INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
The Oral History of Appalachia Collection (OHAC) is currently housed in the Marshall University Morrow Library Special Collections Department. It is comprised of over two thousand interviews conducted in Appalachia, largely in West Virginia, over the last 40 years.
The majority of these interviews were recorded in analog signal on magnetic tape compact cassettes. There are also a good number of interviews recorded similarly on reel-to-reel tapes. Stored in ideal conditions, the expected life span for these recording media is not more than 25 years. To date only a fraction of the collection has been digitized. An even smaller amount of the recordings have been transcribed. This means that they are not easily available for research. These limitations are a reflection of the practical matter that, at present, there are no full or even part-time personnel responsible specifically for the archival needs of the Collection. Over recent years, students have done a limited amount of work to digitize and transcribe interviews. Clearly, though, much more needs to be done.
CURRENT DIRECTION
In December 2008, the collaborative initiative to create the Center for Ethnographic and Oral History Research (CEOHR) was approved by Marshall University's Provost, Dr. Gayle Ormiston. CEOHR's mission is to promote and support ethnographic and oral history research projects within the Appalachian Region. The Center will be a research cooperative competing for external grant opportunities focused on high quality ethnographic and oral history research projects. The Center will also make its services for hire to private and non-profit organizations wanting to conduct specialized research but who lack such capabilities and are unable to find qualified, capable researchers in the absence of a dedicated regional center. It is also the work of the Center to support OHAC.
As the archival arm of CEOHR, the Oral History of Appalachia Collection, will serve as a continually enriched resource for research projects and University outreach in the communities of Appalachia. Once fully established, CEOHR will be responsible for fielding and carrying out ethnographic and oral history research and disseminating these findings to other scholars, policy makers, and the public. One of the ways that this is accomplished is through a robust Oral History of Appalachia Collection with an active outreach component.
OHAC's MISSION
The Board of Directors of the Oral History of Appalachia Collection is an interdisciplinary collective committed to encouraging and maintaining investigation into the living history of the Tri-State region. The collection will be the archival arm of the newly created Center for Ethnographic and Oral History Research (CEOHR).
The Board of Directors' mission entails several interrelated concerns, including:
- developing standards and practices for managing and preserving the existing collection;
- publicizing and facilitating its use by students, scholars, and the general public;
- fostering collaboration with regional and national scholars, institutions, and communities;
- encouraging expansion of the collection’s holdings and outreach capacity;
- networking with other oral history programs, centers, and initiatives;
- and acquiring funding for such partnerships and projects.
CeOHR has its first director
Dr. Brian A. Hoey becomes the Center for Ethnographic and Oral History Research's first Director. Hoey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Marshall University. He received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan. His research encompasses a number of themes including personhood and place, migration, narrative identity and life-transition, community building, and negotiations between work, family, and self in different social, historical, and environmental contexts. Longstanding interests in career change, personal identity and the moral meanings of work lead to his project as a postdoctoral fellow at the Alfred P. Sloan Center for Ethnography of Everyday Life on “New Work,” unconventional arrangements of work, family and community life explored by so-called free-agents of the post-industrial economy. His dissertation research in Northwest Lower Michigan explored non-economic or “life-style” migration where downsized and downshifting corporate workers relocate as a means of starting over. As a Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia, he studied the contested nature of constructing personally and culturally meaningful space within the process of creating imagined and intentional community in far-flung agrarian settlements within a government migration program. Hoey’s most recent project considers how therapeutic ideals are attached to particular physical settings – including purposive communities that range from 19th century moral treatment asylums to today’s new urbanist developments.
JOURNAL LAUNCHED AT MARSHALL
Collaborative Anthropologies is a journal meant to engage the growing and ever-widening discussion of collaborative research and practice in anthropology and in closely related fields. Published annually, the journal:
- facilitates dialogue about collaborative anthropologies, including but not limited to those between and among researchers and their interlocutors, anthropologists and other scholars/practitioners, academics and other professionals, universities and local communities, faculty and students;
- embraces a special focus on the collaborative research between and among researchers and communities of informants/consultants/collaborators, but is by no means limited to this focus;
- promotes discussion about new forms of collaborative research that are engendering new kinds of collaborative anthropologies;
- charts new theoretical and methodological approaches, especially those that theorize collaboration and imagine new intellectual spaces for collaborative anthropologies;
- invites essays that are descriptive as well as analytical/interpretive/exploratory;
- solicits works from all subfields of anthropology (and closely related disciplines);
- encourages interdisciplinary inquiry into collaborative anthropologies, especially those that connect collaborative anthropologies with other modes of collaborative research practices;
- seeks a diversity of perspectives on collaborative research, including those academic, applied, and pedagogic;
- considers scholarship from single to multi-sited in scope and from all parts of the world; and
- includes book/media/exhibit reviews that chronicle the creative and innovative use of collaboration in anthropology and closely related fields.
Edited by Luke Eric Lassiter, Director of the Graduate Humanities Program at the Marshall University Graduate College in Charleston, WV. Dr. Lassiter is an affiliate of CHEOR.
