Samuel Finesurrey

The Guttman Community College Undergraduate Oral History Project explores oral history as critical pedagogy for working class and immigrant students: a vital practice in a city of widening inequality gaps and a nation strewn with anti-immigrant rhetoric. As a pedagogical tool, oral history has inspired a sense of historic curiosity in Guttman’s undergraduates, who gather and then study the testimonies of people in their own lives and communities. By producing, archiving, writing about, and performing oral histories, these community college students come to see themselves as producers and curators of historic knowledge. Further, the students’ work challenges the dehumanizing stories being told about their communities and injects intersectional narratives into contemporary and future discourses on immigration, class, gender and race. This fellowship supports the development of an archive of student-conducted oral histories and publication of an open-access edited volume by and for community college students.