Episode 20: A Year of Listening in Place
This episode of VT Untapped™ is the culmination of a six-part series built around our “Listening in Place” project.
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a response to covid-19
Over twelve months since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic we take a moment to look back on a year of the Listening in Place project, focusing on submissions to our Sound Archive.
This facet of Listening in Place began with a small collection of audio recordings submitted via a portal on our website in response to an invitation to sit down and interview someone in your household, or remotely, during our first weeks of lockdown.
Over time we received about 30 recordings from across the state. College students interviewing their classmates or their parents who they were suddenly living with again after campus shut down;. a father talking to his two kids; people connecting remotely with friends who were far away or who were quarantining just across town. In this episode of VT Untapped™ we revisit and reflect on these records, which we now think of as the first seeds planted in what has become the Listening in Place collection in our archive, documenting people’s experiences in Vermont during the pandemic.
Campus Connection
The largest group of crowd-sourced submissions received thus far came from a UVM Activist Journalism class—you’ll hear excerpts from several of these recordings in this episode. Dr. Benjamin Dangl shared with us why he chose to assign a Listening in Place interview to his students.
In the Spring of 2020 we all found ourselves suddenly on lockdown due to COVID. In my Activist Journalism class at the University of Vermont, this presented a new way to come up with story ideas because we all became part of this global news story. The Vermont Folklife Center's Listening in Place project really resonated with our class at that moment because it focused on how we all have important stories to tell, and we can look to ourselves and each other to show that everyday life is full of profound and compelling stories. This took on a new urgency at the start of the pandemic. With the world suddenly thrown into this crisis, Listening in Place provided an outlet for us to share our experiences in isolation. As a journalism class, it was a great way to practice news-making by turning the mic back on ourselves and our immediate community to show that important stories are all around us.
- Dr. Benjamin Dangl, Public Communication Lecturer at UVM
Other aspects of Listening in Place
The Sound Archive is just one part of Listening in Place. Other aspects of the project are featured in past (and upcoming!) episodes of VT Untapped™:
Virtual Story Circles are a way for a group of people to process a shared experience together. Learn more here and listen to this special podcast episode featuring audio from the first Circle we hosted in April, 2020.
Virtual Vox Pops are short interviews recorded over the phone or Zoom with VFC staff. We partnered with Project Independence in Middlebury, VT and conducted 20 interviews with seniors citizens living at home. You can hear more about this partnership in Episode 12 of this podcast. More info on Virtual Vox Pops here.
Show Us Your Masks! is a photo collecting project to document homemade face masks created by Vermonters. Check out our beautiful gallery here and stay tuned this summer to hear from some of the makers behind these masks in a new episode of VT Untapped™.
We’re still listening
Listening in Place isn’t done! We are currently focused on two major areas of activity:
VFC directed documentation: focused interviews led by VFC staff within Vermont communities
Supporting individuals and communities undertaking their own documentation of current events through public workshops, partnerships and customized training.
If you’d like to learn more about doing your own interviews in your family, household or community or if you’re part of a group or organization and would like to partner with VFC to engage in this kind of work, please click here to learn more:
All Interviews and recordings from this episode were recorded as part of the Listening in Place Project:
Alexandra DeLuise interviewed Anouk Bringer on April 25, 2020
Olivia Stafford interviewed Nancy Stafford on April 26, 2020
Mike McRaith interviewed Theodore McRaith on April 10, 2020
Eliza West interviewed Ariel Swyer on April 2, 2020
Ethan Gatfield interviewed Ezra Peterman on April 26, 2020
To access the full recordings please contact the VFC Archivist.
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The views and opinions expressed by participants of this project are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Vermont Folklife Center.
This episode of VT Untapped has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts: Democracy demands wisdom.
