hear/say

Training fellows to collect oral histories of elders and people with cognitive impairment, producing a book and documentary film.

Northern America

Overview

The hear/say project, in continued collaboration with Voice of Witness, created an ethics-driven oral history training program for Atlantic Fellows and staff at GBHI that culminated in a book, Readers’ Theater event, and a documentary film. The hear/say project builds on the success and impact of the first hear/say book project, which is a collection of 31 oral history stories, in four languages, from five countries.

The principal investigators of this project grant were Jennifer Merrilees, Lorina Naci, Caroline Prioleau and Dominic Trépel.

Project Details

Personal stories are a powerful way to share the rich, multi-dimensional nature of people’s experiences with aging, dementia, and caregiving.

The hear/say project began as a collaboration between the Memory and Aging Center (MAC) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Voice of Witness in 2016. The goal was to create a space for people with dementia, carers, doctors, family members, researchers, nurses, artists, and others to share “stories of aging, dementia, art, work, and life.” The stories shed light on the personal and rarely heard day-to-day experiences of aging and dementia and help to reduce the stigma and othering that occurs by perpetuating a “single story.”

The second volume of hear/say was published in 2019, in which the Atlantic Fellows for Equity in Brain Health were brought in to incorporate a global perspective on health care, memory, and aging. The stories in this volume contain themes of loss, love, joy, compassion, and more.

Both volumes of hear/say stories can be downloaded for free as PDFs (Vol. 1, Vol. 2) and are available for sale from the printer, Norfolk Press.