I'm a Blogger Now, Too

In jazz, the term “big ears” refers to the ability to hear and make meaning out of complex music. One needs “big ears” to make sense of improvisatory negotiations of tricky changes and multiple  simultaneous lines and rhythms. “Big ears” are needed to hear dissonances and silences. They are needed to follow nuanced conversations between soloists; between soloists and rhythm sections; between music and other social realms; between multiply situated performers and audiences and institutions; and between the jazz at hand and jazz in history. If jazz was just about hitting the right notes, surviving the chord changes, and letting out the stops, jazz scholars, listeners, and even musicians would not need “big ears.”

…There are some areas in which meticulous historical work in jazz studies has managed to unsettle ideological understandings of jazz historiography. Much of this has involved locating jazz discourse in a history of primitivism, or in European and European American fantasies of exotic otherness, while documenting “lost” jazz practices that did not fit, and therefore do not appear, in dominant discourse. This type of scholarship…is not just about dueling canons, but about taking the canon apart to see what makes it tick, then trying to craft a different kind of historical narrative that contextualizes this ticking, along with other social, cultural, and political frameworks through which jazz has mattered. This work [is] important, not only because it will give us a more complete understanding of jazz history as a distinct narrative, but because it will increase our understandings of the societies for whom jazz has been meaningful.

Sherrie Tucker (2002)

Students of oral, labor, cultural, and sexual history should learn to “grow” their ears as well. 

Feminist oral history is never just about “getting the story.” It’s about recognizing how power, positionality, and voice shape what gets told, how it is told, and what remains unsaid. Sherrie Tucker’s approach to oral history in Swing Shift (2000) and “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” (2002) models what feminist researchers describe as listening differently: treating silences and refusals not as gaps to be fixed, but as knowledge in their own right.  Tucker leans into her narrators’ contradictions rather than smoothing them over:  when accounts conflict or resist neat categorization, these moments reveal the multiple and often competing ways that people construct meaning about their lives.  Instead of writing this off as this as a flaw in oral history, Tucker treats it as one of its strengths. 

Likewise, Tucker refuses to erase the “messiness” of memory. In Swing Shift, women musicians at times recalled the same incidents in very different ways: for instance, one remembered racial tension on the road, while another described the same tour as harmonious. Rather than deciding which account was “accurate,” Tucker shows how memory itself is shaped by identity, later experience, and the politics of telling. This aligns with Alessandro Portelli’s (1991) argument that the value of oral history lies less in factual verification and more in the meanings attached to memory. For Tucker, memory’s contradictions are not a problem to solve but an opening to feminist interpretation.

Her chapter “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” takes this even further by questioning the assumption that researchers should always pursue disclosure — especially about sexuality. She notes that historians often enter interviews with the implicit desire that subjects will “finally” name themselves as queer, as if oral history’s objective is to uncover some ultimate truth. But what happens when narrators don’t? Tucker warns against the archival “closet,” where silence or ambiguity is read only as lacking data. Instead, she asks: what does it mean to respect refusal? To recognize that what is not said may reflect survival strategies, community norms, or simply the narrator’s right to privacy? This, too, is feminist practice: decentering the researcher’s expectations and honoring the autonomy of the narrator.

These methodological choices echo the principles set forth in Feminist Research Practice (2011), where oral history and focus groups are described as tools for amplifying marginalized voices in ways that challenge dominant narratives. The text emphasizes three commitments: awareness of power dynamics, ethical responsibility, and collaborative knowledge-making. Tucker embodies all three of these principles. She acknowledges her own positionality as a white feminist historian writing about women of color of an older generation; she resists imposing tidy conclusions that might overshadow narrators’ voices; and she considers the ethical stakes of how stories circulate in public memory.

What I find especially compelling is Tucker’s attention to silence as a form of data. She reminds us that narrators’ pauses, contradictions, or refusals to answer are not voids but more like productive absences that tell us something about historical context and lived experience. For instance, when some musicians avoided directly naming (what we’d consider today to be) sexual harassment they experienced on the road, Tucker doesn’t interpret that as denial. Instead, she highlights how gendered expectations of propriety shaped what women felt they could safely say in an interview, even decades later. This is feminist oral history at its sharpest: not extracting “confessions,” but situating speech within structures of power.

By weaving together oral testimony, archival fragments, and her own reflexive awareness, Tucker shows that feminist oral history is not only about recovering “lost” voices. It is about cultivating responsibility in how we listen, interpret, and represent. She reminds us that recovery without reflexivity risks exploitation — a kind of academic mining of marginalized lives. Listening differently, developing “big ears” (a term she adopted in a chapter penned two years after Swing Shift’s publication) means being accountable to the conditions under which people speak, and to the silences that accompany their words.

Tucker’s work reframes what counts as valuable historical knowledge. Feminist oral history is not simply additive — plugging women or queer people into existing narratives — but transformative, forcing us to rethink what kind of evidence matters. Silence matters. Contradiction matters. Ambiguity matters. And as Tucker demonstrates, honoring these dimensions is not methodological weakness but feminist rigor.

Tucker pushes oral history beyond recovery into responsibility. It’s not enough to surface marginalized voices if we then force them into neat categories that suit our pre-ordained frameworks. Feminist oral history, as Tucker practices it, insists on listening with humility, with ears big enough to hear the stories and the silences and the spaces in between.

Works Referenced

Hesse-Biber, S. N. & Leavy, PN. (2013). Feminist research practice: A primer. Sage Publications, Inc.

Portelli, A. (1991). What makes oral history different. In The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history. State University of New York Press.

Tucker, S. (2000). Swing shift: “All-girl” bands of the 1940s. Duke University Press.

Tucker, S. (2002). Big ears: Listening for gender in jazz studies. Current Musicology, 71-73 (Spring 2001-Spring 2002) pp. 375-376.

Tucker, S. (2002). When subjects don’t come out. Queer episodes in music and modern identity, 293-310.

When Octavia Leona Kohner showed up to contract negotiations in little more than “two flaps of fabric … attached by string,” she wasn’t just making a fashion choice. She was embodying the tension between workplace discipline and individual expression — and daring the management of Babeland, the famed New York City sex shop, to call her bluff.

The oral history of Octavia Leona Kohner, preserved in the NYC Trans Oral History Project[1] in partnership with the New York Public Library and the Digital Transgender Archive, offers a vivid case study of how oral history has evolved as a practice—from documenting elites to centering the voices of those historically pushed to the margins. Kohner, a transwoman who grew up on Staten Island, recounts her coming-of-age, her struggles with depression and suicidality, and her experiences as a labor organizer at New York City’s Babeland.

Interviewer Michelle Esther O’Brien spends 9 of 30 transcribed pages establishing Kohner’s life story, her traumas and relationships — which at first seemed unrelated to the unionization of Babeland’s employees, but actually positioned Kohner as the narrator of her own history. This aligns with Portelli’s (1991) argument that oral history is not just about facts but about meaning, memory, identity, and voice (in a pointed moment at the start of the interview, Kohner even “plays” with her voice, trying to determine if the mic would pick up her high-pitched, soft-spoken voice or if she should “go with” the more “bombastic” (i.e. deeper-pitched) voice we hear throughout the recording).  Kohner’s interview demonstrates the value of oral history not as a record of factual accuracy (Portelli, 1991), but as an illumination of how labor was lived and remembered by someone negotiating the intersections of gender, class, and work. 

Kohner’s account begins with her working-class childhood in Canarsie, where the cruelty of family and classmates foreshadows the resilience and tenacity she would later bring to her role as a labor organizer and self-described “agitator.”  Her organizing style is inseparable from her identity.  Kohner’s own decision-making (e.g. which voice to use), her subjectivity, and reflexivity shape the retrospective narration (Portelli, 1991; Sommer & Quinland, 2024).  In one section, Kohner discusses the “AEIOU”s of labor organizing: agitate, educate, inoculate, organize, unionize.  She reflects that she overdid it on agitating and should have put more energy into inoculating.[2]  Here, we see how oral history adds interpretive layers to labor history (Halpern, 1998).

O’Brien’s style also reflects the “art and science” of the oral history interview. (Sommer & Quinland, 2024, p. 4).  O’Brien gives Kohner space to narrate freely, asking open-ended questions that invite reflection rather than dictate it. The result is a narrative that feels collaborative rather than extractive, shaped by care and attentiveness. But, of course, oral history also reminds us that memory is produced in context—framed by the questions asked, the setting of the interview (here, the NYU Department of Sociology), the knowledge that the account will be archived, and the institutional framing (here, by the Trans Oral History Project).[3] 

In almost all ways, Kohner’s story stands as a direct rebuttal to the early vision of oral history articulated by Allan Nevins (1966) and Louis Starr (1977). For Nevins, oral history was born to preserve the recollections of “great men,” political leaders, and intellectual elites. Starr similarly associated the method with capturing authoritative accounts of public life. By contrast, Kohner’s narrative illustrates the democratization of oral history; Kohner’s is precisely an experience that Nevins’ traditional archives would have overlooked. This shift mirrors the broader trajectory of oral history’s role in recovering working-class perspectives (Halpern, 1998).   

Another poignant experience highlights both Kohner’s tactical acumen and Halpern’s (1998) appreciation for how oral history renders organizers’ creativity and their lived strategies: Babeland’s employees very intentionally threatened not to show up to work over Valentine’s Day weekend, the busiest shopping “season” in a sex shop. Kohner’s take-away: “hit them in the pocketbook and they will fold.” That threat to Babeland’s bottom dollar was ultimately what got the union recognized.  Lived human anecdotes and commentary like this complicate the official narratives of labor movements (Halpern, 1998).

And “complicated” is certainly one way to describe Octavia Kohner.  Toward the end of the interview, I found myself questioning her credibility somewhat.  She claims that she’s been retaliated against since the union contract went into effect, and this is something she’s arbitrating (through her union lawyer) with management. She relays that she’s been placed on probation after a poor customer service review on Yelp.  Her account left me wondering whether retaliation and legitimate critique can always be so neatly separated — especially for someone who embraces the mantle of “loudmouth agitator.”  But here, we see what makes oral history different: oral sources share their meaning with us, they don’t impart neutral fact (Portelli, 1991). So, maybe the “truth” isn’t whether Kohner deserved the Yelp review, but how she interprets and narrates [what she considers to be] retaliation.

While Kohner’s confidence in booty shorts is enviable for sure, the larger takeaway is that oral history expands labor history beyond contracts and strikes. It reveals the messy, embodied, sometimes unreliable, but deeply human side of organizing.

Works Referenced
Halpern, R. (1998). Oral history and labor history: A historiographic assessment after twenty-five years. The Journal of American History, 85(2), 596-610.

Nevins, A. (1966). Oral history: How and why it was born. In D. Dunaway & W. Baum (Eds.), Oral history: An interdisciplinary anthology (2nd Edition, pp. 29-38). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Portelli, A. (1991) What makes oral history different.In The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history (pp. 45-58). State University of New York Press.

Sommer, B. W., & Quinlan, M. K. (2024). Introduction to oral history.  In The oral history manual (pp. 1-10). Rowman & Littlefield.

Starr, L. (1977). Oral history.  In D. Dunaway & W. Baum (Eds.), Oral history: An interdisciplinary anthology (2nd Edition, pp. 39-61). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

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[1] https://nyctransoralhistory.org/interview/octavia-kohner/

[2] “Kohner: So I was really good at agitating, because I’m a very agitated person who is good at making other people feel agitated. I was good at educating, because I learned things the way that you are able to teach your co-workers, which is not through textbooks but by talking. And kind of sometimes I would skip the inoculate part, which wasn’t very good, which is essentially like, being like oh, they’re going to say this but really it’s this….And so I missed that part sometimes….And I would bring people to O a little bit too early.  I wouldn’t have felt them out enough where I didn’t agitate them enough or — I wasn’t very good at that part. I’ll admit it, I’m much better now….I was good at getting people agitated, who then other people could be like hi, you’re really agitated, do you want to meet [with leadership at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union]?”

[3] Another notable example of interview framing comes in the WPA Slave Narratives (1936) Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Administrative Files.

I made a career centered on arguing and deciding what counts as credible historical evidence. Just because evidence is subjective or partial doesn’t make it incredible.  Oral history’s subjectivity and partiality are often framed as weaknesses, but this week’s readings expound those traits as oral history’s distinctive strengths. Oral history does not pretend to provide a seamless, objective record of the past. Instead, it documents memory, interpretation, and meaning. That recognition helps us see oral history as not “less credible” but differently credible.

Nevins’s account highlights oral history’s roots in technology and journalism, and its growth into a practice that democratized history by capturing voices outside elite institutions. His reflections on the role of the interviewer also remind us that oral history is never a neutral record (is there really such a thing in the first place?). The interviewer arrives with preparation, biases, and strategies for eliciting certain responses, and then later shapes the narrative through transcription, editing, and presentation. Oral history therefore contains traces of both participants—the subject’s memories and the historian’s questions and interpretive choices. I found myself thinking about this when revisiting the WPA Slave Narratives. Those interviews do not stand apart from the context in which they were created: white interviewers in the 1930s trying to capture the stories of elderly African Americans. The transcription of dialect, often filtered through racist assumptions about what constituted “usual” speech, makes clear how much interviewer presence shaped the record.

Halpern’s discussion of oral history and labor history helped me situate oral history in relation to social change. I was struck by the idea that oral history was meant to recover the voices of working-class people and to empower them by involving them in writing their own histories. Yet, as Halpern shows, oral history in labor studies did not always live up to this promise because of methodological shortcomings and uneven integration with archival evidence. Still, the power of first-person testimony—especially when used in dialogue with written sources—illustrates how oral history complicates and enriches traditional historical narratives. I especially liked the idea of oral history as a “usable past,” a resource for ongoing struggles for justice.

Portelli’s essay was my favorite. His insistence that oral history tells us less about the bare facts of events and more about the meaning people attach to them was profound. I loved his observations about how transcription flattens spoken language. Tone, rhythm, and intonation carry social meaning that cannot easily be reduced to punctuation marks on a page. His point reminded me of the “My Cousin Vinny” example I use in teaching evidence: how a line transcribed with a period instead of a question mark can completely change its meaning. Reading Portelli also made me think about my mother’s experience being criticized for speaking her regional Italian dialect. Just as oral history resists being flattened into a uniform record, dialects resist being subsumed under the “proper” language. Both preserve the texture of lived experience “from below.”

Finally, looking at the WPA Slave Narratives with these insights made me more critical of what those documents tell us. They reveal not only the lives of formerly enslaved people but also how the interviewers chose to represent them. I wished I could hear those voices, not just read the transcripts, because the intonation and cadence would carry meaning the text alone cannot. At the same time, the handwritten notes/corrections and archival indexing remind me that oral history is never raw data—it is mediated, preserved, and structured in ways that reflect choices, biases, and incredible labor.

Oral history’s subjectivity is not a flaw to be corrected but a central feature to be embraced. It is precisely in its incompleteness, partiality, and dialogue between narrator and interviewer that oral history creates some of its most enduring truths.

September 1, 2025 – Happy Labor Day!

Engaging with Sommer and Quinlan alongside Richie underscored the complexity of oral history as both a methodology and a product, but also made clear how structured the practice has to be to qualify as oral history at all. Oral history is not simply recording memories or hosting conversations; it is the deliberate creation of primary sources within a framework that emphasizes preservation, accessibility, and reliability. Sommer and Quinlan’s “benchmarks” for the oral history cycle—conceptualization, planning, interviewing, preservation, and access—make it clear that oral history must be intentional and sustained. Without these steps, as they point out, one risks producing something anecdotal rather than something with long-term scholarly or community value.

Richie complicates this somewhat by highlighting the choices and interpretive work required of the oral historian. His discussion of paradoxes—particularly around memory—reminded me that oral history is not about pristine accuracy but about context, meaning, and perspective. Memory’s limitations are well known, but Richie’s examples of narrators who, even with memory loss, retain remarkable insight decades later forced me to consider memory as more nuanced than simply reliable or unreliable. This perspective recalled, for me, the jury instructions given in courts: credibility is judged not only by whether details are precise but also by whether testimony is consistent, plausible, and corroborated. In this way, memory in oral history can be both fragile and authoritative, depending on how it is framed and interpreted.

Another dimension that struck me is oral history’s power to challenge existing hierarchies of knowledge. Both Sommer and Quinlan, and Richie in particular, emphasize that oral history’s value lies in elevating voices otherwise left out of the archive. Richie’s point that the most illuminating insights may come not from those in positions of leadership but from employees or community members without formal authority complicates the assumption that “official” records provide the best evidence of the past. Oral history can correct misconceptions, supplement gaps, and re-center perspectives, producing histories that are more inclusive and, in many ways, more accurate to lived experience.

The organizational dossiers we read followed Sommer and Quinlan’s cycle of oral history work: they began with a clear research idea, developed a plan for gathering information, identified candidates for interviews, and drafted preliminary questions that would focus the conversation but that were broad enough not to stifle reflection and commentary.  I was especially struck by how the organizational histories presented institutions almost biographically, with traits, aspirations, challenges, and defining episodes. Reading them felt like encountering characters whose stories were far from static, they were animated, dynamic, and multi-voiced.

Taken together, the readings and dossiers suggest that oral history’s rigor derives as much from its methodology as from its interpretive choices. It requires attention to formality—release forms, preservation standards, archival planning—but it also demands reflexivity about the role of subjectivity and the responsibilities of the interviewer. In this sense, oral history is both disciplined and creative, situated between documentation and interpretation. What makes it compelling is precisely this dual nature: it insists on fidelity to process while simultaneously recognizing that memory and narrative are not fixed but negotiated. That balance itself gives oral history its particular strength as a historical method.

This is my eighth full academic year as a practice professor of law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, where I teach evidence, trial advocacy, and serve as the director of the LL.M. in Trial Advocacy program. About six years ago, I started researching gender bias in the courtroom for a presentation called Hysterical: Identifying and Eliminating Gendered Communication in the Practice of Law which I’ve given about 50 times all over the country. It’s become my passion project—equal parts love letter to women in the legal profession and tirade against the catch-22 we face: be too emotional, and you’re unprofessional; be dispassionate, and you’re a heartless bitch. The legal profession is slowly evolving, but I’m here to make sure we give it a good shove in the right direction.

Why this class?

Oral history feels like a natural extension of my scholarly and professional interests. Much of my work has involved the collection, preservation, and interpretation of testimony. In the courtroom, stories are structured and constrained by rules of evidence; in oral history, stories are expansive, layered, and contextualized within lived experience. I am especially interested in the ways oral history can surface voices that are often marginalized or silenced in official records—precisely the kinds of voices I sought to amplify as a prosecutor and now highlight in my research.

This course offers a chance to strengthen both the theoretical and methodological dimensions of my work. On the theoretical side, I am eager to study how oral histories complicate collective memory, power, and identity. On the practical side, I want to build skills in interviewing, transcription, and archiving—techniques that will allow me to capture narratives of women and gender-diverse lawyers as part of my eventual dissertation research. My goal is to document not only how these advocates navigate bias in the courtroom, but also how their personal experiences shape their advocacy styles, professional choices, and resilience.

Ultimately, I hope to bridge my legal expertise with the tools of communication scholarship. Oral history offers a methodology for preserving the lived realities of people whose voices are often minimized in institutional contexts. By learning to conduct and analyze oral histories with rigor, I can deepen my research, enrich my teaching, and contribute to a more inclusive understanding of how law is practiced and experienced.

Anything Else?

Where to begin? I’m married and have four kids (ages 13, 11, 9, and 4—a pandemic baby really keeps life spicy). I’m an only child, so I’m balancing parenting, a full-time job, and Ph.D. coursework with worrying about my aging parents, too. It’s a lot, but I thrive in chaos. Sleep? Overrated.

If there’s a day I seem scatterbrained, it’s probably because I’ve been up since 4:30 a.m. reviewing coursework while packing lunches, refereeing sibling squabbles, and heading into Philly traffic. But I’m here, caffeinated, and eager to learn.