Michigan Oral History Association Flipped Conference

Camron Amin earned his Ph.D in Near Eastern Language and Civilizations in 1996 from the University of Chicago.  He joined the faculty of the University of Michigan-Dearborn where he is now a professor of History and serves as the Coordinator of the Middle Studies Certificate Program and is developing two digital oral history collections, the Michigan Iranian American Oral History Project and the Modern Middle East Travelers Oral History Project.

Dr. Rubén O. Martinez is professor of sociology and director of the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University.  His research interests include neoliberalism and Latinos, diversity leadership in higher education, institutional and societal change, education and ethno-racial minorities, youth development, Latino labor and entrepreneurship, and environmental justice. Dr. Martinez is the editor of the Latinos in the United States book series with the Michigan State University Press. He has numerous publications, including three co-authored books: Chicanos in Higher Education (1993), Diversity Leadership in Higher Education (2007), and A Brief History of Cristo Rey Church in Lansing, MI (2012); one edited volume, Latinos in the Midwest (2011); and two co-edited volumes: Latino College Presidents: In Their Own Words (2013), and Occupational Health Disparities among Racial and Ethnic Minorities: Formulating Research Needs and Directions (2017). 

Dr. Richard Cruz Davila joined JSRI as a researcher in August of 2017. He recently completed a PhD in Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. His dissertation traces the history of Chicana/os and Latina/os in punk scenes in Los Angeles and Chicago. He is currently researching the evolution of Texas-Mexican music in Michigan. He is a member of JSRI’s Black/Brown Dialogues task force, which seeks to achieve a more equitable and inclusive Michigan through sustainable intergroup collaborative relationships.

Yoshira D. Macías Mejía is a postdoctoral scholar with the Julian Samora Research Institute at Michigan State University. Yoshira received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of New Mexico in 2019. Her research areas revolve around Latino politics and public policy. Specifically, her research explores how ethnic identity is shaped among younger generations of Latinos and how this impacts their political participation. She also studies how new information platforms (digital media and social media) are shaping political engagement among Latinos and other racial and ethnic groups. Other research interests include social, family, health, and immigration policy areas affecting Latino communities.

Benjamin Thomason’s background is in history (BA and MA) with a focus on cultural studies. He is interested in how punk communities both resist and reflect the social, economic, and cultural contexts they developed in, and how they adapted over time. Punk communities provide a good lens to understand wider youth culture and changes in American socioeconomic life. He is also recently researching contemporary imperialist interventions and Hybrid Warfare in Global South nations, and how popular culture and media is mobilized and weaponized for these covert and overt operations. He has focused specifically on Syria in the past decade, connecting it with US history of supporting fundamentalist and sectarian Islam against secular nationalist and socialist governments. He is planning on connecting Middle East and Latin American operations for his dissertation, with special focus on how pop music, rock, and hip-hop is weaponized for operations in places like Cuba and Venezuela.

Martha Bloomfield is an award-winning author, oral historian and artist, who has written several books about immigrants, migrants and other marginalized peoples to help dissipate prejudice based on oral histories. Internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker Jacky Comforty wrote The Stolen Narrative of the Bulgarian News and the Holocaust with Martha Bloomfield published by Rowman and Littlefield in their series Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature (2021). Martha’s first book, The Sweetness of Freedom, Stories of Immigrants (co-author, Steve Ostrander) (Michigan State University Press (MSU), 2010) based on oral histories won a national IPPY Award (an Independent Publisher Book Award, Silver Medal for Multicultural Adult Non-Fiction) and a Michigan Notable Book Award, 2011. Her other books also published by MSU Press based on oral histories include My Eyes Feel They Need to Cry, Stories from the Formerly Homeless (2013); Hmong Americans in Michigan, (2014); and Romanies in Michigan (2019). Her website is: marthabloomfield.com

Brittany Fremion will introduce and share information about how community members and academic partners from multiple institutions collaborated to develop the Michigan PBB Oral History Project. The focus of her presentation is a discussion of CMU student engagement with and contributions to the project. From April 2018 to May 2019, six undergraduate and five graduate students from History, Cultural Resource Management, and Education Programs dedicated nearly 2,000 hours to conducting, transcribing, and auditing interviews, attending community events, and preserving donated personal papers as part of a federally-funded grant team. In doing so, these students learned about oral history theory, methods, and ethics. They also learned a great deal about the ways in which PBB contamination changed individual lives, communities, and environmental health research, and they thought deeply about why this history matters. As one student observed, “these stories, they stick with you.” Another student reflected, “history, to me, is no longer just about places and ideas…but something much more personal.” These students shared in the pain and sorrow expressed by many community members, as well as celebrated moments of joy and triumph. They have heard the voices of those who for a long time felt unheard. Most importantly, they have been good stewards of the past, which seems ever present, as the past is never in the past, especially when chemicals are involved.

Brittany Fremion is an Associate Professor of History at Central Michigan University where she teaches courses in environmental history and public history. She is the director of the Michigan PBB Oral History Project, a member of the Michigan PBB Registry Leadership Team, and secretary for the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force (St. Louis, Michigan). She is also a MOHA Board Member and chair of the Workshop Committee.

By assisting on oral history projects students gain and opportunity for professional growth in ways that could not adequately be replicated in a classroom setting. Candy DeForest explains how her experience as a Project Graduate Assistant working on the Michigan PBB Oral History Project has contributed to her professional development as a public historian. Taking on a position with this oral history project has allowed her the opportunity to diversify and deepen her professional skills and experiences in oral and public history outside of the classroom. Candy will discuss her roles in the project, including transcribing, editing, digitizing, public speaking, and assisting with events. She also will highlight the challenges she has faced in working with personal oral histories and documents, detailing what she learned from those experiences. Student assistant opportunities like these provide students with valuable insight and practical work experience, while contributing to the oral history field.

Candy Deforest has a Master of Arts in History from Central Michigan University. She is a former Graduate Assistant for the Michigan PBB Oral History Project, for which she transcribed and audited interviews, digitized companion manuscript collections, trained undergraduate research assistants, and assisted with public presentations and community events. She is also a founding volunteer for the Rockford Area Museum, working in collections management, social networking, and assisting with fundraising.

Nikki Brabaw, a graduate student, will present her work on a creative endeavor project inspired by her work with the Michigan PBB Oral History Project, which documents and interprets the consumer experience. Millions of Michigan consumers were negatively, and permanently, impacted by the largest food contamination event in the history of the United States in the fall of 1973. Workers at Michigan Chemical Company accidentally loaded a fire retardant, instead of a nutritive feed supplement for livestock, into a delivery truck destined for a Farm Bureau feed mill. After this mix-up occurred, it took nearly a year for the problem to be identified and brought to the attention of the public, but by then the chemical had already heavily contaminated the human food supply. It is estimated that nearly nine million people were exposed to PBB in the 1970s through direct exposure to the chemical, through food consumption, through breastfeeding, or in the womb. It is devastating that so many people unknowingly consumed food contaminated with this toxic chemical. The oral histories collected from this cohort provide a powerful glimpse into this historic event and their interpretation provides important insight into how to best handle a situation like this in the future.

Nicole Brabaw has a Master of Arts in Cultural Resource Management from Central Michigan University. She is a former Graduate Assistant for the Michigan PBB Oral History Project and serves on the Board of Directors for the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force (St. Louis, Michigan). Her master’s thesis explored Michigan resident consumers’ experiences and memories of the PBB mix-up, specifically those of nursing mothers.

Marian Matyn will provide an archival perspective on the challenges and advantages of collaborating to collect, process, identify, and make accessible PBB-related manuscript collections supporting this oral history project. Until this collaborative effort, almost none of the collections of Michigan farm families and community members affected by the PBB tragedy in the early 1970s were in archives, resulting in their story being largely forgotten and unavailable to researchers. Archival concerns include: personal privacy issues versus the desire of families to make their stories available for public research, and trust issues and fears their records will be destroyed in the future due to the prior, unanticipated destruction of records tracking the health of farm families. Physical and mental health issues of families, including minors, and bankruptcy cases are documented in the collections. Marian will discuss her research to resolve her professional, ethical concerns about accessibility and retention issues and her efforts to identify PBB-related news footage in the Channel 9 & 10 film collection. Project collaboration has many advantages for the archives, including new donors of collections, archival researchers, collaborators, archives stakeholders, and researchers, new collections, and increased community awareness of archives.

Marian Matyn is Archivist in the Clarke Historical Library, Associate Professor in the Libraries, and liaison to the History Department where she teaches HST 583 Archives Administration as an adjunct professor.

Elizabeth Ann-Berton Reilly holds a master’s degree in education in Heritage Studies.  While working on her master’s degree at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire, she focused on oral history projects and  the history and culture of Northeast Woodlands Indigenous people. She is a PhD student at the University of New Mexico, in Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies program. She recently  moved to Michigan in 2020 to be close to the tribe I am working with.  Her research interests include mixed-race Indigenous identities (specifically passing as White and being White-coded), including among non-federally recognized Indigenous communities and peoples.  She is interested in studying family oral histories and the design of oral history projects with that focus.