Editor’s Note: This post comes from contributing editor Kyle Bridge. Enjoy!
One of my best professors once told me that I should sit down and take stock of what went right and wrong after every course I teach, and I figure there’s no better place than Points to reflect on a class about oral histories of addiction that I helped put together this past spring.
Each semester the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) invites undergraduates to apply for its internship, through which they learn the ins-and-outs of oral history: archive management, transcription, theory and methods, and applied fieldwork, among other topics. The organizing theme changes every go-round, with past subjects ranging from veterans to organized labor.
I started as a SPOHP internship coordinator in January and chose to focus on addiction because my own work revolves around it, but also because I hoped the topic would resonate with students. I thought that drug use had a certain taboo that made it almost inherently alluring, and if students had watched the news with any regularity in the past five years they would be aware of the ongoing opioid crisis and might like some historical perspective. It was an educator’s win-win.