FINDING FATHERS: NAVIGATING UNCERTAINTY IN THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW
By Emma Courtland, 2017
In his essay “Listen to Their Voices,” the former director of Columbia’s Center for Oral History Research, Ron Grele, suggested the key to analyzing the underlying structure of consciousness that governs oral history interviews “lies in the imagination of [the narrator] and how he uses that imagination to construct a history” (222). But how can we locate the imagination? And if we can’t, how will we ever know what exactly we are analyzing? This project constitutes an attempt to develop a methodology for locating the imagination in the oral history interview, and demonstrates the necessity of such an undertaking.
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Since graduating from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in English, Emma Courtland has worked as a writer, editor, film programmer, and field producer in and around Los Angeles. The bulk of her professional efforts, however, has been on behalf the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where she spent seven years collaborating to devise and execute a full slate of public programs focused on the vast and ever-changing intersections of storytelling and technology.
She is especially interested in cultural form and narrative cognition, and how our modes of sharing stories—written or spoken words, still or moving images—shape our understanding of and interactions with the world.
In 2017, she received a M.A. in oral history from Columbia University in the City of New York.