Culture & Society / ANT-240

Borderlands Ethnography & Oral History

Dean Chen Wei Hong introduces field interviews, ethics, archives, minority languages, and public history.

Course detail

Research connection

Contributes to PU's Borderlands Oral History Archive, preserving multilingual accounts of migration, labor, farming, and everyday civic life.

Interview Practice Quota8 supervised sessions
Lab affiliateBorderlands Oral History Archive
Studio intensity66/100

Learning outcomes

What students should be able to do.

  • Design an ethical interview protocol for sensitive regional histories.
  • Connect oral testimony with archive material and public interpretation.
  • Produce a respectful public history object with participant consent.

Readiness

Prerequisites and assessment.

PU-101 or equivalentMethods readiness

Interview protocol 25%, archive note 20%, field reflection 25%, public history object 30%.

Weekly syllabus

Four-week intensive module structure.

  1. 01
    Ethnographic Listening and Consent

    Interview roles, consent language, positionality, and field note practice.

  2. 02
    Archives, Memory, and Minority Languages

    Working with multilingual sources and fragmented public records.

  3. 03
    Interpretation Without Extraction

    Participant review, anonymization, translation limits, and narrative responsibility.

  4. 04
    Public History Studio

    A short exhibit script, audio excerpt plan, and ethics appendix.