ORAL HISTORY WORKSHOPS
- Isak Dinesen
In May 2015, Humanities Guåhan and humanities scholar Laurel Monnig, PhD conducted a series of oral history workshops for servicewomen and women veterans. These workshops introduced participants to oral history and its importance to everyday life and to the historical record and provided practical training and advice for collecting and recording oral histories. Through a combination of lectures, practice exercises, and reflection, workshop participants learned how to prepare for and conduct oral history interviews, and how to document and transcribe oral histories. These workshops explored oral history and memory and focused on documenting the military experience—entering military life, boot camp, active duty, deployment, and military and family—and the experience of coming home and returning to civilian life.
Laurel Monnig, PhD, has conducted ethnographic fieldwork and research on Guam, investigating how CHamorus negotiate with US colonialism, militarization, racial ideologies, and activism. Her doctoral dissertation, “‘Proving Chamorro:’ Indigenous Narratives of Race, Identity, and Decolonization in Guam,” was completed in 2007. Monnig graduated with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois in 2008, and teaches at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.