Sandra Faulkner, professor of Media and Communication at BGSU, is seeking older women in the Bowling Green area to collaborate with her to create nuanced portraits their experiences across the life course.
According to Faulkner: “The interviews will provide the opportunity for older women to tell their story in their own words, deciding what is important to share, what stories they wish to emphasize, and how they present themselves.
The oral history interviews with older women (i.e., 60+) in Wood County will focus on:
- What their lives are like.
- Contributions they have made to their community.
- How their relationship contexts, situations, and life circumstances have influenced their experiences.
- How their experiences across the lifespan have shaped their sense of self.
The poetic portrait is an evocative, engaging, and sensitive way to present life stories and interviews.
Faulkner will create a portrait through poetry and pictures for the subject to keep. She will craft a poetic transcript of each story and use that transcript to create a poetic portrait.
Poetic portraiture is an arts-based research method of representing an interviewee’s embodied aspects of their life story in poetry and poetic forms. These series of poems and collage capture the spirit, contours, and specific nuances of an interviewee’s life story. The use of multiple forms of representation will make the work accessible and inclusive.
Women’s stories will be archived in the BGSU library as a public document available for celebration, study, and historical record. The archiving of stories is important for the historical record in the Bowling Green area.
“We don’t want these important stories to be lost,” Faulkner wrote.
To participate contact Sandra Faulkner at sandraf@bgsu.edu or 419-308-1798 for more information and to set up a time to talk. Interviews will take place in the BGSU Kuhlin Center.
Last year, students as part of a project for a BGSU class taught by Faulkner created poetic portraits of older women in conjunction with the Wood County Committee on Aging.
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