Say It Forward: A Guide to Social Justice Storytelling by Cliff Mayotte & Claire Keifer

Author:Cliff Mayotte & Claire Keifer [Mayotte, Cliff & Keifer, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Human Rights, Social Science, Methodology
ISBN: 9781608469581
Google: xLFmswEACAAJ
Amazon: B07KWGWVQ4
Barnesnoble: B07KWGWVQ4
Goodreads: 43523812
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2018-01-15T13:39:33+00:00

Find a System That Works for You

From the five interviews I collected, there were about seven and a half hours’ worth of audio recordings. The transcription process took me a little more than a month to complete.4 While transcribing, I made sure to keep a summary log for each transcript. The summaries included the subjects covered and their corresponding time. This helped immensely once I began writing. I know that some people get others to help them with their transcription. The process can be draining, but I think it is necessary to have an organizational system in place that you created and implemented yourself by the time you start writing. There are books on oral history theory that can provide detailed organizational systems.5 These can often be complicated and at times unhelpful, but if you take a “Goldilocks” approach, you can find or create a system that works for you. The goal isn’t to duplicate someone else’s process or arbitrarily choose an organizational system just because it works for someone else, but to create a system that will allow you to access your research reliably and efficiently.

By the end of the transcription process, I had picked a few themes to focus on. Rather than include the interviews as a whole, I separated my paper into three chapters—integrating the interviews into an overarching narrative. The first chapter outlined the events leading up to and including the storm. The second focused on the narrators’ transition to Houston. The third looked at the impact of the narrators’ relocation on their lives in Houston and the impact on the city of New Orleans.

For each of these three chapters I assigned labels and tags like those you would find, for instance, with a YouTube video of a dog playing fetch—“dog,” “playing,” “dog trick,” and so on. I gave tags to my interviews and research that would later become the topics of paragraphs and pages within the chapters. Each tag received its own color. I assigned a tag for the debate on the word refugee, one for the change in New Orleans, and another for Houston traffic. All of these topics appeared in my background research as well as the interviews. And for every time they appeared in the text, they received their corresponding label. When I wanted to find where my sources talked about displacement, for example, I just looked for the yellow tab. This organized my thoughts and helped me start writing.

Once I finished my paper, I presented my project at a symposium with several other students who had also completed their own oral histories. There were about forty-five to fifty people there, most of whom were family and friends of the presenters. I spoke about my project, the work I had done, and what it meant to me as a Houstonian and a resident of the Gulf Coast for these people to trust me to record their stories. After I finished there was a short five-minute question-and-answer session. A woman near the back of the room raised her hand.

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