Dear All,
Please join us for the third public online talk of 2023 of the Society of American Archivists' (SAA) Crisis, Disaster, and Tragedy Response Working Group (CDTRWG).
CDTRWG maintains and updates SAA's Documenting in Times of Crisis: A Resource Kit; develops and provides immediate and ongoing resources and response assistance to archivists, allied cultural heritage professionals, and their communities in times of tragedies, disasters, or other crises; and builds partnerships with organizations focused on relief efforts and cultural stewardship and preservation. As part of that partnership building, we are conducting a series of public talks in 2023 to hear about related work.
Proximity and Oral History: Trauma-informed Listening and Practice
Pamela Schwartz, Executive Director, Orange County Regional History Center
Wednesday 28th November 2023, 12pm EST; 9am PDT; 5pm UTC
RSVP: us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/...
Summary
Through review and juxtaposition of case studies in preserving oral histories containing instances of contemporary and generational trauma, this presentation will include a discussion of purpose, process, ethics, challenges, and use of oral history on topics relating to the Pulse nightclub shooting, the Ocoee Massacre, politics and law, and more.
Pamela Schwartz is a national award-winning museum executive and curator who currently serves as executive director of the Orange County Regional History Center and the Historical Society of Central Florida.
Working within the museum industry since 2002, Schwartz joined the History Center in 2016 as its chief curator and senior program manager. In her role as chief curator, she helped increase diversity and inclusion in collections and exhibitions and exponentially grew the museum's oral history collection toward centering community voices, winning regional and national awards for the History Center in the process.
Shortly after the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016, Schwartz was the architect of the urgent-response One Orlando Collection Initiative, which includes over 14,000 artifacts, photographs, archives, and oral histories documenting the memory of the event. She has become a national authority on historical collecting after community tragedy and has assisted other sites globally from Parkland, FL to New Zealand. She was also the chief curator of the landmark, globally-covered Yesterday, This Was Home: The Ocoee Massacre of 1920 exhibition. For these efforts she and the staff have been honored with more than twenty-five national or regional awards in just six years, including the 2019 Institute of Museum and Library Services National Medal, the nation's highest honor in the field, as well as other prestigious awards from the American Alliance of Museums, the American Association for State and Local History, and the Society of American Archivists.
Schwartz was designated as one of Orlando Business Journal's 2022 40 Under 40, Orlando Magazine's 2020 Women of the Year and 2021 Ones to Watch, as well as Watermark's (Florida's largest LGBTQ Media Group) 2017 Most Remarkable People in Central Florida.
Schwartz received her Master of Arts in Museum Professions from Seton Hall, a Bachelor of Arts in Public Relations from the University of Northern Iowa, and a Certificate in Genealogical Research from Boston University.
The recording of this talk will be made available after the event on the Working Group's webpage.
Best wishes,
Chrystal
Chrystal Carpenter, MA, CA
Head, Special Collections and Archives
VCU Libraries
carpenterc2@vcu.edu
804.827.3576
Pronouns: she/hers
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Chrystal Carpenter
Coordinator of University Archives & Special Collections
Virginia Commonwealth University
Henrico VA
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