6 item sets

• Arm of Honor
  
• Black Student Association: Taking Great Risk
  
• Five Days in May
  
  In the Fall of 2022, Matt Jones’s Oral History Techniques class conducted a set of interviews documenting the stories behind the student unrest on Eastern Michigan University’s campus from 1966-1972. Caught up in the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war protests, women’s liberation, fights for student rights, and a hometown serial killer, EMU found its place within the greater cultural shifts taking place on college campuses across the country. The narrators taking part in this project range from student activists, to administrators, to police officers, each providing a unique perspective in this story. Five Days in May reflects a period of time in EMU’s history where the campus made sure its voices were heard.
• Out of the Margins: Voices from 1279
  
  In 2021, Eastern Michigan University Archives lecturer Matt Jones began documenting the story of Ypsilanti’s Human Rights Ordinance #1279 in an effort to explore the ways in which local queer activism has evolved multi-generationally in Ypsilanti. What began as a refusal of service by a local print shop to a small EMU student group quickly turned into a years-long battle over who was deserving of basic human rights. To the LGBTQ activists and community members documented here, they had always been present in the community: working, paying taxes, painting their houses, mowing their lawns, attending council meetings, and even serving on council. This ordinance battle was about more than just LGBT rights—it was about protecting the human rights of all Ypsilantians.
• Veterans History Project
  
  This collection contains oral histories with Ypsilanti and Washtenaw County veterans collected by the Ypsilanti District Library, Ypsilanti Rotary, and the Eastern Michigan University Archives for the Veterans History Project. The VHP is part of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center which aims to document, preserve, and make accessible the stories of veterans from World War I on. Interviews with local veterans are housed at the Eastern Michigan University Archives in addition to the LOC. Oral histories continue to be processed by the American Folklife Center and the collection is updated regularly.
• YAWH Afghan Resettlement Project
  
  This oral history project explores EMU's partnership with Jewish Family Services of Washtenaw County in providing on-campus housing for twelve Afghan families who fled their homes when the Taliban took over in 2021. The families stayed in the Westview Apartments from January to June of 2022.

5 items

• Alessandra Bergamin, Oral History Interview, 2023
  
  Alessandra Bergamin is an award-winning Australian investigative journalist who divides her time between Melbourne and Los Angeles. Bergamin covers the intersection of environmental conflict and human rights around the world. Her work has appeared in The Baffler, In These Times, Harper’s Magazine, National Geographic, and The New Yorker.com, among others. In 2022, Bergamin was honored as a Distinguished Journalist by the Society of Professional Journalists, Los Angeles in the newspaper/print (smaller circulation) category. She has received fellowships and grants from many entities to investigate environmental and human rights issues. In this interview, Bergamin reviewed her experiences and takeaways from reporting labor and human trafficking issues during the pandemic. She shared approaches and advice to developing and cultivating sources who reside remotely and in hard-to-reach communities. She also commented on the importance of mental health and the challenges of being a freelancer and woman journalist. Finally, she reflected on the meaning of the pandemic to her personally and professionally. She called for more understanding of the differential impact of the pandemic on different populations.
• Aliya Bashir, Oral History Interview, 2023
  
  Aliya Bashir is an independent journalist covering India and India-administered Kashmir with a focus on human rights, gender justice, women’s issues, the environment, healthcare, education and minorities. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Time, Reuters, Global Press Journal, Global Health Now, and The New Humanitarian among many others. She is the winner of the 2015 Schizophrenia Research Foundation-Press Institute of India “Media for Mental Health” award for best reporting on mental health issues in India. A HEFAT trainee, she has won reporting grants from the International Women’s Media Foundation and Population Reference Bureau. In this interview, Bashir recalled her experiences covering the impact of COVID-19 on women and their children. She reflected on the lack of women's representation in mainstream media, vaccination and health data, and the decision-making process in families. Despite the challenges of reaching sources in remote and vulnerable conditions and with little support as a freelance journalist, her reporting brought awareness to the gender gap and urged officials to collect data and build women-centric vaccination campaigns. She also commended more recognition of women journalists' work and minimizing the pay disparity between genders.
• April Zhu, Oral History Interview, 2023
  
  April Zhu is a freelance journalist based in Kenya. Her work focuses on gender, urban inequality, and the Chinese diaspora in Kenya. She is a senior editor at Guernica Magazine where she edits interviews and produces a podcast “Until Everyone is Free”. Her work has appeared in The New York Review of Books Daily, Foreign Policy, The Baffler Magazine, The South China Morning Post Magazine, VOA News, and others. Zhu's COVID reporting helped people understand the systematic issues in the healthcare system in Africa. She recalled the early lockdowns in Kenya, government responses, and police violence. She criticized Sinophobia and racial discrimination and commented on the financial challenges and lack of institutional support for being a freelancer. Regardless, she's grateful for growing professionally during the pandemic. She urges the future generation to connect their crisis reporting with structural issues and make an impactful change.
• Beimeng Fu, Oral History Interview, 2023
  
  Beimeng Fu is an award-winning video journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Shanghai, China. She has covered stories out of the Greater China Area, the U.S. and its Asian diasporas, and East Africa. Her bylines have appeared in The Washington Post, BuzzFeed News, The California Sunday Magazine, ABC News, Quartz, South China Morning Post, Sixth Tone, Tencent Guyu Project, and more. During COVID, she recorded the collective mood of people who experienced the two-month-long lockdown in Shanghai in the Spring of 2022. The documentary, “Thank You For Your Cooperation,” was named a finalist in the 2023 Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA). In this interview, Fu recalled the ground situation in China where COVID was discovered first. She covered the pandemic news and its impact on migrant workers, residents in Wuhan, education, and rural parts and frontier cities of China. She endured a two-month total lockdown in her apartment in Shanghai while producing two video projects about these lockdowns from home. She also commented on the difficulties of producing video and documentary projects in a highly censored media environment when mobility was tracked and restricted by the government.
• Where Women Journalists Reported Covid-19
  
  This map depicts the regions in which the women interviewed for this collection reported on the pandemic.