadly. The first three goals of the project, implemented simultaneously, involved three different skill sets and three different areas of collecting: 1) collect oral histories with individuals who shaped our region’s built environment; 2) identify and collect archival records from architects, builders, designers, developers, engineers, planners, politicians, and more; and 3) photograph the region’s architectural features and the interplay between built and natural environments. As the oral history gathering phase refocuses towards editing, the archival and photographic gathering continue.
Maria Elena de las Carerras, Ph.D. (Film studies lecturer, California State University Northridge and UCLA), Caitlin Diaz (Filmmaker, editor and colorist, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Oral History Department), Barbara Hall (Archivist and film historian, Writers Guild Foundation), Maya Montañez Smukler, Ph.D. (Film studies lecturer and oral historian, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), and Teague Schneiter (Sr. Manager of Oral History Projects, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) consider the role of oral histories as a feminist intervention into the understudied subject of women whose varied careers, though often marginalized, have significantly contributed to film history. Participants will present clips from interviews produced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Visual History Program and discuss their roles in capturing myriad voices of female filmmakers and craftspeople.
Jamie A. Lee, (Assistant Professor of Digital Culture, Information, and Society, School of Information, University of Arizona), Harrison Apple (Ph.D. student, University of Arizona; co-founder of the Pittsburgh Queer History Project), and Dalena E. Hunter (Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Los Angeles; librarian, UCLA Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies) center queer community productions, such as the POP-UPArchives Event of the Arizona Queer Archives in collaboration with FARR, a coalition of feminist scholars, artists, and activists of public scholarship; an exploration of ongoing relationships beyond the interview encounter which reject the strict relationship of evidence to empiricism and narrator to oral historian; and the orality and experiential nature of Black lesbian archiving practices and material approaches to archival principles and practice in the discipline as experienced in working with ALOT, the Canadian-based online archive of lesbian oral histories.
Southwest Oral History Association 