Oral History Paper

This class will require a mandatory Oral History paper in which you are required to interview an elder in your family 

and apply course material to their lives.  You will examine the interviewees’ experiences at school, work, and home to 

see how their daily realities reflect what we are learning in class. 

Oral History Paper Guidelines

The purpose of this assignment is to enable you to explore themes that have been discussed in class, particularly 

sociological theory, social stratification, race, class, gender, sexuality, globalization, the prison industrial complex, and 

activism.

I would like you to select an elder in your family who can tell you your family history. More specifically:

1.

I would like to know how you are related to the interviewee, the interviewees age, gender, nationality, marital 

status, age when married, number of children, education, occupation and current residence.

2.

Where they are from, how you arrived to the United States, patterns of immigration, and what it has been like 

since they have been here.  

3.

Did they encounter any racism, sexism, classism in two of these four areas: school, work, in the home, or in 

their neighborhood?  How did these experiences limit (or not limit) their life chances? These last two sections 

is where you make connections between your elders experience and the concepts in the class! This is the most 

important part of the paper!  

4.

And last, which theory best describes their experience?

Throughout your paper, I want you to 

bold

the concepts/theory, as well as define the concepts you will be using. For 

example, 

My mother’s experience at school is an example of 

colorism, 

which is defined as “a kind of prejudice in which 

someone believes one type of skin tone is superior or inferior to another within a racial group” (Openstax, 2016 232). 

The paper must be 6-8 pages in length, MLA format, double spaced, with Times Roman 12 point font.  YOU MUST 

INCLUDE 4 OR MORE REFERENCES WITH CITATIONS AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY!