The Brooklyn College Listening Project

The Brooklyn College Listening Project is an interdisciplinary oral history and community interview initiative. Founded by Brooklyn College faculty members, the project helps faculty to develop oral history and listening projects to enable their students to interview family, friends, neighbors, and strangers. Students learn to listen in new ways. They become interviewers, researchers, and creators of their own knowledge, drawn from the everyday wisdom of ordinary New Yorkers.

Students in history, English, American studies, sociology, anthropology, journalism, TV and radio, Puerto Rican and Latino studies, Judaic studies, music, art, children and youth studies, and modern languages and literatures classes have participated. In doing so, they have helped others tell their life stories and share their perspectives on the world. Many students have presented their work at our End of Semester Celebrations. More than 500 oral histories are available to be archived so that others today and future generations can listen to them.

Some of our students’ work is displayed is displayed on our website.

Our multimedia exhibition, “We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices,” based on our students’ interviews with immigrants and children of immigrants, has toured the city for over a year and a half.

If you are a faculty member who would like to become involved or a student who would like to learn more, e-mail the project’s director, Professor Joseph Entin.