Interview transcript:
Terry Gerton I’m excited to talk about this project, an oral history project, but first of all, tell us what the project is and why you want to start it now.
Dr. Jason Chernesky So the Federal Employees and Contractors Oral History Project is an effort to capture the oral histories of everyone who worked for the federal government, whether they’re a civil servant or a contractor, so that we have a fairly large archive of firsthand accounts of what it is that federal workers do for the federal government, either currently or in the past, recent past, I should say. And really the effort there, one of the big efforts here for us, is to make sure that we’re capturing all of the institutional knowledge that we can in these oral histories of people who may have been forced out of government because of the firings that have happened and the layoffs in the past six months, or from folks who have been recently retired or were, again, maybe perhaps sort of forced to retire because of the changes that have occurred. And really it’s not only to capture institutional knowledge, but also start to build a database of stories that can help fill the gap really between what maybe the public and others interested in these stories think they know what government workers do and what they actually do so that we can have a really great set of resources for people to use that for content to create other stories about federal workers. But also we want it in their words. We want it in the words of the federal workers. But it’s also, in addition to capturing and demonstrating what federal workers have done for the American people, we’re including a kind of mini life history as well. And what that means is that, one of the methods in oral history is what you might call a life story history, so you start from the very beginning, you tell me about where you grew up and everything, and you go through that person’s life to where they are at that moment you’re recording the oral history. So we’re doing a little bit of that too. So it gives listeners some context about who these people are and humanizes them in a way that I think is necessary for these stories. Then the last bit of the oral history will reflect on these recent changes that have happened over the last six months. And because it’s a very important historical inflection point, we want to capture that in real time. And some of the things we’re going to want to do, too, is give some of our narrators the ability to come back in a year, two years, three years to add to their story if they feel that they want to. Because this is the one benefit about doing oral histories now, when people are still around and are moving into maybe different careers or different phases of their life, we’ll be able to add that to the story, which makes these oral histories very rich, compelling and useful resources for people.
Terry Gerton Well, I know you are an oral historian yourself. Why is that the mode that you want to capture these stories in? Why not just take surveys or why not have people write essays?
Dr. Jason Chernesky I mean, oral history is, as a historian who practices history in the fairly recent past, I’ve found those resources extraordinarily valuable for my own research. Why is that? Because the historical record can capture other types of information and other types of data. Memos and reports and correspondence, and correspondence of course can capture someone’s internal thinking or working through a problem or something like that, it personalizes it in a way. When you have the actual person’s voice, it really does help make it a little bit more personal. That’s number one. Number two, you get a little bit of a look behind the curtain, behind the production of, let’s say, a report or an event or something like that. And in aggregate, when you look across a number of those oral histories, you really get a great sense of how people were experiencing a moment, experiencing a phenomenon, a career, whatever the case may be that isn’t captured in other parts of the historical record. So oral history has really enhanced and personalized these stories. And I’m trained not only in the history of science, medicine, public health, and environmental history, but really I take this approach, what historians have called for generations now, social history. So it’s history from the bottom up, looking at the people who are involved in many of these big events that we talk about or impacted by these big events that we talk about in history. So oral histories really are those rare sources that allow you to get at those personal accounts. And what an oral history does as opposed to a survey is you have somebody there to ask follow-up questions to really get you to flesh out as much of the details as possible. And it helps bring more information to the forefront that otherwise might get left out. And of course oral histories aren’t perfect, no one method is, but again when you put that in a group of other sets of data, you can really enhance a story that you otherwise wouldn’t capture if you didn’t have that oral history.
Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Dr. Jason Chernesky. He’s the project director for the Federal Employees and Contractors Oral History Project. So Jason, in this case, the Organization of American Historians has partnered with the Volcker Alliance to bring this project to life. Why that partnership? How is that helping you reach people or get folks in to tell their story?
Dr. Jason Chernesky The Organization of American Historians, we were able to get support from the Volcker Alliance to help get this project off the ground. And this happened through a set of happenstances, essentially, where in the beginning, while I was trying to get this oral history project off of the ground, first the OAH got in contact with me through colleagues of mine who knew the executive director, Beth English, who’s sort of overseeing the project from the OAH side. And she asked me if we wanted to team up and it be an OAH project where I’m directing the day-to-day of putting this oral history collection together. And so, in that time, I was also talking to a number of other folks who were doing similar kind of projects, that are trying to capture data that federal employees who have been terminated might have, or how that impacted their lives in certain ways. So through that network, I was linked up with the Volcker Alliance. And they were going to try and do something similar. And when they learned that we were already on the road to doing these oral histories, they were like, hey, how can we help you guys out the best we can? And that has been extraordinarily helpful in getting this project off the ground. And right now, we’re waiting to see what news we have. We applied to the Mellon Foundation for some funding to really get this project going in earnest for the next three years. And we should be getting news out shortly about that. So, we’re ready to go. We already started collecting oral histories and getting all the infrastructure built. So the next step is really to get out there and talking to as many people as we can to get their stories captured.
Terry Gerton Well, speaking of infrastructure, you talked earlier about how scholars use oral histories, but there’s also an aspect to this project to make these oral histories available in the general public domain. Why do you think that approach is so important?
Dr. Jason Chernesky I think it’s important because I see this as a public resource. We’re talking about public servants and as someone who is a public servant, or was a public servant, that’s a little bit of a complicated situation right now, but wanting to be a public servant, I always found the value in having these things available to everybody. And the reason is, is that these are stories of other Americans that have worked for the public for years, in some cases 30, 20, 30, 40 years, some cases one year, depending on where they were in the federal government when these changes occurred in the recent past. So having these things available, I think, are very important to everybody and it allows people to engage with them on their own terms. They might know somebody in the collection, they want to hear their story. They might just be curious about what it is that federal workers have done. And journalists, other storytellers, other researchers, they’ll all have access to this and it will get filtered through those different mechanisms, whether it’s a journalistic account or whether it’s through some sort of research initiative. But if people just want to sit and read and listen to somebody’s story that they think is interesting, I think that’s a really valuable thing as well.
Terry Gerton And so if someone wants to tell you their story, how do they get connected to this project?
Dr. Jason Chernesky We have a website that has our pre-interview questionnaire up on the site. So people who are current, former federal workers or contractors can go fill out that form and then we’ll get in touch with them to set up an interview time. And so that’s the easiest way to do it. And the website is fecohp.org.
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