By Jessica Siegel
The Brooklyn College Listening Project celebrated its 10th Birthday in December 2024 with a Junior’s cheesecake and panel of Brooklyn College students and their interviewees sharing their experiences (click here for the YouTube video of the event, or scroll to the embed at the end of this post).
Each participant spoke about the impact conducting the oral history or being interviewed had on them.
Nadia Moore, who interviewed her grandmother Yvonne Moore, said at first her grandmother said, “Why me?” But soon Mrs. Moore was relating her experiences in Trinidad, her immigration story and making her way in the education system in New York City.
“I had to go back to my younger days,” said Mrs. Moore. “I was able to look back and pull all of that together and look back with satisfaction.”
Dylan Karlowski interviewed his friend Naomi Hamowitz, who works with severely disabled people. He was impressed with her sensitivity and commitment to the people she works with and wanted to interview her about it.
He said was interested in viewing history differently from how he learned it in high school. “If you look at how we are taught history in high school, it’s through the viewpoints of 40 guys—Napoleon and Genghis Khan and some others,” he said. “In fact, there were people working under them who constructing the pyramids and the skyscrapers—people like Naomi, who are equally if not more important than the figureheads we are taught to view as forces in history,” he said.
Lena Mazioui, interviewed her mother, her father and her grandfather (who is in Algeria) about the Black Decade in the 1990’s when Algeria went through a period of civil war, terrorism and oppression. Between 100,000-200,000 civilians were estimated to have been killed.
“Even though they were my family members, it was still awkward interviewing them,” she said. “It was something traumatic to them—terrorism, settler colonialism. But after a while, however, I felt liked an honored guest to be doing this work.”
Lena’s mother Salima Mazioui, who spoke on a recording because she was working, said, “It was the first time I was interviewed. It was kind of weird. It brought me back 20 years to places I thought I’d never go back to.”
For Lena, “It added more to my story as a first generation American. It tells me more about that I’m from people who held on through this,” she said. And she added, “In a time when we are seeing genocide in the world, it’s really important to see how it happened in the past and why we can’t let it happen again.”
The Listening Project was created in 2014 when Prof. Joseph Entin put out a call for faculty interested in forming an oral history project. A number of faculty responded including Prof. Phil Napoli, now Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Prof. Maddy Fox (Sociology), Prof. Miguel Macias (Television and Radio), Prof. Naomi Schiller (Anthropology) and Prof. Jessica Siegel (Journalism, English and Education.)
Prof. Entin, in a welcome speech, described the Listening Project as “flipping the educational script. So often the university tends to think that students have something they lack; something we as professors have to provide them with.
“The Listening Project tries to challenge that idea,” he said. “We see our students and the people they know having a lot of wisdom that that our society needs to hear. By doing oral history interviews, we give our students the opportunity to generate their own knowledge as they collect the social wisdom of the people of New York City.”
Thanks to Prof. Nyssa Chow of Columbia University, Prof. Aleah Ranjitsigh, Prof. Gaston Alonzo, Keanna Benjamin, Ruby Cheung, Robert Echevarria and Fatima Davis of the Wolfe Institute.