This oral history interview is an intimate conversation between two people, both of whom have generously agreed to share this recording with Oral History Summer School, and with you. Please listen in the spirit with which this was shared.
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I interviewed Christina Malisoff at the Hudson Opera House where she works. We spoke about her development as a political activist, her family history, and her involvement in the community garden. We also discussed the changes she’s seen in Hudson from the 1970’s through the present day, and some of the similar changes she saw in New York City, where she is from. We also discussed how she approaches her life and the actions she chooses to take given the multitude of problems she sees in the world around her. This interview would be of interest to people interested in: community gardens; urban decline, gentrification, and revitalization; environmental issues; political activism; New York City in the 1960s and 1970s; and Hudson from the 1970’s.
I was born in 1981 into a bi-racial family in Long Island, NY, and have lived in Brooklyn for the past 10 years. I work as work as the Project Director of a community organizing and urban agriculture project in Brooklyn, and am interested in oral history’s capacity to capture and amplify the stories of people whose lives are often not viewed as remarkable, but I believe, are. Within this I am especially interested in the stories of low-income people and families and people of color. This was the first formal oral history I ever conducted.
Oral history is an iterative process. In keeping with oral history values of anti-fixity, interviewees will have an opportunity to add, annotate and reflect upon their lives and interviews in perpetuity. Talking back to the archive is a form of “shared authority.”