The American Folklife Center (AFC) has launched the sixth season of the America Works podcast. This season focuses on food and the individuals who grow, harvest, prepare food, as well as those who feed other Americans. Each episode is an excerpt from a longer interview, conducted as part of the AFC's Occupational Folklife Project. In this post, Dr. Nancy Groce details the new season and it's eight episodes.
The American Folklife Center recently posted a new collection of interviews with workers at the Tillamook County Creamery Association (TCCA), a farmer-owned dairy cooperative in coastal Oregon, to its Occupational Folklife Project website. This post is an interview with Dr. Jared Schmidt, a public folklorist based in Oregon, who conducted the interviews with TCCA workers. In 2021, Schmidt received an Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center to undertake this research.
In mid-April, the American Folklife Center posted another noteworthy Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) collection to the Library’s website. We are excited to point out that it was the 50th collection of oral history interviews with contemporary American workers to be made available online. In this post we celebrate the milestone and highlight the contributions of Steve Berkley and Matthew Smith, two of the many hardworking AFC staff members who do the complicated behind-the-scenes work of processing Archie Green Fellows’ fieldwork projects, accessioning them, and making them available to online patrons.
On April 12th, the American Folklife Center posted another Occupational Folklife Project (OFP) collection to the Library’s website. The collection features 15 in-depth interviews documenting the careers and work culture of African American nurses who are members of the Chi Eta Phi Sorority, Incorporated, a renowned historically Black national professional nursing organization founded in 1932. (We are excited to note this was the 50th OFP to be processed and made available to the public – but more on that in an upcoming blog.) To mark the occasion, AFC staff folklorist Nancy Groce interviewed the collection’s creator, Carmen Vaughn-Hewitt, a nurse, oral historian, and Chi Eta Phi member who was awarded a 2021 Archie Green Fellowship from AFC for this research project. Find the interview over at Folklife Today!
In this post, Nancy Groce (Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center) highlights "Custodians and Janitors in Colorado" -- a new collection available from the American Folklife Center's Occupational Folklife Project. The collection, documented by Cynthia Torres, features interviews about the occupational culture and experiences of custodians and janitorial workers in the state of Colorado. The post gives an overview of the collection and features an interview with Torres about her field research. Torres was awarded an Archie Green Fellowship by the American Folklife Center in 2021 to undertake research for this collection.
