Women’s Narratives | Summer 2023
Oxford-Tbilisi-Belfast
TRAINING AT SOMERVILLE COLLEGE, OXFORD
This year’s focus is growing our flagship women’s narratives project with new partnerships and a funding drive to prepare the archival site for launch. (We will offer public workshops next in 2024.)
A dozen volunteer Oxford graduate and undergraduate students joined our project editing team in January, and we selected twenty additional summer fellows to work in editing groups in June.
During the Oxford training days, we prepared teams to receive women’s stories and participate as editors for interviews from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Belfast, Northern Ireland. As always, it was refreshing to review the ideals and vision of the project with new student fellows.
GWNP Training Workshop
Alexandra Hoer and Clair Miller, two trauma specialists from the Optimum Joy private practice in Chicago, joined Dr. Boyd-Judson to co-lead an intensive interviewing and trauma-sensitivity training at Somerville College, Oxford—the academic home of board member Dr. Patricia Owens. The students practiced opening interview questions and varied how to approach intimate stories gently and professionally. Training sessions introduced the science of trauma, how to receive a story that might hold trauma for the teller, and how to care for them if the trauma should be unresolved. While GWNP does not seek out stories of trauma in particular, these stories often arise in narratives about war, health, religion, death, and gender globally.
This training began a pro bono partnership with Resonate Joy, the nonprofit arm of Optimum Joy, for pro bono aftercare counseling for women connected to the project—as interviewees, interns or leadership. This new partnership deepens our commitment to women’s mental health and honors the significance of the gift of women’s stories.
Tbilisi, Georgia
A small team of selected graduate students accompanied Dr. Boyd-Judson to Tbilisi, Georgia—a country sharing borders with Russia, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—where our new Advisory Board member Ms. Tamar Karosanidze arranged for our team to interview eleven extraordinary women. Over the week, the team put their new interview skills into practice, hearing stories of resistance and hope, including from two women with refugee status from the Ukrainian war who recently made Tbilisi their home.
Belfast & Derry, Northern Ireland
A small group of experienced interviewers will visit Belfast and Derry, Northern Ireland, from 19 - 25 September 2023 to gather our first intergenerational stories of mothers and daughters working and raising families along the peace lines. Oxford Initiative Fellow Damian Gorman and long-time prominent activist Anne Carr, are advising on the ground.
Summer 2023 Team | Fellows | Editors
Charlotte Long
Eziamaka Ogbuli
Brooke Bacigal
Josita Thirumalai Kavitha
Kate Curry
Mizy Clifton
Katherine Hickson
Hanifa Ali
Samantha Colorado
Emily Rae Foreman
Amelia Sellers
Hazel Simpson
Zuleika Frost
Ainhoa Garcia Reyes
Kiran Kang
Ishita Krishan (Managing)
Alexandra Hoerr (Optimum Joy partner)
Clair Miller (Optimum Joy partner)
More about Maria Fusco’s History of the Present
ROYAL OPERA HOUSE BELFAST
The Global Women’s Narratives Project is honored to be a creative partner with Maria Fusco’s History of the Present, a new experimental opera-film made collaboratively by Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon, featuring new compositions by Annea Lockwood and improvisational vocal work by Héloïse Werner. The film opened in July at the Belfast Opera House.
This experimental opera-film forefronts working-class women’s voices to ask: who has the right to speak and in what way? Layering sociological, cultural, and political themes from the recent history of Northern Ireland, the work exercises voice, breath and field-recording composition through a range of film techniques and operatic articulations, amplifying marginalised stories.Written and co-directed by Maria Fusco, who grew up beside a peace-line in Belfast during The Troubles, the work commemorates the 25th anniversary of The Good Friday Agreement.