From Repository to Resonance by Dr. Crystal Baik

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What does oral history feel and sound like if drawing from a decolonizing feminist approach? How does this change our storytelling and listening? And how can memory work engage life-affirming, activist methods that are grounded in community? In this talk, I address these provocations by challenging what academia often defines as best practices in oral history. This ranges from conventional notions of consent to the impact of settler capitalism in shaping the formal language of preservation. More broadly, this talk offers a praxis of resonance rather than repository – or an understanding of oral history as a living archive that seeds multiple manifestations, spanning from more stories to intergenerational solidarities and renewed relationships with land and place. While my talk draws from my experiences in ethnic studies teaching, interdisciplinary research, and cultural organizing, I focus on Unsanctioned Knowledges: Korean/American Activisms, an ongoing oral history project that traces genealogies of radical leftist organizing among Korean diasporic activists across Turtle Island, Korea, and Oceania. I conclude by considering how the praxis of resonance aligns with the work of the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and converses with Native Hawaiian epistemologies.

Event Sponsor
The Department of Ethnic Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
1-808-956-8086, esdept@hawaii.edu

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