Below are some of the collaborative oral history projects I’ve worked on at Virginia Tech.

Calfee Community and Cultural Center

In my capacity as a faculty fellow with VT Engage from 2021-2022, the service learning and civic engagement arm of Virginia Tech’s campus, I managed a grant and redesigned my graduate public history course to kickstart an oral history and digitization project at Calfee Community and Cultural Center. The CCCC works towards providing community services like a community kitchen and a daycare, as well as a museum and community space, through preserving a historically Black, formerly segregated school in economically depressed Pulaski, Virginia. The project, which was co-designed with members of the organization and the graduate students, resulted in two community “digitization” events, student-led oral history interviews, student projects including a social media plan and short film, and a final presentation and luncheon. Many students stayed involved in the CCCC, producing a master’s paper, internships, and paid work for our graduate students.

Tidewater Main Street Program Project

My very favorite and longest-standing project is a collection of over two hundred narratives about work and environmental change in Eastern Virginia. I took my very first experiences in oral history as a freshman in college—doing interviews in Guinea and White Marsh, Virginia—and developed it into a fieldwork trip for undergraduate students as I pursued by doctorate at the University of Florida. Once at Virginia Tech, I remained committed to community collaborations and relationships in the area, and continued completing interviews for local nonprofits (which contributed to, for example, a National Register of Historic Places nomination and a published county history). In 2023, I coordinated a graduate fieldwork trip with students from University of Florida, University of Mississippi, and Virginia Tech to assist a Black-run organization interpreting segregated education and business in rural Middlesex County, and document the experiences of people on H2A visas with the Eastern Shore Migrant Mission. (See a video made by the UF crew here.) I hope to continue this trip on an annual basis in the future.

Southern Foodways Alliance Collaboration

I’ve also completed three small projects with the Southern Foodways Alliance, enabling me to bring students and collaborators to Virginia and into the oral history world. “Tidewater Foodways,” in partnership with former student and oral historian Patrick Daglaris, documented restauranteurs, watermen, farmers, and an Indigenous scholar about the changing seafood industry in the Tidewater. The project explored the tensions between climate change and the “local food” movement. Building on this work, through the “Mutual Aid during COVID-19” project my students and I examined how people organized to respond to a different type of crisis—COVID-19—in the restaurant business and through providing food access to their neighbors. The interviews, taken with the same group of people almost a year apart, allowed us to see how mutual aid efforts rose and fell over the course of the pandemic. Finally, “Home Baking in Southwest Virginia,” in partnership with VT folklorist Danille Christensen, explored how people kept alive their own baking traditions but also scraped together an independent living selling at farmer’s markets, festivals, and on social media in sparsely-populated Patrick County.  This project concluded in 2023 is still undergoing processing.

Oak Hill History Project

Completed with volunteers from our undergraduate public history course, this collection is the result of a field trip to Oak Hill to document changes in environment and health on the edges of the Pocahontas coal fields. It resulted in a co-authored article with Emily Satterwhite about how rhetoric and strategies for handling occupational and environmental health issues overlap in oral history narratives.

“People of Blacksburg!”

This “project” is a catch-all of local activists, policymakers, workers and business proprietors, and just People-About-Town that we lovingly call the “People of Blacksburg” collection at the Center for Oral History. The existence of “People of Blacksburg” allows us to respond to community desires to have neighbors (i.e., the aging owner of the local barber shop or grocery store) or specific moments (i.e., the integration of a the United Methodist Church in Dublin) archived responsibly with a nearby, resourced institution like Virginia Tech. While it might seem like a folksy, silly collection, the archive has resulted in master’s theses, plenty of student work experience, and regional oral history collecting days.

Voces of a Pandemic

This project, completed in partnership with Roberto Silva of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute Health Sciences and Technology Library (Roanoke, VA) and the Voces Oral History Project out of the UT-Austin College of Journalism, documents the COVID-19 experiences of Spanish speakers in the region. Virginia Tech’s participation was conceived by faculty in the office of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and supported by a Departmental Diversity grant. The project resulted in 15 interviews, some in Spanish and some in English, with people of a wide variety of backgrounds currently residing in Southwest Virginia. The project also engaged students as transcribers and resulted in a 2022 collaborative showcase with on VT’s campus with representatives from a local nonprofit serving the Spanish-speaking population in Roanoke, Casa Latina.

Transition Towns

In collaboration with the Oral History Society Environmental Interest Group, based in the UK, this collaborative project is documenting “transition” environmental movements—aimed at addressing climate change and social injustice through local economic and environmental transformations—across western countries. My role in this project is to document the stories of people engaged in environmental justice organizing in Appalachia for an upcoming exhibition in the UK. This project is expected to be complete in 2024.