About Us
The Brooklyn College Listening Project (BCLP) was founded by a group of Brooklyn College (CUNY) faculty in 2014, and formally launched in the spring of 2015. Since then, over 800 students across classes in a wide range of departments—American Studies, English, History, Sociology, Anthropology, Children’s Studies, TV and Radio, Journalism, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Judaic Studies, Music, Modern Languages and more—have conducted interviews with their families, neighbors, friends and strangers. Twenty-five to 30 professors have integrated oral history assignments into their classes. Over this time, our students have conducted over 500 audio recordings of interviews.
From the beginning, the Listening Project has been designed to create new links between the college and the many communities of Brooklyn, to take better advantage of the wisdom of everyday people who our students interview, and to showcase the brilliance of our students, and the communities in which we all live—Brooklyn, New York City, and beyond.
Over ten years, it is hard to overemphasize the impact the Listening Project has had in how many classes are taught at Brooklyn College and on the role that students play in them. With the help of the Listening Project, professors create projects within their classes to give their students an opportunity to use oral history or interviewing skills to enrich and deepen their curriculum. In doing so, the professors move the ball into their students’ court. The students go out and interview people who can reflect upon some of the topics and issues that they have discussed in class. In doing so, the students become researchers, not just receivers of knowledge.
Oftentimes, the interview process has an impact itself. Many students choose to interview close family members: parents, grandparents, uncles, aunt or close neighbors or friends. Since most of them have never been interviewed before, students are offering them an opportunity to have their say and to share their reflections on their own lives and experiences. Often in the course of the interview, the attitude of the interviewee begins to change. When they are first asked questions, many interviewees begin by saying “I don’t know why you want to interview me, my life isn’t very interesting.” Over the course of the interview, you can often hear the dynamic changing. The interviewee begins to suggest or to say quite clearly: “listen to me, I want you to know about this.”
This website gives you a taste of our students’ work—students from a variety of classes over ten years. Many people agreed to do oral histories with our students, but only for class, not to be shared with a larger audience. Others wanted their interviews to be made public and archived, which now they are (nearly 150 and counting) through JSTOR Forum.
When this site was first launched, Jessica Siegel wrote much of the text, in addition to a number of her journalism students, including Israel Salas-Rodriquez, LaQuinta Clark, Jherelle Benn, Jonathan Gomez, Ivanna Machuca and Zainab Iqbal.
Leah Shaw, a graduate of Brooklyn College’s Feirstein School of Cinema Studies, and now a podcaster, audio engineer, composer and working musician, created many of the podcasts of the oral histories that appear on this site and worked with both undergraduates and graduate students on others and edited the resulting oral histories.
Students in Profs. Jonathan Zalben and Pontus Gunve’s Music Technology classes in the Media Scoring Program of Brooklyn College’s Feirstein School of Cinema Studies created a number of the podcasts as did our group of BCLP interns: Maruful Hossain, Jada May, Jasmine Peralta, Annabelle Paulino and Minela Sarkinovic. Weniber Bu organized our archive.
Prof. Miguel Macias created the Gentrification podcast and Prof. Joseph Entin did the same for the podcast based on Robert Scott’s oral history.
Many thanks to our great designer Shanthony Exum of Shanthony Art and Design originally from Brooklyn but now based in Montreal who created this website and the multimedia exhibition, “We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices,” which is linked to on this website. The exhibition has toured New York City for a year and a half.
Special thanks as well to Colin McDonald for maintaining this website and creating our online archive on JSTOR Forum as part of his role with the Brooklyn College Library OER Initiative. Additional thanks goes to the program’s leaders, Frans Albarillo and Miriam Deutch, who have supported the BCLP over time.
Please contact us here for more information. We’d love to hear from you!
Joseph Entin (English & American Studies): jentin@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Maddy Fox (Sociology and Children’s & Youth Studies): MadelineFox@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Aleah Ranjitsingh (Africana Studies): Aleah.Ranjitsingh03@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Naomi Schiller (Anthropology): NSchiller@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Philip Napoli (Dean of HSS): pnapoli@brooklyn.cuny.edu