The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) Panel

Oral Histories as a Space for Public Historical Thinking: 9/11 and the Covid Pandemic in NYC

In this lecture, I will share moments from interviews conducted for our Covid-19 and 9/11 projects in which we can hear narrators actively struggling to do the work of building a historical narrative that ties the past to the present. They try out various historical analogies, figure out where they fit and where they don’t fit, and try to use the past to make sense of what is happening and imagine what might come next. People also drew connections to more personal past experiences – family violence, having bedbugs, a serious knee injury – but here we will focus on people connecting to shared, collective experiences of various kinds, from the fires burning the Bronx in the 1970s to the AIDS epidemic. Listening to these archives, we will witness the social work of historical thinking in all of its messy complexity, providing unique insights into the processes through which urban history is produced.

Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose research focuses on oral history as a social practice and the politics of history, value and property in cities. She is the Director of Columbia Oral History and the Oral History MA Program at Columbia University. She is Past President of the Oral History Association and in 2022 she received the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. She is co-author of the Telling Lives Oral History Curriculum Guide and co-founded the Pedagogy of Listening Lab. She was a lead interviewer on Columbia’s pathbreaking oral history of 9/11 and co-directed the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Project. Her book, Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City, was published in 2016 by the University of Chicago Press. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and Radcliffe Library and published in peer-reviewed journals including American Ethnologist, Oral History Review, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Public Health, and Oral History.

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is co-organized by the MSUP Program and second-year PhD students in Urban Planning: Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Asher Alec Kelvin, aak2255@columbia.edu, Lauren Drew Leiker, ldl2124@columbia.edu and Kavyaa Rizal, kr3020@columbia.edu