The OHL presented at the Oral History Association’s (OHA) virtual three-day symposium Trauma-Informed Interviewing, Reckoning & Beyond on June 23, 24 and 25, 2026.
Please see below for information about when members of the OHL team presented: Director Ricia Chansky, Librarian Natalia Hernández Mejías, Faculty Researcher Marci Denesiuk and Community Programs Manager Zaira R. Arvelo Alicea.
Recordings from the symposium will be made available for OHA Members when they log into OHA Webinar and Workshops.
Day 1 (JUNE 23)
8am-9am PST/11am-12pm EST: What are we talking about when we talk about trauma and healing?
An opening workshop on language
Co-facilitators: Anna Sheftel, Ricia Chansky, Elena Foulis
In this opening workshop, participants will be encouraged to reflect on how we talk about trauma, and how this affects our projects and our relationships with narrators.
3:30-5:00pm PST / 6:30-8:00pm EST: Narrators’ Perspectives
What’s Behind the Story? Narrators Discuss Trauma-Informed Interviewing
Chair: Ricia Anne Chansky
Eva Kuper, Montreal Holocaust Museum
Zaira Arvelo Alicea, the Oral History Lab at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Lisa Nakamura, Clinical Psychologist
This discussion brings together two narrators, Eva Kuper and Zaira Arvelo Alicea—both survivors of individual and collective trauma—to reflect upon their interviews as narrative transactions in the immediacy of the interview and events that have had lasting effects.
Day 3 (JUNE 25)
4:00pm-5:00pm PST/ 7:00pm-8:00pm EST: Archiving and Metadata Workshop
The Ethical Paratextual: Permission, Preservation, and Public Humanities
Facilitators: Ricia Anne Chansky, Marci Denesiuk, and Natalia Hernández Mejías
In this workshop, members of the Oral History Lab at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez share aspects of the lab’s permission slips, metadata production, and public humanities program that were created to uphold our ethical approaches to crisis oral history interviewing and support our decolonial digital archiving practices.
5:00-6:00pm PST / 8:00-9:00pm EST: End of day debriefing exercise
Facilitator: Ricia Chansky
How do we build ethical frameworks for trauma-informed research projects? Through a series of guided questions, this reflection supports participants in planning research projects that center narrator and community needs.