KU News Release

Hall Center announces Oral History Workshop

Byron Hurt

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas artist, an award-winning author and a filmmaker will discuss oral history at work in the United States and around the world at the eighth annual Oral History Workshop sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas.

The workshop, Oral History at Work — The View From Within, will take place from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, March 26, at the Kansas Union Ballroom. The workshop is open to the public, and registration is available online. The registration deadline is March 12.

Participants will join Carol Ann Carter, KU professor of art; Tobias Hecht, anthropologist and author; and Byron Hurt, filmmaker, in a discussion of the 60-year-old documentation technique. Hurt’s award-winning documentary, “Beyond Beats and Rhymes: Masculinity and Hip Hop Culture,” will be shown. KU students and scholars will join the workshop for a discussion with Hurt following the film.

Carter’s visual commemoration for the centennial of Western Kentucky University in October involved collecting oral histories and incorporating videos of interviews with residents in the public exhibition. The multimedia project focused on a community’s attempt to heal from its troubled past.

Stories told to Hecht by a Brazilian youth from the streets of Recife inspired his 2006 novel, “After Life.” The book, says one critic, is a “call and response of truth, invention, mental illness and yearning.” Hecht's first book, “At Home in the Street,” won the 2002 Margaret Mead Award.

Hurt’s documentary, which made its appearance at Sundance Film Festival in 2005, provides an in-depth look at machismo in rap music and hip-hop culture. His candid interviews present divergent voices of fans and social critics speaking about the struggle to negotiate the exciting creativity, seductive rhythms, blatant violence and homophobia in what is now an international music form.

For more information, contact the Hall Center at hallcenter@ku.edu or (785) 864-4798.

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