Inspired by NPR’s StoryCorps oral history project, the EH Portable Sound Booth was used over the course of the 2024-2025 academic year to record a diverse cross-section of the Bard community about the 2024 election and postelection sentiments. Interviews or self-recordings focused on the ways media shapes, informs, and produces conditions for listening (and not listening) around politics and issues of democracy, building up to the election, the inauguration, and its aftermath. Pop-up events and exhibitions throughout the academic year were organized in collaboration with campus partners such as the Center for Civic Engagement, Rethinking Place, the Stevenson Library as well as connected to several cross-listed EH courses. These “community sound portraits” are now available to Bard community members as part of an archive reflecting the current political moment. Interviews or self-recordings will all remain anonymous and to date we have over 80 interviews.
Season 4 of our podcast, EH Out Loud, includes segments of these interviews. Listen here: https://eh.bard.edu/season-four-community-sound-portraits/
Our current project with the sound booth focuses on environmental histories in the Hudson Valley and is in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities (CESH).